While humans have long used bags to transport small items with them on their person, handbags as a modern gendered phenomenon did not emerge until the 18th century, with the rise of the French 'reticule'. This was eventually followed up by the emergence, in England, of more expensive and structured leather purses during the 19th century and the first attempt to explain the (gendered) appeal of bags during the same time. In this case, it was Sigmund Freud who argued that bags represent female genitalia and that the use of handbags by women represents a psychosexual enactment of a kind of sexual play. This is, at once, a theory of 1) what bags mean and 2) why women tend to like them. Importantly, what little literature that exists on the aesthetics of bags takes it that a good answer to 2 will say something about the appeal of purses at all but in a way that captures their gendered appeal. Here, I argue against Freud's answers to both 1 and 2. I also trace the history of both the development of handbags and the public and intellectual discourse around them. The lesson of this history is that while handbags don't mean anything in general the way that Freud has argued, they can still mean in the same way that other forms of adornment can (and in some uniquely handbag ways). Finally, I also provide a kind of deflationary answer to 2, one which which attempts to shift the burden. The more fruitful question, in my view, is not "why do women like bags?", but "why don't men?"

There are many paradoxes of aversive or painful art. We enjoy being disgusted, scared, sad, and stressed in engaging with art in a way that we don’t, for instance, on the train into work. A similar problem arises in extreme music (metal, hardcore punk, and their various offshoots). In this case, the puzzle is explaining why we enjoy listening to screaming in extreme music but not in our workaday lives. Here, I argue that there is not one, but many answers to the screamed vocals problem. Particular kinds of musical screaming take on their character and value according to the function they play in different genre practices and in order to support the values and activities of those communities. Accordingly, we ought to be pragmatic pluralists about musical screaming. Beyond attempting to make sense of this one particular problem from the philosophy of popular music, I also argue that thinking carefully about the screamed vocals problem can help us clarify some merits of a good aesthetic explanation and, perhaps, give us a pragmatic argument for adopting an explanatory model within aesthetics. 

The 'conversation argument' tells us that art interpretation is a conversation between the artist and the audience. If this is right, then non-defective communication requires moderate actual intentionalism as a framework for assigning meanings to works. Here, we argue that if the conversation argument is true, then art interpretation is subject to the same ethical considerations that govern everyday conversations (like those regarding silencing). This is to say that, on actual intentionalism, there are are more or less ethical ways of engaging in art interpretation and practice. This, in turn, may explain weak normative forces in both popular and classical musical practices. The degree to which these obligations are plausible will ultimately weigh on the success of the conservation argument and the attractiveness of moderate actual intentionalism.

In this paper, I argue that dance music raises a number of problems for functionalist accounts of genre. If functionalism about genre is true, then genres are functional kinds which are picked out by particular functions. Likewise, genre membership is achieved for a work when the artist of that work creates the work with the intention that it should fulfill the function that picks out that genre. However, a number of musical genres feature works which aim to fulfill the function of encouraging and enabling dancing, and there is no clean way of sorting dance music into genres according to the artists' functional intentions for that work. This is to say that, in the case of dance music, the function intended by the artist is not necessary or sufficient to diagnosis a work's genre membership. Here, I survey a number of potential responses to this worry, explain why none of them are satisfactory, and survey a handful of conclusions we can draw from this discussion. Most importantly, this means that if we are to endorse functionalist accounts of some genres, then we must be pluralists about the nature of genre. The burden is then on functionalists to say what brings together these various ways of categorizing art and makes them all genres.

A popular view of the self tells us that actions, experiences, and psychological states can be said to belong to the same person insofar as they can be appropriately incorporated into that person’s story of their own life. Some adherents go even further by arguing that this narrative theory not only provides us with an account of the self, but also with an answer to the problem of personhood. That is, in order to be a person (in the rich sense of being both a member of the moral community and also a moral agent unto themselves), an individual must engage in this kind of narrative meaning-making by bringing the experiences and events of their lives into a coherent and intelligible story. Yet, if this is right, then it opens up the possibility that selves and the lives they lead could be evaluated aesthetically as a narrative. Here, I focus on the special narrative role that death can play in fixing the meaning of one’s life. This is the question of what it would mean to have an aesthetically good death. I outline some basic narrative structures one’s death can conform to and their aesthetic dimensions, and argue for the necessity of recognizing aesthetic agency in death. 

The two most influential accounts of virtue ethics come from Aristotle and Kongzi (Confucius) respectively. While they differ in the details of their metaphysics and in their ethical conclusions, the two visions also share a great deal in common. Most prominently, both Aristotle and Kongzi seem to adopt forms of essentialism. In both cases, what it means to live the good life is, in no small part, fixed by rigid and defined social and biological roles. In contrast, contemporary queer theory often seeks to undermine essentialism. This opens up the question of whether we can have a non-essentialist virtue ethics, and what it would look like. Here, I argue that Aztec moral theory offers one possibility for a queer virtue ethics and I trace an outline of such a view. The results of this being that the non-essentialist and dynamic nature of Aztec metaphysics, along with its emphasis on reification through performativity, are quite compatible with the philosophical ambitions of queer theory.

Cisgendered heterosexuality ('cishet' sexuality) is often characterized by an assumed straight romantic and sexual culture. This scheme takes monogamy, straight temporality, and the network of dualities which Natalie Wynn refers to as 'default heterosexual sadomasochism' as necessary and natural. This structure is then used as the reference against which queer romantic and sexual life can be cast as 'deviant' or other. Here, I argue that cishet ideology is reified by a kind of sexual sedimentation common to oppression, in which the dominant class externalizes deviance from these norms and thereby construct notions of 'propriety' and 'deviance', with racialized, classist, homophobic, and transphobic consequences. If this is right, then we can imagine a non-ideological, non-essentialist, queer heterosexuality, which runs counter to these consequences. 

Recent academic and critical writing has sought to explore the implications of the decline of youth subcultures and rhe rise of 'aesthetics'. These 'aesthetics' are generally thought of as self-contained aesthetic styles which individuals can pick up, use, and discard with relatively little social commitment, and which can be applied to visual media, fashion, interior design, and more. While some have lamented the loss of subcultures and the unique social aesthetic practices they enable, others have argued that the decline of subcultures allows for youth social circles to not be narrowly or shallowly defined by aesthetics. Here, I argue that the critics of subcultures misunderstand their nature in thinking that they are defined on the narrow basis of aesthetic sensibilities. While subcultures do allow for communities to form and engage socially in aesthetic practices, causation can also run the opposite way. In this case, subcultures are the aesthetic lives of communities gathered together around deeply held common values. Rather than forming a community on the basis of artistic preferences, subculture participants often form communities on the basis of shared values and their aesthetic practices emerge out of and buttress their valuing together. If this is right, then subculture critics are wrong to think that the decline of subcultures will lead to less shallow friendships. In fact, without the accompanying social aesthetic practices, value-based communities are less likely to persist over time. These issues are explored primarily through various punk and metal subcultures.

The term "actual play" refers to a recording of the playing of a tabletop roleplaying game. These may be in audio or video format, they may be edited or not, they may involve trained actors or not, and they may be livestreamed or not. These recordings are then released and consumed by audiences as media. on one level, the aesthetics of actual plays are the aesthetics of tabletop roleplaying games and, on another, they are the aesthetics of film and television. However, actual plays and the appreciative practices which engage with them are not clearly exhausted by any extant aesthetic analysis. Here, I argue that actual plays, as an improvised artform, are characterized by a kind of 'interpersonal residue' which can be appreciated aesthetically as well. This residue provides us with metatextual access to the relationships between performers as they appreciate one another as peers within a craft, but also often as friends. Actual plays, thus, give us access to the aesthetic appreciation of comradery and of friendship.