 The topics included under the designation “feminist aesthetics” extend through philosophy, history, critical disciplines, and art practices. Theories of perception, appreciation, and interpretation have been developed in all of these areas. While much of this thinking began with examination of philosophical tradition and the conceptual frameworks it affords, feminist perspectives have also opened the field in many directions, such that theorizing in the twenty-first century has taken different directions from the critical perspectives that began to probe gender analysis in the 1970s. Of special note is the diffusion of interests from overtly political and strategic analyses of women in society and culture, to exploration of the variant forms that gender can assume, a shift that also distinguishes aspects of the transition from feminism to postfeminism. A wider attention to issues of diverse identity, particularly attentive to racially inflected differences, characterizes both feminist theory in general and aesthetics today. Thus feminist work is more and more likely not to focus on women as an exclusive topic but to consider other modes of identity as well. And feminists have employed philosophies of divergent stripes in their own quests, elaborating and refining them, and—most importantly—formulating ideas that are independent of any particular theoretical allegiances. The changing emphases of feminist perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art over the last five decades are evident in philosophy, art theory, criticism and commentary on the arts, and in the practice of artists themselves, testimony to the degree to which philosophy and cultural production travel hand in hand, which is an abiding characteristic of the field of aesthetics itself.