Pin-Up Grrrls

Buszek Maria Elena Buszek

Description

Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre's 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published.Beginning with the pin-up's origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.

Sujets

• History of art

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387565
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

PinUp Grrrls

PinUp Grrrls

F E M I N I S M , S E X U A L I T Y,

P O P U L A R C U L T U R E

Maria Elena Buszek

Duke University Press

Durham and London



©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Bembo

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

nd printing, 

A mis padres, con cariño

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: Defining/Defending the ‘‘Feminist Pin-Up’’  1 Representing ‘‘Awarishness’’: The Theatrical Origins of the Feminist Pin-Up Girl  2 New Women for the New Century: Feminism and the Pin-Up at the Fin de Siècle  3 The Return of Theatrical Feminism: Early-Twentieth-Century Pin-Ups on the Stage, Street, and Screen  4 Celebrating the ‘‘Kind of Girl Who Dominates’’: Film Fanzines and the Feminist Pin-Up  5 New Frontiers: Sex, Women, and World War II  6 Pop Goes the Pin-Up: New Roles and Readings in the Postwar Era  7 Our Bodies/Ourselves: Pin-Ups in the Wake of Women’s Liberation  8 From Womyn to Grrrls: The Postmodern Feminist Pin-Up Conclusion/Commencement  Notes Bibliography Index

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I owe many people thanks for seeing this book from the graduate semi- nar to press. First, however, I would like to thank my editor and good friend Ken Wissoker, whose enthusiasm for and support of this book from the very start more than made up for the years of baffled responses with which the project was met while in progress. Needless to say, I hit the jackpot when I stumbled into an editor with whom I could talk Pierre Bourdieu, Chuck D., and Susie Bright in one sitting. I would also like to thank Duke University Press editors Christine Dahlin, Courtney Berger, and Justin Faerber for absorbing my frequent freak-outs over the workaday details, and the press’s anonymous readers for their amazingly insightful suggestions for the manuscript’s revision. This book began as my doctoral thesis at the University of Kansas’s Kress Foundation Department of the History of Art, and although it has been through myriad changes since I first subjected it to the cruel margin ruler of’s Graduate School secretary, even in this trans- formed version it is indebted to the mentorship and patience of my dissertation committee members: John Pultz, Ann Schofield, Marilyn Stokstad, Patrick Frank, and especially Joanna Frueh, whose thought- ful readings and criticism of each original chapter and whose love and encouragement of my person immeasurably shaped this project. The students and faculty at’s history of art, women’s studies, and