 Many of these critical investigations can be ordered into a sustained critique of aesthetic practices, in particular, of what is presented in the name of beauty. Of all the concepts within aesthetics, for feminist consideration there is none so central, so contested, so rejected, and so embraced as beauty. Beauty is an enormous category of value, for so many disparate things are beautiful that generalizing about its nature is a formidable challenge. Beauty is among the oldest of philosophical value concepts, with Plato numbering among its formative theorists. Plato focused on beauty as an abstract form whose essence is bestowed on the particular items that instantiate it, and in keeping with this foundational model, philosophers have usually treated beauty in the most general of terms. Combined with the modern notion of disinterested attention, this approach to aesthetic value seems to aim at the highest level of universality of appreciation. Yet at the same time, as noted above, one of the central exemplars of beauty has been the (young, pretty, pale-skinned) female body, which exerts erotic attraction and promises satisfaction of physical desire. Critiques of the gender-inflection in supposedly neutral theories, as well as its racialized implications, numbered among the early feminist revisions in aesthetics. These theoretical efforts merged with social critiques of beauty norms that circulated in the late twentieth century. What is more, for some time, beauty was rather sidelined in the art world as well (Danto 2003). As a result, beauty fell out of favor, and for quite a while one could find little original work published on the subject.