With impressive learning, McDonald shows the variety and energy of feminist approaches and sensitively separates various phases in the challenge to dominant aesthetics and ideology. The text is most useful in delineating the 1980s shift of emphasis in feminist inquiry from ideological danger to corporal pleasure. This good intention can be maintained, I suppose, even if the artworks perpetuate the exoticising of difference that has occurred throughout the industrial period. The theme of ambiguity is not suited to conclusiveness. McDonald is correct in identifying ambiguity as a common theme among the artists discussed.
Some works are subversive but others are just obscure.
Far from reliably challenging the dominant paradigms, ambiguity is a venerable trope of that very humanist tradition that she would urgently deconstruct. The chapter Historical Ambiguity dealing with Titian and Rubens doesn't make up for this lack and seems little to the purpose. Closer to our epoch, ambiguity may be linked to the absurd. In humor it has long had a destabilising effect on language and systematic thought. I think not well.