The Beauty of Choice

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values.

Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their taste—and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.

Following a reading from The Beauty of Choice, Steiner will sit down with Heather Love, Penn Professor of English, to discuss the ways in which taste, beauty, and pleasure intersect in defense of women’s freedom.

A book signing and reception will follow.

Cosponsored by Kelly Writers House and the Department of English.

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania, past Chair of the Penn English Department, and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum (now, the Wolf Humanities Center). Her most recent books are The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom (2024); The Real RealThing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010); Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001); and The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (listed in the “NY Times 100 Best Books of 1996”). Steiner’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, and she is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, and Royal Society of Canada.

Steiner’s six opera libretti have been composed by Paul Richards, Frances White, and Mark Rimple. The latest, using both her text and her photography, premiered in New York in 2024, Upon Reflection: An Opera in Ten Images, starring soprano Sherezade Panthaki and the musicians of Parthenia. Steiner has presented multimedia installations in the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennales.

Heather Love, a Professor in Penn’s English Department, is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project ("To Be Real,”) concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing.

More information: https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/steiner

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This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

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