Understanding aesthetic judgment to be distinct from erotic attraction, Kant established a powerful tradition of disinterestedness, perhaps most vivid today in articulations of art and pornography as mutually exclusive. This week's Berkeley Books selection, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, critiques this Kantian tradition. Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Modern and Ancient Art, begins with a chapter on Johann Winckelmann's study of the homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, then examines the relationships between sexuality and aesthetics in major intellectual movements since the late 18th century: Kantian and Hegelian idealism, Darwinism, pre- and non-Freudian sexual anthropology, psychoanalysis, existential psychiatry, and contemporary analytic philosophy.

The Kantian exclusion of desire from aesthetics represents just one object of Davis' critique; he also argues against a psychoanalysis that reduces aesthetics to sexuality, or a Darwinian conception of beauty in terms of reproductive utility. Queer Beauty proposes instead a recursive relationship between sexuality and aesthetics:  

"The copula in my title [...] denotes not only the separation or splitting of sexuality and aesthetics. It also denotes their intersection, recursion, and interdependence--the fact that between 1750 (if not earlier) and 1920 (if not later) the concepts could not be fully cleaved apart. For some fundamental purposes, in fact, they had to be treated as mapping the same topography, though perhaps in different ways or from different vantages. If the terms were not too cumbersome, sexual aesthetics and aesthetic sexuality might best denote my object here."

The book's emphasis on the intersections between aesthetics and specifically homoerotic and homosexual approaches to sexuality grows in part from the titular chapter, which places Kant in dialogue with Winckelmann. Several of the writers Davis discusses in Queer Beauty--Winckelmann, John Addington Symonds, and Michel Foucault--both write from positions identified with homoerotic sociability and write about homoerotic aesthetics. Additionally, Davis argues that the widespread prohibition of nonstandard sexuality put considerable pressure on both conceptions of sexuality and of aesthetics. 

Queer Beauty has received international attention, with a review by Keith Miller in the Times Literary Supplement, as well as leading French, German, and Russian newspapers and journals. Within the U.S., many have voiced both enthusiasm for the important study and admiration for the scholar. Michael Kelly, Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asks: 

"Who else but Davis could give a philosophical account of the genealogy of sexuality and aesthetics that, politically, allows homoerotically inclined viewers to '(re)discover their participation in the dynamical constitution of ideals of beauty' and, ethically, reveals that a task of art is the idealization of erotic sociability 'that might eventually ensure that humanity will flourish rather than decline?' Who else could invoke the 'sniper' of the 'Monk's Head' orchid as a metaphor to give queer beauty and beauty queered their philosophical due and forever change our thinking about sexuality and aesthetics?"  

In this week's Biblio-file, Davis recommends nine critical iterations of intersection between sexual desire and aesthetic appreciation from Winckelmann to Freud, and beyond. His suggestions include Richard Payne Knight's 1786 A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, an important (though rarely cited) source for Freud; The Various Contrivances By Which Orchids Are Fertilized By Insects, Darwin's 1862 study of "mechanisms of generation" of orchids, and of their "perverse and lurid" beauty; and Vernon Lee's 1897 documentation of her empathetic corporeal responses to artworks; as well as more recent work by Michel Foucault and Richard Wollheim.