Visions Of Femininity Research Articles

Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraits

Since their appearance at the beginning of the millennium, fashion blogs have become key players in the field of fashion. One type in particular, personal fashion blogs, where bloggers post pictures of themselves documenting their style, has established itself as a central form of fashion blogging. This is the type of blogs that this article concentrates on. By bringing together various technologies of the self it argues that the blogs represent a significant space of identity construction. Focusing on the idea of gender, it explores the various forces, both empowering and disempowering, at play in the formation and representation of femininity. The computer screen is discussed as a mirror through which women's position as specular objects is both reproduced and challenged, whilst the blogs also constitute a space for the circulation of alternative visions of femininity.

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

I once believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was wrong.' Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. Drawing on a wealth of research and personal interviews, LIVING DOLLS is a straight-talking, passionate and important book that makes us look afresh at women and girls, at sexism and femininity - today.

Mexicanas en guerra: World War II and the Discourse of Mexican Female Identity

Mexicanas en guerraWorld War II and the Discourse of Mexican Female Identity Monica A. Rankin (bio) “Why do women shave?” asked Aura Rostand, a conservative commentator, whose columns appeared regularly on the women’s pages of the illustrated weekly Hoy magazine in April 1946.1 As she provided beauty-related advice combined with political and social commentary, she pondered what purpose it served for women to fret over the arch in their eyebrows and to “polish their bodies like armor.”2 She offered her own perspective on why women should maintain their beauty. Referring to makeup, perfume, and jewelry as artillery, Rostand argued that “modern” women had an obligation to maintain their beauty, not for purposes of vanity, but instead as a weapon of social advancement. Her perspective on social advancement was quite different from the arguments being made in the 1940s by Mexican feminist activists, who were campaigning for political and economic equality. Rostand argued, “Instead of fighting for political rights such as the vote, women should fight for the exclusive right of beauty. . . . [Think] how easily women could manipulate the masculine vote if they all truly devoted themselves to beauty through cosmetics and perfume.” In other words, Rostand argued that a woman should “shave” and primp so that she could more easily persuade men to vote the way she wanted them to vote. In this paper I examine the active discourse about the changing imagery of women in Mexico in the 1940s.3 This dialogue took place through the mass media, especially newspapers, where advertisements and commentary framed concepts of identity in the context of World War II for an audience that was primarily middle class. But other messages circulated to a larger audience as U.S. and Mexican propagandists used images of Mexicanas and other women around the world to communicate specific information about the war. Through a process that was both national and transnational, this propaganda drew on existing gendered concepts such as motherhood, beauty, and feminism to promote specific messages about the war. Those messages helped to shape and reshape [End Page 83] identity by reinforcing traditional feminine roles some of the time and, at other times, by injecting influences that were perceived as modern. I argue that the various discourses about Mexican femininity worked to make sense of social and economic adjustments brought about by World War II and to promote the interest of specific individuals and groups during a time of considerable change. Government leaders, advertisers, feminist activists, and conservative social critics all participated in these discourses in an attempt to foster Mexicana identity related to gender and nation that would support their varied agendas. Government propagandists, for example, emphasized a Mexicana identity based on various constructions of motherhood and modernity as a way to win support for government wartime policies. Advertisers incorporated the war itself into identity constructions based on female beauty, while female activists and conservative social commentators promoted competing visions of femininity and the home. This is a topic that has garnered relatively little scholarly attention in the bourgeoning field of gender studies in Mexican history, but it is a significant matter for a number of reasons. First, it provides another lens through which to examine the 1940s as a transitional period for Mexico as the nation dealt with the profound transformations created by the wartime environment. This was a time that laid an important foundation for discourses surrounding identity, modernity, and gender that would continue for the rest of the twentieth century. Second, an examination of the imagery of “la Mexicana” during World War II illustrates the ways in which gendered discourses in a time of crisis could be molded and shaped in various ways—even by competing interests—to promote a particular agenda. The debates that emerged in postrevolutionary Mexico surrounding the role of women in society and the nation’s own deliberations of national identity are visible in Aura Rostand’s arguments. Integral to those debates and to Rostand’s column were discussions of modernity and tradition. Anne Rubenstein has convincingly argued that these concepts formed a binary in postrevolutionary Mexico, that they defined each other, and that each one existed because of and in contrast...

Women, Muscular Nationalism and Hinduism in India: Roop Kanwar and the Fire Protests

This article unpacks the manner in which women/womanhood circulates within an uniquely Hindu interpretation of a particular gendered vision of nation that I term ‘muscular nationalism’. Muscular nationalism centres the values of martial prowess, physical strength, moral fortitude and the readiness to go to battle against groups defined as enemies of the nation. Further, these values are most frequently expressed by a male body. The relationship between women/womanhood and muscular nationalism is dynamic. This nation as woman can take multiple forms; it can be imagined as powerful mother or vulnerable virgin or warrior goddess. Whether mother or virgin or goddess, chastity and purity are important components of this imagination and nation as woman impacts real women’s lives through ideas of honour. In muscular nationalism this focus on the purity and chastity of female bodies stems from their role as border guards. By border guards I mean the notion that the boundaries separating ‘we the people’ from ‘them’ are represented by chaste women’s bodies. Put another way, this line of thinking argues that our women are chaste and pure, yours are not. This is the difference that separates our nation from yours. Women’s role as border guards requires that their purity be vigilantly guarded. The story of women/womanhood in Hindutva or Hindu muscular nationalism which unfolds in this essay is rooted in the assumptions described above. By drawing on interviews with women in the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Sevika Samiti – with reference to women’s involvement in the Bharatiya Janata Party, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Shiv Sena – this paper contextualizes the role of women in Hindutva. Then it goes on to unpack the 1987 immolation of Roop Kanwar as well as cultural protests against Deepa Mehta’s film Fire to illustrate the contested location of female bodies in this ideology. This analysis indicates that many women are certainly politically active in Hindu muscular nationalism; however, the vision of femininity driving the discourse around Roop Kanwar and the resistance against Fire reveals the limitations of an activism embedded in a context of a rigid expectation of female chastity and virtue.

Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique

The article provides a critical analysis of a postfeminist identity that is emergent in a set of beauty advertisements, called ‘entitled femininity’. Three major discursive themes are identified, which are constitutive of this postfeminist feminine identity: 1) ‘It’s about me!’ focuses on pampering and pleasuring the self; 2) ‘Celebrating femininity’ reclaims and rejoices in feminine stereotypes; and 3) ‘Girling women’ encourages a youthful disposition in women of all ages. The article shows that entitled femininity occupies an ambivalent discursive space, which celebrates as well as repudiates feminism, and re-installs normative gendered stereotypes. The ambivalence, it is argued, contributes to fostering a culture of post-critique, which numbs resistance and deflects criticism. For all its appearances to be pro-women, feminine entitlement based squarely on an entitlement to consume offers a rather limited and problematic vision of femininity and gender equality.

Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. By Linda Ruth Williams (Harvester Wheatsheat, 1993)

Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. By Linda Ruth Williams (Harvester Wheatsheat, 1993)

Second-Long Fictions

Sarah Moon 12345 Royal College Of Art London October 17-25, 2008 Michael Hoppen Gallery London October 16-November 22, 2008 Sarah Moon 12345 By Sarah Moon with additional texts by Dominique Edde, llona Suschitsky, Magali Jauffret, Alain Fleischer and Robert Delpire London: Thames & Hudson, 2008 486 pp./[pounds sterling]95.00 (sb) It is a testament to the lasting appeal of Sarah Moon's photography that her soft-focused grainy aesthetic remains so evocative of the romantic femininity peddled in the pages of fashion magazines from the 1970s. Although undeniably nostalgic, the original celebrated advertising campaigns for Cacharel and editorial shots for Vogue and Nova were rarely cloying or overly sentimental, haunted as they were by an underlying narrative of disquieting uncase. Describing her photographs as second-long fictions, Moon continues to explore the various facets of feminine experience in both her fashion photography and personal practice--two distinct but overlapping strands that were reconciled in two exhibitions of the photographer's work in London this Fall. At Michael Hoppen Gallery, the display focused on examples from Moon's thirty-year commercial career, while at the Royal College of Art more experimental work was included, with rooms dedicated to two recent films. shows coincided with the publication by Thames & Hudson of Sarah Moon 12345, whose title reflects its composite structure of five chapter-like notebooks in a slipcase cover. A personal rather than chronological retrospective in which Moon attempted to revisit and update the past (3), the book's pages mix and present in an album-like format that was echoed in the installation at the RCA. Hung four or five deep on the gallery walls, the undated and untitled photographs weaved an unresolved narrative that emphasized the work's dream-like quality, as if fleeting snatches of memory on the brink of being forgotten. It was in this display of personal work that a darker vision of femininity emerged. Strange motifs recurred--of lone women wandering lonely streets and abandoned fairgrounds or waiting in the wings backstage, conjuring a sense of unfulfilled anticipation as a distinctly feminine condition. Particularly pronounced in Moon's reworking of the fairy stories The Little and Bluebeard in the new films Mermaid of Auderville (2007) and Red Thread (2005), that sense of suspense was heightened by the combination of still shots and moving images to tell tales of adolescent femininity on the verge of sexual awakening, marked by periods of waiting, longing, and ultimately of disappointment. Elsewhere, that awakening had more sinister consequences: in shots produced to illustrate Creative Education's 1983 edition of Little Red Riding Hood, the viewer took the position of the big bad wolf stalking its prey through the urban forest. Pictured only as a nightmarish shadow cast from a position behind the camera, our identification with the wolf's predatory presence implicated the viewer in a narrative of desire in which female sexuality was to be consumed. …

Margaret Cavendish y sus Atomic poems (1653): fusión revolucionaria de ciencia y literatura

Margaret Cavendish, Duquesa de Newcastle, fue una personalidad descollante en el XVII no sólo como escritora, sino también como creadora de una teoría científica. Sin duda, en ambas labores fueron determinantes tanto sus experiencias vitales como el contexto histórico en que vivió (Bazeley 1990). Su obra se convierte en una respuesta a las tensiones culturales y sociales de la época y en una reivindicación de los derechos de la mujer (Charlton 2002). Es más, su teoría científica, que se aleja del mecanicismo de Hobbes y Descartes, está caracterizada por poseer una “visión femenina” de la ciencia (Rees 2003). Es la única mujer que ofreció entonces su propia visión utópica del mundo y dedicó su labor literaria a cuestiones científicas. En este marco se enmarcan sus Poemas atómicos (1653), mezcla de literatura y ciencia. El presente trabajo pretende ofrecer las claves para entender estos poemas, aparentemente confusos y absurdos, desde el contexto histórico de la Nueva Ciencia del XVII. Una lectura actual basada en los conocimientos científicos del siglo XXI, aparte de carecer de sentido, haría parecer a la autora una ilusa visionaria. En realidad, Cavendish es la fusión perfecta entre literatura, ciencia, ficción y feminismo.

Paulina Chiziane: uma contadora de histórias no ritmo da (contra-)dança

O presente trabalho propõe um caminho de leitura de Niketche, mais recente romance da escritora moçambicana Paulina Chiziane, apontando os recursos musicais como elementos participantes de uma prática oralizante. No ritmo da dança, a trajetória das personagens são entretecidas, bem como a própria construção do texto em si. Dentro de uma visão de mundo feminina, cria-se um universo marcado pela musicalidade e redimensão da língua portuguesa e pela construção musical do texto ficcional.

"The Call of Salome": American Adaptations and Re-creations of the Female Body in the Early Twentieth Century

IT IS ANNOUNCED ON GOOD AUTHORITY, A York Times writer joked in August 1908, the management at the Amsterdam Theater has been exceptionally active in guarding against outbreaks of Salomania among members of the company. As soon as any chorus girl shows the first symptoms of the disease, she at once enveloped in a fur coat--the most efficacious safeguard known against the dance--and hurriedly isolated. jokes continued. It rumored, he reported, tongue in cheek, Oscar Hammerstein will introduce the 'Salome' dance into every opera to be given by him at the Manhattan Opera House next season.... As soon as he got the idea he at once called an expert play tinkerer and gave him, as a starter, the libretto of Gotterdammerung with strict instructions to insert the dance in an artistic and convincing manner. (1) Today, a familiar figure: she everybody's favorite bad girl, the original dancing vamp, a launchpad for discussions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century insecurities and fascinations with women, national identity, imperialism, the Oriental Other, and the female body. (2) A tale of female sexuality, erotic transgression, and taboo, the narrative and particularly her Dance of the Seven Veils have come to stand for anxieties about cultural disorder, describing a desire to legitimize male control of female bodies and behavior. herself has become a promising and yet troublesome icon in feminist opera scholarship. Try as musicologists might to read her as something more than a fantasy of the male artistic imagination, something other than yet another operatic woman undone, inevitably seems to slip away as the curtain falls, leaving her would-be liberators musing over her intangibility, her indescribability, her strangeness. The emancipated Salome, Lawrence Kramer has lamented in analyses of the opera, is still a critical phantom; the real still a cheap date. (3) Yet as the humorous York Times quote above implies, early-twentieth-century American culture was flooded with dancing Salomes that were neither cheap dates nor critical phantoms. Rather, they were depictions created and enacted by female performers that were both liberating and comical, offering new, meaningful of femininity to American women and simultaneously poking fun at themselves and their audiences. In this article I explore American depictions and the female authors behind them. These Salomes, I argue, were just as slippery as their operatic sisters. Emerging at the juncture of theatrical and operatic traditions, they entangled the working class with the elite, entertainment with uplift, naughtiness with promises of purity, power and emancipation with misogyny. These dancers represented a wide (and often jumbled) range of genres. Some, like Bianca Froelich and La Sylphe, were working-class actresses and dancers performing before massive crowds at Keith and Proctor's vaudeville house and on rooftop theaters; others, like Gertrude Hoffmann, were self-proclaimed highbrow artistic dancers engaged by upper-crust female patrons to perform at afternoon Salome lawn parties at private country homes. They were opera singers and film stars (and sometimes, as in Mary Garden's case, both); they were the subjects of jokes, speculation, adoration, and photo montages. Yet all of these Salomes, I argue, were creative authors, constructing their own visions of and her dance in performance. Each of these dances, then, was marked by its dancer's aesthetics and performance ideologies. Further, each simultaneously reflected and helped to define American cultural shifts, anxieties, and tastes, particularly in relation to gender roles and the evolving trope(s) of the New Woman. Examining what I call Salome-as-danced, a specific set of performances carefully contextualized within turn-of-the-century American life, allows us to momentarily shift the focus away from the temptation to treat Salome's dance as a phantomlike, mystical truth. …

Matter Out of Place

Matter Out of Place

« Un épagneul, une femme et un noyer, plus nous les battons, meilleurs ils sont »1 : Frances Power Cobbe, la féminité et l’altérité

Frances Power Cobbe was a remarkable Victorian and a very assertive woman, who was praised for both her astute feminist mind and her tenacious fight against animal experiments. She utterly disapproved of women being ranked as creatures whose whole existence depended on their relationship with another individual. She deplored their “wretched proverbial similarity to spaniels and walnut-trees”. In her writings, she tackled the theme of violence, especially that committed within the home by malicious husbands and she took strong exception to “the notion that a man’s wife is his PROPERTY”, because of the stigma attached to such a belief and because it made women—as well as animals—morally inferior to men. The following article provides an insight into Frances Power Cobbe’s perspective on domestic violence and her in-depth exploration of the concepts of femininity and otherness. It begins by explaining how the authoress of “Wife Torture in England” became the spokeswoman of beaten wives and it goes on to study her vision of femininity as conveyed through her discussion of violence, cruelty, appropriation, otherness and the fate of animals. The article concludes by trying to shed light on the image of femininity that Cobbe wishes to extol.

Girls Blush, Sometimes: Gender, Moral Agency, and the Problem of Shame

Few contemporary philosophers discuss the ways in which the emotion of shame may be gendered. This paper addresses this situation, examining Gabriele Taylor's (1985 and 1995) account of genuine vs. false shame. 1 argue that, by attending to the social pressures placed on many women to conform to a certain vision of femininity, an analysis of the shame to which women may be prone shows that Taylor's account of shame remains incomplete.

"A New World for Women"? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s

ABORTION MUST BE THE KEY TO new world for women, wrote the British feminist Stella Browne in 1935. Browne believed that the public emancipation of women in such areas as politics and the economy demanded and was dependent on their emancipation in the private sphere of sexual and reproductive practice: freedom of choice and deliberate intention are necessary for [women] in their sexual relations and their maternity, if they are to make anything of their status and opportunities. Toward this end, she advocated abortion as an absolute right spanning public and private realms.1 Browne evoked modern visions of femininity through abortion and emphasized the issue's liminality between public and private. These are themes also reflected in recent historical studies of abortion in North America and Europe. In work on post-1960 abortion in the United States, for example, Celeste Michelle Condit notes the intersection between changing discursive understandings of abortion and those of femininity, a negotiated transformation of women's own private discourses in public and private spheres, view also adopted by Jane Jenson in her examination of abortion in France.2 Other studies of abortion have emphasized its role in problematizing the private female body in the context of the public sphere after World War 1.3 This is particularly true of work on the controversies surrounding Article 218 in interwar Germany and the 1920 loi sce'Mrate in France, as Cornelie Usborne, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Louise Roberts have shown.4

Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism, Film and 1968 — A Curious Documentary

A microhistory of the interconnections — both literal, through personal relations, and theoretical — between radical feminism and avant-garde film culture views culture as a model for politics during the 1960s. In short, radical feminism owed much of its rhetoric and practice to avant-garde film. Beginning with the screenings of Schmeerguntz, feminists moved against female stereotypes with the Miss America action (to get media coverage), documented the history of women’s struggle in Newsreel’s The Woman’s Film (to challenge the news media), and experimented with visions of femininity through personal films and happenings (to unravel domesticity — its bliss and horror). This parallels three 1960s film practices: New Hollywood, a commercial response to the end of the studios and the rise of television (filmmaking as industrial production); documentary, to track issues within New Left politics (filmmaking as collective activity); and the Underground, a celebration of the counter-culture (filmmaking as personal vision).

Feminine Dis-ease in Ciudad Real by Rosario Castellanos

Ciudad Real, a book of short stories published by Rosario Castellanos in 1960, has been largely neglected by literary criticism. This article examines the idea of femininity in Ciudad Real, exploring the metaphors of sickness and deformity in the delineation of its female characters. These metaphors contribute to a process of negation of the female body, and the article focuses on that process, as it develops in the protagonists of the stories 'Modesta Gómez' and 'La rueda del hambriento'. The female protagonists adopt this recourse in order to gain a measure of textual autonomy, an autonomy that is frustrated by factors outside the control of the characters, such as race and class. In its turn, this process functions as a metaphor of the struggle Castellanos must undergo in order to be accepted and included within the masculine tradition of Mexican literature. The article also considers the implications of this negative vision of femininity for recent feminist critique of Rosario Castellanos's work.

Política, médicos y enfermedades: lecturas de historia de la salud en la Argentina

Mirta Zaida Lobato has brought together a collection of articles on the history of health in Argentina that will be a valuable addition to the published work in this field. Much of the writing that exists on this topic has focused on the rise of public health professionals (higienistas), who functioned as the arbiters of sanitation and pathology between the state and the populace. This volume enhances such an approach with its broadly conceived notion of política, examining the issues of housing, food, education, and work through the prisms of alcoholism, syphilis, tuberculosis, and epidemics. The authors add the ideas of anarchists, socialists, and patients to the opinions of physicians and other professionals whose statements are better studied.Lobato notes in the introduction that historians began to study this topic relatively late. Although the subject matter has already been plumbed by other disciplines, the field is still ripe for historical investigation. Few contributors in this volume acknowledge or discuss the existing historiography on the topic; in fact, one or two of them seem to be unaware of large parts of it. And yet, the collection is firmly anchored by the contributions of some of the finest social historians working on Argentina today. The chapters move chronologically, from the 1850s with Ricardo Gonzalez Leandri’s analysis of the incipient professionalization of medicine in Buenos Aires, through the 1940s with Susana Belmartino’s search for continuity between the social programs of Peronism and those of the preceding decades.The central essays share a concern with alternative discourses on the social diseases linked to urban excess: tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism. Diego Armus focuses on tuberculosis and its association with poor living and working conditions, an association that prompted some anarchist writers to understand the disease as the result of societal injustice, with the inevitable conclusion that the disease could not be eradicated without radical social change. Other anarchists (or the same ones at different times) offered an analysis that shared the emphasis of official science on the individual’s responsibility to avoid dangerous behaviors associated with sex and alcohol.In her research on the Sociedad Luz, an organization of the Socialist Party dedicated to the education of workers, Dora Barrancos uncovered similar concerns. With the same passion that they demanded better industrial hygiene, leaders such as Angel Giménez also campaigned for moderation in the consumption of alcohol and the avoidance of venereal disease. Barrancos goes on to question the extent to which workers themselves shared these concerns and whether improving statistical indices merited such alarmist zeal.Marcela Nari turns the reader’s attention to a different presumed outcome of sexual excess in unwanted pregnancies. Along with a discussion of the ability of porteña women to limit the size of their families, Nari explores higienista anxieties about shrinking fertility on the one hand, and about their concerns whether the “correct” people were having babies, on the other. Medical debates created a new vision of femininity that reduced “woman” to “mother” and imbued her with a variety of characteristics that were then propagated as “natural.” Much of the essay concerns poor and single mothers who were unable to attain these ideals.Beatriz Ruibal’s discussion of legal medicine nicely complements other contributions on the earlier corporate structure of health care and demonstrates how successfully medical professionals had insinuated themselves as men of science into numerous branches of the country’s administrative elite. Belmartino, as part of a larger discussion about the shifting ideologies of social assistance, looks at the creation of early Peronist social works as a response to the structure of mutualism as it had developed in the 1930s.Like Belmartino’s essay, many of the contributions in this book make it clear that the history of health not only raises intriguing questions of its own but also offers new perspectives on social arenas that have long interested historians. Most of these articles assume that the reader has a basic familiarity with Argentine history between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, particularly with regard to immigration and the formation of the modern nation-state. This is not an introductory work, but the book could certainly be enjoyed by both specialists and others interested in the processes of urbanization, medicalization, and ideas about welfare reform.

Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press

How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late 19th-century Spain? Using an array of images from popular magazines of the day, this text finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. The author has organized the 190 images reproduces in the text into six broad categories, or fictions of the feminine: she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil; as a privileged link with the natural order; as a font of male inspiration; as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores; as a focalised point of male fear and desire; and as an eroticised expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, argues the author, were a response to, and also helped create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behaviour and poses.

Shootout at the Gender Corral: Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender

Shootout at the Gender Corral:Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender L. Clare Bratten (bio) From 1954 to 1956, television's Annie Oakley (played by actress Gail Davis) competed and won effortlessly in a rough-and-tumble man's world that valued skilled shooting, riding, and toughness of mind. A spunky, pigtailed young blonde woman in a fringed buckskin outfit, Annie was fearless, truthful, unflirtatious, and determined to oppose law-breakers, immorality, and selfishness wherever they arose. Although a pie on the kitchen table might be identified as one that she had baked, within seconds of learning about trouble Annie would leap onto her horse and gallop off to interrupt another round of criminal behavior. Tender hearted and warm toward her kid brother, Tagg, she was flinty-eyed and unruffled after shooting the gun out of the hand of a villain or surveying the carnage of a gun battle. And in the weekly introductory credits, Annie was shown overtaking a runaway stagecoach, stealthily climbing in a window, and doing trick riding, including one breathtaking sequence in which she stands on the saddle of her horse while the horse is moving at a full gallop and shoots the center out of a target held by a cowboy—the ace of spades from a deck of cards. Although the character of Annie Oakley had been popularized in 1946 by Ethel Merman in the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, she remained innovative as a network heroine because she was so different from other representations of femininity on television in the 1950s. Prime-time shows such as I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, Mama, and Private Secretary generated images of women as homemakers, mothers-in-law, teachers, and secretaries. In sharp contrast, Annie Oakley, an altered vision of the original historical person, was portrayed as a hero—not a sitcom mother but the star of her own action-adventure series. By the standards of the time, the vision of femininity this series presented was radical, the show itself an anomalous variation on the ubiquitous children's adventures and Westerns that television aired over that decade. Annie Oakley was both entertainment and profit-generating medium at a historical moment when program formats and scheduling were changing quickly as networks, programmers, and advertisers sought ways to secure viewership and stabilize the industry. How did the institutional practices of television programming in the 1950s produce a show that challenged some of the dominant myths about gender roles? How and why did the text and genre work to construct Annie as an essentially genderless being whose femininity was so uncertain that her clashing gendered attributes, a pair of pigtails and a buckskin shirt, appeared to be performative iconic accoutrements stuck on like pie dough? This article will examine the show within the context of its genre and children's programming in general in order to illuminate some of the ways in which Annie Oakley destabilized conventional representations of femininity. According to media historian Joseph Turow, early television of the late 1940s to mid-1950s adopted the program formats that governed children's radio. These shows were live and segmented into fifteen-or thirty-minute episodes. Turow claims that by the 1930s, the radio shows broadcast for children changed from storybook or variety-show presentations to "thriller dramas," often adapted from popular sources such as newspaper comics, pulp magazines, movies, or juvenile novels (17). These serials used open formats with "cliff-hanger endings" that, like soap operas, were designed to encourage repeat listening. In 1948 the format began to change when ABC developed the episodic half-hour format called a "series," which presented a show with a complete plot but whose characters returned each week. Two afternoon radio series, Jack Armstrong and Sky King, were the first to finish out a story but to return the next week with the same cast of characters in a new adventure. This series format, as opposed to the cliffhanger serial, became the staple fictional format used by television, except for daytime soap operas. The television series of the 1950s also slotted these programs in the late afternoon and early dinner hours, the same hours devoted to children...

Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence

Reviewed by: Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence Garry Leonard Linda Ruth Williams. Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993. xi + 178 pp. No price given. The notion of bewildering speed, inscrutable hustle and a general spirit of chaos has long been linked to the concept of modernism. Typically, the omnipresent sense of velocity is presented as self-evidently uncomfortable and disorienting. As Virginia Woolf explains it “if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown though the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! . . . . Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . . .” The remark occurs in her essay “The Mark on the Wall,” even the title of which points to a basic modernist strategy for surviving this self-annihilating pace: a self-conscious, forcefully willed fascination with otherwise insignificant details of one’s surroundings—such as marks on the wall. Of course, this detail is as random as anything else, but it is static, it can be contemplated, it can be designated as an occasion for reflection. Its actual existence is ephemeral, but it becomes something around which one can wrap a thread of personal narrative. Joyce, to offer a counter-example, fully engages the issue of “speed,” but has his Odyssean hero think about a modern solution to this modern dilemma, one that involves engagement with it rather than aversion to it. Just before falling asleep, Leopold Bloom’s mind returns to an oft-rehearsed fantasy: “What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and [End Page 882] congruous with the velocity of modern life.” Although this is a descripton of a presumably low art form (an advertising poster), the goals that it sets out for itself are not easily distinguished from Ezra Pound’s Imagist credo to “make it new.” In the case of cinema, there was no need to “make it new,” it was new. The best of the current revisions of the concept of modernity and modernism are concerned with a project of defamiliarization that attempts to revisit what it was like to be surrounded by an increasingly mediated world, one where images—whether they be advertisements, photographs, movies, or imagist metaphors—flicker before the eye of the viewer, open up a window of self-experience, and then just as rapidly close down again. Joyce’s famed trope of the epiphany, for example, long ago mined for its religious significance, might also be understood as an aesthetic perception based on the “snapshot,” or a scene quickly extracted from everyday life because it is something viewed from a passing train. Joyce’s epiphany “frames” reality the way a cinematic shot “frames” what it represents. The Joycean epiphany is motion arrested by the mind, a mind briefly exposed and latently imprinted the way a clicking shutter briefly exposes film to light. Nothing is in fact arrested by an epiphany, rather the spectator selects a sample and, like Woolf’s mark on the wall, nominates it as a characteristic representation of the chaos from which it was “snapped.” The result, like Bloom’s fantasy poster, is something with “all extraneous accretions excluded.” Now, Linda Ruth Williams has come along and made a very convincing case that Lawrence, too, was compelled by intersections of technology and art, such as the cinema, to experiment with temporal and spatial orientation, constructions of desire, and the multiple perspectives individuals simultaneously experience through fantasy. One general effect of Williams’s approach to the modernist text is that innovative style is no longer a sort of shibboleth determining who is to enter the walled city of canonization. D. H. Lawrence, of course, has dwelled within those walls for some time, but always with the explanation as Williams recounts, that he found stylistic...