Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture.

Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture

by Maria Elena Buszek

Duke University Press, 2006.

In common cultural parlance, pin-up girls are actresses or models whose photographs have received wide circulation, their glamorous images taken from magazines or calendars and then "pinned up" by fans and admirers. While pin-up girls are popularly associated with GIs, perhaps epitomized by Alberto Vargas's Esquire centerfolds of the 1940s, the phenomenon is much older. Maria Buszek's in-depth analysis provides a comprehensive history of the pin-up genre over the course of 150 years. Based in large part on her doctoral dissertation, Pin-Up Grrrls disputes the idea that sexualized representations of women are necessarily oppressive icons produced by men for a male viewing audience. Rather, Buszek argues, women themselves have long produced (and consumed) such imagery as a form of empowerment. The nineteenth-century burlesque performer Adah Isaacs Menken and the postmodern-era sex worker-turned-artist Annie Sprinkle book-end a history in which women have constructed and controlled their own sexualized representations in order to present themselves as "self-aware, assertive, strong, and independent" (8).

Buszek credits theatrical stage performers of the mid-nineteenth century as the originators of what she deems "feminist pin-ups." While some feminists would consider this phrase oxymoronic, Buszek argues convincingly that actresses like Menken and Lydia Thompson constructed and employed pin-up imagery as they negotiated a transgressive space for women outside of society's typical binary of male-public/ female-private spheres. In this way, burlesque performers capitalized upon both the new technology of photography and the popularity of collecting cartes-de-visite, a "shrewd promotional device" (43) that, more importantly, subverted conventions regarding women's behavior in the public sphere.

At the fin-de-siecle, burlesque pinups gave way to a proliferation of "Gibson girl" imagery in Life magazine. Although modest in comparison to some burlesque images, Buszek argues that Charles Dana Gibson's popular romantic and adventurous illustrations nonetheless celebrated the cultural strides made by the era's "New Woman" (in stark contrast to other publications that ridiculed the modern woman). Simultaneously, photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston and pinups featuring such New Women as Sarah Bernhardt played with and subverted gender conventions in ways that attested to greater freedoms in women's sexual and public lives. In the early twentieth century, political activists recognized the efficacy of these actresses' performative constructions; as a result, "suffragists actively forged alliances with them for the good of the [women's] movement" (131).

Although burlesque pin-ups were collected enthusiastically in their day, their twentieth-century counterparts reached a new level of popularity in celebrity fan culture (Fig. 1). Pin-ups adorned all manner of memorabilia, from sheet music to powder tins, culminating in the popular film fan magazines such as Photoplay. The pin-ups in Photoplay, like the movies it discussed, addressed the "breadth of modern womanhood" (148), continually portraying the actresses featured--and, by extension, their female fans--as complex, contradictory women. From working girls to vamps, Photoplay pin-ups signaled "the period's growing acceptance of not just the sexual woman and the thinking woman, but the notion that one might acceptably be both" (182).

In its subsequent manifestation, the pin-up skyrocketed in popularity due to the fantasy creations of Alberto Vargas for Esquire magazine. The pin-up genre earned its appellation at this time, during World War II, as U.S. soldiers overseas "pinned up" the Vargas Girls in their barracks. The Esquire pin-ups were popular with both men and women, however, perhaps because Vargas's images made reference to the continuing expansion of what was socially acceptable for women, both sexually and professionally. As wartime society sanctioned new roles for women in the public sphere, the assertive and sexually aware stance of many pinups that had previously appeared transgressive now became an apparently wholesome ideal for its female viewers.

In the post-war era, however, women's opportunities--for self-expression, sexuality, and labor--took several steps backward. With the return of American GIs, women who patriotically had joined the workforce during the war now found it their patriotic duty to return to the home. Popular-culture representations of women paralleled this return to conventional gender expectations, as the 1950s ushered in the "era of the 'eternal virgin' and 'dizzy blonde bombshell'" (285), a binary perhaps best represented by Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe. In addition to a severely limited range of roles for women to play, women now were also pointedly excluded from the audience for these types of pin-ups, as envisioned by Hugh Hefner in his new magazine for men, Playboy. While Hefner's publication and others like it ruled the pin-up scene of the 1960s, Buszek delineates concurrent trends in countercultural, sexually aggressive pin-up publications as well as the political intersections of race and sexual representation seen in Ebony magazine.

As women reacted against the constrictions of the 1950s (think Friedan's The Feminine Mystique), the pin-up genre of later decades returned to women's hands, representing a "growing desire to celebrate and politicize their own sexuality" (271). The rise of the second wave witnessed the appropriation and politicization of pinup imagery by feminist artists from Eleanor Antin to Hannah Wilke. While the 1980s beheld some bitter debates among feminists regarding pornography and women's sexual representation, women and artists of the third wave increasingly have embraced the pin-up as a language of self-expression.

Throughout the text, Buszek's greatest strength is her ability to interweave historical and art historical elements fluidly. In each chapter, she situates a period in pin-up history within a much larger cultural context in order to argue effectively for women's use of these images. Pin-up history unfolds within and alongside of the history of the women's movement, allowing Buszek to articulate why and how such images can be read as empowering to women. Even so, she respectfully acknowledges the position of feminists who disagree with such a reading, paying particular attention to the intergenerational tensions between second- and third-wave feminists. While Buszek's clause-filled style can at times seem weighty, in her selection of words she is a gifted writer. With Pin-Up Grrrls, Buszek provides a unique blend of art, cultural, and women's histories that will engage a wide and diverse audience.

Rachel Epp Buller is an independent scholar and artist. She earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2004, and currently writes and makes prints, while raising three small children.

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Author:	Buller, Rachel Epp
Publication:	Woman's Art Journal
Date:	Sep 22, 2007
Words:	1030
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