Girls Girls Girls Girls Girls: The Trans-Atlantic Mass Magazine Culture of the 1920s as a Gendered Affair

Abstract

The article explores the ways in which illustrated magazines of the Weimar period contribute to a larger gendering of transnational exchange, particularly through image-text doubling and shifts. It takes the Weimar society magazine Uhu as a major reference point, investigating how it modelled itself on American lifestyle and ‘smart’ magazines and made use of the iconic figure of the ‘Girl’ to carve out a spatio-temporal continuum between ‘Amerika’ and Europe. While the Girl is a figure of the stage and screen as much as of the modern magazine, it is in the magazine that this figure comes into her own. The Girl incorporates modernity as a multimodal and multifaceted configuration much like the modern magazine itself. The article argues that the Girl enters the illustrated magazines not only as a subject matter but also as a tool of gendered self-reflection, particularly in the work of female writers, illustrators, and photographers.