Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4071479 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maud Lavin (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Issue | 51 |
| Pages | 62 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New German Critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/488172 |
| OpenAlex | W2332657127 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
In 1930, the same year that Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel was released, Hannah Hach made the photomontage Marlene. With its challenging array of sexual signs and its deliberate allusion to Dietrich, an actress well known for her ambiguous sexual identity, the photomontage provokes a wealth of questions about gender identity and sexuality, strategies of representation, and the reading of imagery by a Weimar audience. In the montage, two men gaze upward at a pair of gigantic, stockinged, and high-heeled legs mounted upside-down on a pedestal. A bright red mouth is positioned in the upper right corner, facing the viewer. The mouth, not situated in the line of the male gaze, is instead offered directly as an object of desire to the male or female viewer of the montage. The name Marlene, with its connotations of androgyny, is handwritten across the sky in large letters, as if by a fan. Viewed in its historical context, H6ch's image takes its place amidst an enormous proliferation of images of androgyny during the Weimar years, produced by both avantgarde artists and mass-culture institutions. Today many critical or theoretical treatments of androgyny promote the androgynous ideal as a liberation from constricting gender roles, or describe it merely as a pre-Oedipal fantasy. But if we examine this strain of imagery in the historical context of Weimar culture, we see that representations of androgyny, and of ambiguous sexual identity, can function in two fundamentally opposed fashions.' For both the producer and the
Androgyny · Art · Masculinity · Psychoanalysis · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 2005 - 2025 (21) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |