Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture.
Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular CultureMaria Elena Buszek
Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 444 pages, 9 color illustrations,
94 black and white; paper $24.95
In Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Maria Elena Buszek traces feminist history through the format of the pin-up and posits an interpretation of the genre as a vehicle for sexual self-awareness and feminist empowerment. While the words "feminism" and "pin-up" seem contradictory to one another, Buszek shows how the format was alternately used to liberate and to repress women throughout the history of feminism. She begins in the 19th century with the precursors to the pin-up to show the visual culture out of which the genre emerged. In the 20th century, the path of the pin-up is traced through its appropriation by various cultural entities, from Hollywood studios to late-century feminists. Although second wave feminists, born out of the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, generally consider the pin-up to represent a negative stereotype of womanhood, Buszek argues that a third wave of feminists has adopted the pin-up as an icon of sexual self-agency. The validation of this adoption and reconciliation between the two waves of feminists is the real impetus for the book. Buszek aligns herself with the younger generation, evident by her title inspired by the "riot grrrl" movement, a third wave feminist youth culture from the 1990s. While scholars have researched various aspects of the history of the pin-up, no comprehensive survey of the history and evolution of feminist uses of the pin-up exists; this book seeks to fill that void.
In chapter one, the carte-de-visite provided the first mass-produced format for sexual self-agency. Wildly popular in the last half of the 19th century, cartes-de-visite were small, standardized photographs that were easily produced and distributed. The middle and upper classes delighted in collecting these images of themselves, their friends and family, and even portraits of public figures. It is not surprising, then, that Adah Isaac Menken, a media savvy burlesque queen, employed the medium to effectively market her career. That Menken exploited her sexuality so openly at a time when proper women eschewed the public sphere is surprising, however. The actress commissioned a number of cartes-de-visite, many of which featured her posing in daring burlesque costumes while in others Menken appears in respectable, and traditional, feminine clothing. Following Menken's example, Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes manipulated the photographic format to emphasize the comedic satires of their burlesque performances. They, too, posed in their costumes, made a little more risque by their seductively exposed legs. As if to rein in their audacity, Thompson also presented herself in traditional feminine roles in other photographs. Throughout all of these images, the women controlled their own public personas.
While the cartes-de-visite are not pin-ups as Buszek too readily calls them, they are an important part of the popular visual culture responsible for the development of the 20th-century pin-up. As part of her historical survey of the pin-up genre and its predecessors, Buszek shows how the representation of feminine sexuality empowers its female viewers. In the 19th century, the burlesque cartes-de-visite generated a phenomenon known as the "Girl of the Period," a term British author Eliza Lynn Linton coined in 1868. Linton bemoaned the effect that the burlesque actresses had on middle class women. In essence, the Girl of the Period was given to swearing, wearing racy clothing, and promenading the streets unchaperoned. She was not restricted to England as Henry James noted a similar phenomenon in the United States.
By the end of the 19th century, the Girl of the Period gave way to the New Woman. Women were agitating for suffrage by this time in a movement sometimes characterized as the first wave of feminism, and the opposition derisively crowned them "New Women." The British periodical Punch often condemned the New Woman in its cartoons, portraying her as vain, mannish, and sexually unacceptable, all in an attempt to undermine the suffrage movement. Not every artist depicted the New Woman so negatively, however. Buszek argues in chapter two that Charles Dana Gibson's illustrations for Life magazine celebrate the New Woman as the ultimate modern woman. She posits that the Gibson Girl, as these illustrations became known, embodied the romantic ideal of the New Woman and was an example of progressive American spirit. Ironically, Gibson was unsympathetic to the suffrage movement, but that did not prevent him from exploring the new social freedoms enjoyed by the New Woman. Throughout the 1890s, women in his illustra tions could be seen golfing, sporting new-fangled bathing costumes at the beach, playing college football for Vassar against fumbling Yalies, or simply strolling through town wearing the most modern of fashions. Gibson's interpretation of young womanhood was powerful, but safe. Despite their worldly behavior, his women did not undermine middle class morals. The assertiveness and confidence of the illustrated Gibson Girl inspired real-life New Women. In her well-known 1895 self-portrait, photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston presents herself in a somewhat playful parody of the New Woman. She sits before the fireplace in her studio, profile to the camera, in a decidedly masculine posture. In her hands, she holds a beer stein and a cigarette. At the same time, she wears a fashionable outfit with her lacy underskirt exposed. Buszek demonstrates how the features of Gibson's ideal women and the theatricality of the earlier burlesque actresses blended together in this self-portrait.
In chapter three, Buszek returns to the theater to examine how turn-of-the-century actresses continued to construct sexualized identities for themselves. Burlesque had faded in popularity and was replaced by the legitimate stage. Two actresses, in particular, dominated the theater at this time: Ethel Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt. Barrymore fashioned herself as the 20th-century version of the Gibson Girl and embodied the New Woman on the American stage. Sarah Bernhardt, a much older and more daring and eccentric personality, brashly constructed her public identity, in part, through photographs reminiscent of the earlier burlesque cartes-de-visite. Like Menken, Bernhardt knew the power of photographs to advance her career. As early as her school days at the Paris Conservatory of Music and Drama, Bernhardt used the medium to promote herself, sometimes with sexually explicit material, including a very early nude photograph from the 1860s. At least one of Bernhardt's photographs, dated 1891, one in which the sultry actress poses as Cleopatra, signals an important step in the evolution of the pin-up. In this photograph, Bernhardt lies on a couch and flaunts her sexuality. The pose is simply an invitation to observe her physical beauty as the scene is divorced from any narrative. Buszek argues that Bernhardt's manipulation of the media became a model for the developing suffrage movement. Following Bernhardt's example, suffragettes fashioned spectacles by appropriating provocative poses that forced attention from the press. The strategy proved to be an effective way to gain notoriety and convert followers.
The successes of burlesque and stage promotion via mass-distributed photographs inspired the early film studios to adopt similar strategies to publicize their stable of stars. Unlike the earlier actresses who created, and thus controlled, their own professional identities, the film studios came to manipulate the public images of their stars through vehicles such as the new film fan magazines like Photoplay. These magazines featured actresses who depicted some of the most adventurous and modern women in cinema. In chapter four, Buszek traces the array of new roles of femininity created by these fan magazines, including how these images were based in the visual culture of the New Woman and how they presaged the glamorous pin-up of the 1940s. The early films often showed women as daredevils as in the "perils of Pauline" series, which the fan magazines complemented with photographs and brief biographies of the actress. In 1913, Photoplay featured Pearl White, who played the scrappy Pauline, in a variety of poses ranging from her film roles to her dressed in a modern ensemble. Buszek cites this example as particularly important in uniting the theatrical persona of the actress with the modernity of the public New Woman. Race is also an important issue in early cinema and non-Anglo actresses offered different ideals of femininity. In addition to the predominant Anglo-Protestant actress, the studios also employed non-Anglo/non-Protestant actresses, such as Theda Bara, (nee Theodosia Goodman, a Jewish woman) who exemplified the sultry vamp on screen, and Tsen Mei, the first non-European actress featured in Photoplay. Both were exotic, and both were ultimately shunned due to rising audience prejudice against the non-Anglo ideal in the post-World War I years.
By the 1920s, the flapper came to the fore in terms of a strong, sexually aware feminine type. Derived from the vamp, the flapper (sometimes called a "vampette") was a type of New Woman who was intelligent, educated, and sexual. Buszek calls her a feminist, even though the flapper, as a general type, did not seem concerned about suffrage issues (women gained the right to vote in 1919). But, Buszek argues that the flapper represented an internalization of feminist thought and an application of what the suffrage movement signified. While the flapper evolved out of popular culture, it was not long before the type appeared in cinema, most notably with Clara Bow, the best known flapper in Hollywood. Paramount Studios, the studio that contracted her, consciously manipulated her beauty as a modern flapper. Every aspect of the promotional photographs was choreographed to exploit her confidence and desirability. Discussing one promotional photograph from 1928, Buszek argues that Bow was well aware of her objecthood and seemed to collaborate with her photographer in creating her sexualized persona. In the photograph, Bow, wearing a scanty bathing suit and high heels, self-consciously poses with a pair of skates slung over her shoulder, which she raises as if to wave to someone in the distance. As Buszek notes, Bow seems to have "it," that ineffable trait of the self-confidence that the flapper famously possessed. The photograph of Bow signals the nascent emergence of the pin-up genre. One of the book's aims is to demonstrate how the pin-up format is empowering for women, which Buszek advances through her discussion of a 1922 contest sponsored by Photoplay. Female viewers--these fan magazines were specifically directed to women readers--were invited to submit photographs of themselves shot in the manner of the magazine's images. The magazine then published the results, showing how the readers had self-consciously portrayed their own sexuality.
The classic illustrated pin-up emerged during World War II, most notably with the "Varga Girl" of Esquire magazine. Chapter five traces the development of the Esquire pin-up that became a popular culture phenomenon. The magazine was known for its bawdy cartoons of sexy, white, glamorous, upper-class women who were generally depicted as gold-diggers. While E. Simms Campbell, Alex Raymond, and Howard Baer helped to develop the early version of the Esquire woman, it was George Petty's illustrations that emerged as the first trademark Esquire girl in the 1930s. The "Petty Girls" were known for their beauty, naivety, and pouting countenance while charming men out of their money. Even though the Petty Girls were very popular, when Petty's monetary demands became too much, the magazine hired Peruvian-born Alberto Vargas to replace him. Vargas had been a portraitist and set designer in the pre-Hays Code Hollywood at a time when the sexuality of actresses was more openly expressed on camera. (In 1934, Will Hays was appointed the first head of the Motion Picture Production Code, dubbed the Hays Code, to safeguard the moral standards of the movie industry.) Vargas's first pin-up debuted in Esquire's October 1940 issue, and his illustrations, known as the "Varga Girls" became synonymous with the name Esquire. Initially, the Varga Girl was indebted to Petty with regard to design, but within a year, Vargas returned to a more glamorous style reminiscent of his Hollywood portraits. Buszek draws a connection between the success of his Esquire pin-up to Hollywood's glamorization of female stars like Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. His models were his wife, Anna Mae Clift, and a professional model, Jeanne Dean, which resulted in two basic types of Varga Girls. Vargas freely elongated the women's forms to accentuate their sensuality and used an airbrush technique to create the perfect surface. Vargas also abandoned Petty's ideal of beauty; Buszek interprets the Varga Girl as more intelligent and independent compared to the childishness of the Petty Girl. Vargas thus ushered in a new era for the magazine's pin-up; the 'Varga Girl' was a composite of feminine ideals, self-aware and sexually aggressive.
During the six years that he was with Esquire, Vargas extended the realm of the pin-up beyond the pages of the magazine. He designed the 1940 Esquire calendar, which was a success, and was soon commissioned to design an array of merchandise that made the Varga Girl known outside the magazine. His illustrations helped to make the pin-up part of the popular culture, and when the U.S. entered World War II, the pin-up went to war, too. Soldiers carried the pin-up into battle with them, and pilots decorated their planes with the illustrations. Within the pages of Esquire, Vargas contributed to the war effort with illustrations like his October 1942 centerfold of three women's heads adorned with military insignia on their hats or blouse. Driven by the popularity of the illustrated pin-up like the Varga Girl, the military appropriated the genre to recruit women for wartime jobs. In one government poster, the female war worker who filled the void left by men at war was deemed the "real pin-up girl." (214) Women identified with the sexual freedom of the pin-up model, which Buszek argues opened a window to sexual self-agency in the construction of their own identities. Homemade pin-ups circulated overseas alongside the professionally made. In some of these pin-ups, the women were dressed modestly so they could be conventionally feminine, but also have control over their own sexuality.
The end of the war brought a number of changes in gender relations and in the direction of the pin-up. In chapter six, Buszek outlines these changes while setting the stage for the appropriation of the pin-up by the third wave of feminists in the 1990s. In the post-war period, the ideal of femininity became much less aggressive and more conventional than the wartime image of womanhood. In some ways, women's roles returned to a Victorian-like era with a binary of female opposites, but instead of the Madonna/whore dichotomy that dominated the 19th century, it was Doris Day/Marilyn Monroe binary. The pinup also underwent negative changes when Hugh Hefner hired Vargas for Playboy magazine after the artist left Esquire. Vargas had attempted to renegotiate his contract with Esquire, but ended up losing his job and the right to the name "Varga Girl." Vargas's pin-up for Playboy was radically different from the self-confident, aggressive Varga Girl because in Playboy women were seen as either sexual playmates or homemakers. This ushered in a new ideal of pin-up femininity different from that of the Esquire pin-up. In an effort to continue her thread of women's sexual self-agency through the pin-up, Buszek makes a weak point about the readership of Playboy. She cites a number of letters to the editor, supposedly written by female readers, to demonstrate that women could identify in a positive way with the photographs of playmates. Problematic here is the authenticity of the letters. While Buszek acknowledges the issues of editorial selection, she disregards the possibility that the letters could have been entirely fabricated by the magazine for its own purposes.
Toward the end of the chapter, she turns to how the pin-up started to become politicized, first in Ebony magazine and later with Pop artists of the 1960s. Buszek asserts that progressives within the African American community believed that popular culture could be manipulated to subvert negative messages, leading to the founding of Ebony magazine in 1945. An early feature of the magazine was the Miss Fine Brown Frame contest, designed to celebrate the beauty of African American women. Applicants were to submit pin-up style photographs for judging. What followed was a somewhat disastrous controversy because readers expressed strongly divergent responses to the contest. Some believed that the magazine was trying to force white vices onto black readers. Others supported the contest, viewing it as parity with white culture. The later Pop artists, like Mel Ramos, showed the politicization of the pin-up by appropriating the genre as a vehicle to represent the complex synthesis of consumerism and sexuality. Artist Pauline Boty employed the pin-up to show the political power of the sexualized female body. Buszek points out that even at this early date, the art pin-up was directed to the youth culture, a critical point for her later argument for third wave feminist appropriation of the genre.
Buszek furthers her discussion of the politics of sexuality in chapter seven. In response to the feminist movement of the 1970s, known as the second wave of feminism, some artists derided the pin-up in their art, attesting to the genre's significance as a symbol of female repression. A photograph by Judy Chicago's first class in the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College entitled Miss Chicago and the California Girls, for example, playfully mocks the objectification of women by presenting themselves as beauty queens. Their poses suggest the Playboy pin-up, but instead of embracing this ideal of femininity, Chicago seeks to subvert it. While this approach is generally considered the "standard" feminist approach to the pin-up, Buszek notes the seeds of an alternative in the work of Lynda Benglis and Hannah Wilke. Benglis shocked the art world with her pin-up self-portrait ad in the November 1974 issue of Artforum. Similarly, Wilke used her body to protest censorship in a 1976 ArtNews article on artists in their studios. Even though she normally worked topless, she was asked to don a shirt for the article's photograph. She obliged, but in protest, she later reconstructed an almost identical photograph entitled Art News Revisited, only this time she exposed her breasts. She again revisited this image in a poster entitled Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism. This time Wilke addressed those feminists who criticized her as a "flirt" and a "glamour girl" and could not accept her as a serious feminist artist. Rather than ridiculing the representation of the pin-up, both of these artists accepted the sexualized female form as vehicle for self-expression. Their strategy is appropriation rather than subversion, and as such they indicate a significant break with second wave feminism. Cindy Sherman advances the break even further in her series of Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s and even more so in Untitled Centerfolds of 1981. In these series, Sherman adopts the manner of a Playboy pin-up in a disturbing study of pornography. She appropriates the vehicle of sexual repression and overturns assumptions about masculine viewership and pornography by making herself both the object and the subject. And, unlike Miss Chicago and the California Girls, Sherman does not mock the pin-up, but revels in her sexualized body.
These shifts in the use of the pin-up point to the future conflict between the second and third waves of feminism, with the issue of pornography as the key locus for that dissension. In 1974, Andrea Dworkin published in a study of misogyny a "Beauty Hurts" diagram that Buszek asserts exemplified the "constant, painful reminder of women's sexual oppression." (273) Dworkin's hand drawn diagram illustrates what women do to their own bodies in the name of sexual desirability, such as plucking eyebrows, rouging nipples, and girdling abdomens. By the 1980s, these issues became a battleground for feminism. Andrea Dworkin and law professor Catharine MacKinnon vehemently argued against the sexual objectification of women in pornography, which MacKinnon defined as a "political practice, a practice of power and powerlessness." (303) As such, she stressed that it was a threat to all women. Buszek maintains that this position was refuted by later theorists, but she asserts that the media and politicians accepted the anti-pornography stance as a defining characteristic of second wave feminism in addition to its political expedience. Laws to protect women were proposed, but some feminists worried that these could ultimately harm women. Feminists fought back with essays on feminine eroticism. Angela Carter's revolutionary reading of the writings of the Marquis de Sade is particularly critical for Buszek's survey. According to Carter, Sade asserted that women could "master and subvert" the "ugly" truths of sexuality. In the work of the infamous pornographer were the seeds of female empowerment. (305)
In chapter eight, Buszek presents the postmodernist pin-up as a key vehicle for third wave feminists. She locates the beginning of the third wave within the "sex wars" of the 1980s that pitted feminists against one another. The anti-pornography faction, represented by Dworkin, sparked a conflict that was the beginning of the plurality that marks the third wave of feminism. To illustrate the split, Buszek contrasts former sex-worker and artist Annie Sprinkle's witty deconstruction of a pin-up to Dworkin's Beauty Hurts diagram. In her 1991 Anatomy of a Pin-Up Photo, Sprinkle appropriates a composition similar to Dworkin's diagram, presenting herself in sexy garb sporting a corset, thigh high stockings, lace-up boots with stiletto heels. Sprinkle encircles the images with analyses of and comments on the construction of the pinup model. Humorously she points out the pain and time required to create the illusion, thus dissipating the fantasy of pornography. Unlike Dworkin, who would rather eliminate the stereotype, Sprinkle uses it for self-empowerment. Buszek posits that Dworkin's political stance came to define the second wave of feminism in the 1980s, but a faction of feminists who embraced and appropriated sexual stereotypes for their own sexual agency always existed. While this faction was marginalized within the main stream of the second wave, feminism fell into disunity and a period of inactivity. By the early 1990s, however, a third wave of feminism materialized. Part of its formation was built upon the marginalization of non-Anglo and lesbian feminists, and their efforts to develop meaningful pro-sex theories. Another important characteristic of the third wave is its youthfulness. Many in this new generation never knew the struggles of the feminist movement. Like the flapper who benefited from the hard work of the suffragettes, third wave feminists have internalized the accomplishments of the previous generation, and they are ready to embrace their own sexual agency. An important role model, the pop singer Madonna has shown this generation of feminists how to construct and reconstruct their sexual identities. Not surprisingly, the older generation of feminists has harbored some resentment toward these upstarts, and Buszek acknowledges that this generation has not been politically visible save for the short-lived, but organized, riot grrrl movement in the 1990s. Buszek ends her survey by pointing out that feminism still lives and calls for a reconciliation of the two generations.
Buszek's passion for the subject is evident throughout her text. She takes the reader on a fun, exuberant ride through the history of feminist visual culture. Clearly, she has a personal stake in the project, animatedly discussing the third wave feminist "zines" in the slang of the initiated. This approach, however, demands specificity and accuracy of language, which points to one of my major concerns about this book. Too often, Buszek is careless about her terminology, in particular, in her use of the word "pinup." She points out that the term was only introduced into Webster's Dictionary in 1941, thus I would argue that anything well before this should be considered a precursor. (8) Buszek, however, elides the term with "cartes-de-visite" in her discussion of 19th-century visual culture, probably to emphasize the connection between the two. Such overuse is unnecessary; Buszek successfully demonstrates that the pin-up did not arise in a vacuum, but was instead part of an evolution of politicized and sexualized visual culture. An examination of that early culture is essential to understand the appropriation of the pin-up by third wave feminists. In another example of the misuse of language, in chapter six she uses the term "pin-up" to describe a movie studio photograph of Joan Crawford, in which Crawford is mopping a kitchen floor. This begs the question of what actually constitutes a pin-up. Are all movie promotional photographs to be considered pin-ups? My other concern is the organization of the writing. Buszek sometimes leads the reader on tangents that detract from her argument. Other times her diversions are related to her overall thesis, but she takes pages to make the connection, thus frustrating the reader. Her second chapter is particularly problematic with a false start about the exotic dancer Little Egypt and Mary Cassatt at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Buszek attempts to segue between chapters and to establish sexuality and race as a dividing factor for early suffragettes, but she would have been better served by including the segment about Little Egypt in the preceding chapter. In contrast, Buszek is on target with her discussion of the Varga Girls in chapter five, arguably her best chapter. She leads the reader through a well-considered and in-depth examination of the evolution of the illustrated pin-up and its appropriation during the war, while using bright, descriptive language such as "Vargas conjured up lemon-meringue blondes with bodies just as steely and dangerous as anything rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit." (206) Pin-Up Grrrls is the first book for this author, and although it is uneven in its organization, Buszek makes an important contribution to the history of feminism.
Beverly Joyce
Mississippi University for Women
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| Author: | Joyce, Beverly |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Southeastern College Art Conference Review |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2008 |
| Words: | 4253 |
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