Pin-Up Grrrls

In Pin-Up Grrrls, Maria Elena Buszek offers a “feminist history of the pin-up,” drawing on a range of cultural, feminist, and literary theory even as she trains her art historian's eyes on popular media (p. 1). In doing so, she joins a recent wave of scholars—Susan Glenn, Nan Enstad, Kathy Peiss, and June Sochen—all of whom have reinterpreted popular culture as a site of women's agency. Beginning with depictions of women in nineteenth-century carte de visite (a photographic medium used by legitimate theater and burlesque performers alike) and working her way through Life's Gibson Girl, Esquire's Varga girls, Playboy's centerfolds, Judy Chicago's art, and Annie Sprinkle's self-portraits, Buszek argues that women have shaped the pin-up genre. Where scholars have assumed a male audience, Buszek espies female consumers, and where feminists have found exploitation and objectification, Buszek discovers agency and subjectivity. Buszek is at her best when describing and interpreting visual material, tracing for us the evolution of iconic images of women. Indeed, her carefully chosen words paint images so vivid the reader can almost see them. She is less successful at delivering a “feminist history of the pin-up” in part because she defines pin-up so broadly that few depictions of women escape the designation. Even the personal photographs that Heterodoxy members pasted into an album as a gift for their founder in 1920 are so classified (p. 377n53). More troubling still, Buszek has great difficulty locating the empowered female consumers of pin-ups— the very people on whom her argument relies. For the early twentieth century, she provides two questionable pieces of evidence. First, she cites Josephine Gibson Knowlton, sister of and model for the creator of the Gibson Girl, who described this popular turn-of-the-century female icon as “suggestive of emancipation” (p. 99). But Buszek neglects to mention that Knowlton arrived at this description, not at the turn of the century when the Gibson Girl was fashionable, but in the late 1960s, after decades of women's rights activism had shaped her perspective. In yet another troubling use of sources, Buszek points to Margaret Sanger, the noted birth-control activist who, as a teenager, joined her friends in comparing herself to the actresses pictured in cigarette packs (p. 67). Buszek concludes that Sanger and her friends “secretly idolized” the actresses, but, in fact, Sanger tells us neither that nor how scrutinizing the actresses' figures and her own made her feel (p. 68). She does, however, explain her humiliation when, attempting to pursue an acting career, she was required to report the measurements of her ankle, calf, knee, thigh, and leg. “I had expected to have to account for the quality of my voice, for my ability to sing, to play, for grace, agility, character, and morals,” Sanger wrote, still angry decades later. “I could not see what legs had to do with” it (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, 1938, pp. 37–38). Thus, while Knowlton, Sanger, and other women of their day were clearly familiar with the images that Buszek calls pin-ups, evidence that they felt empowered by those representations remains elusive

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Burlesque · Feminism · Human sexuality · Literature · Male gaze · Popular culture · Queer · Sociology · Subjectivity · Visual arts · Visual culture · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Philosophy

• Psychobilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease in Athens

  Open Access•Michael Tsangaris, Konstantina Agrafioti•IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies•2020

  Add to list