Abstract: In the 1980s, this book contends, an uncritical affirmation of anti-essentialism turned this important feminist critique into a disciplinary dogmatism that constrained and homogenized feminist thinking. Feminist work in the academy became forgetful of both women and nature, and began to exchange an engaged politics for the intensity of sublime experience in its postmodern form. This book works between the modern and postmodern notions of the sublime to show that the gendered politics and effacement of nature, central to the modern sublime, especially in Kant's account, are at the heart of the postmodern sublime as well. It turns to Lyotard's postmodern sublime to argue that this sublime is hard at work in feminist poststructuralism, especially the early texts of Judith Butler. The melting away of the extra-discursively real in these accounts tends to make feminist thinking incapable of meaningfully articulating our relations to the natural world and to one another. Yet these very relations are necessarily tied to powerful aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity.

Keywords: anti-essentialism, feminist thinking, postmodernism, gender politics, Kant, sublime, Lyotard, Judith Butler