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Aesthetic agency refers to conditions, capacities, and states that inform artistic forms of acting and exerting power on social structures. In resistance to the marginalization of women of color, aesthetic agency is exercised through creative acts of culture-making and critique of such practices to challenge domination and representation of the oppressed other. To support this work as a feminist Christian ethicist, I construct a theological framework for aesthetic agency. This paper proposes a theological understanding of transformative aesthetics and then describes the exercise of aesthetic agency for Christian communities by using a television special, Black Girls Rock! as an example. Racism, sexism, and oppression of minorities are ethical problems that assume varied forms. One form identified by Iris Marion Young as cultural imperialism is expressed through cultural forms that universalize a dominant group’s experience and make it the societal or cultural norm. (Welch 2008) Cultural imperialism concurrently stereotypes and marks a group as “other” while rendering the perspectives of those from inside the group as invisible. By perpetuating patterns of invisibility and aversion, cultural imperialism pushes minority groups to the margins of a culture. (Welch 2008) Stereotypes of women and people of color are communicated through society’s cultural forms: books, advertising, television, and artistic images. Yet, resources for resisting this marginalization can also assume cultural forms. Artworks and literature can be sites of resistance; galleries, museums, and schools can be spaces of opposition. The act of creating is self-affirming and when undertaken by marginalized peoples can be a source of empowerment to counter their mistreatment. In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, bell hooks states, “It occurred to me then that if one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete. Such work can only be undone by acts of concrete reclamation.” (Hooks 1995, xv) Hooks’ statement provokes consideration of how artistic and aesthetic practices can address the ethical problem of the marginalization of women of color in the United States. 1 Edwards: A Christian Understanding of Aesthetic Agency

A Christian Understanding of Aesthetic Agency: A Theological Framework of Resistance to Cultural Imperialism