ABSTRACT
Feminist explorations of the sublime and the beautiful have developed in markedly different directions. Feminist philosophers who write about the beautiful have primarily concentrated on showing the inadequacy of claims that peoples across all cultures, periods of history, and ethnicities agree on the qualities, properties, or descriptors of beauty. By the middle of the eighteenth century, British writers on theatre, landscape, literature, and the visual arts could not get enough of the sublime; but now the focus had shifted to the nature of the sublime object, rather than questions of style. The sublime is an elusive category, and one that stretches the boundaries of aesthetics. Responses to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the genocide at Auschwitz, the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and 9/11, the Middle Passage endured by those transported on the slave ships, and the tortured bodies of slaves, have all been linked to the thematics of the sublime.
