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Designing women: modernist mass culture and the formation of the female body
- Source :
- Feminist Modernist Studies; January 2019, Vol. 2 Issue: 1 p44-61, 18p
- Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- ABSTRACTThis essay argues for charm as feminist heuristic through which we may re-examine contemporary theories of gendered embodiment. Charm as a form of bodily habitation for women in modernity seems to be another facet of cultural or sociopolitical control over female subjects. However, this is not the entire picture. I argue that charm denotes a superficiality or refusal of depth in female embodiment that interrupts, yet also acknowledges, the physiological marks inscribed upon socially written bodies by addressing theories of the body. I then locate these interruptions in the early experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein and in selected works of mass culture including magazines, beauty pamphlets, and self-help books. Ultimately, by looking to Stein and these cultural texts, I find that women's charm exhibited by their bodies is not what it seems. There is both a seem and a seam to women's bodies, a fissure or stitching that appears when we examine how bodies are formed. This occurs through a repetition that – in contrast to contemporary theories of gendered embodiment by Judith Butler, bodily biopower by Michel Foucault, or bodily mattering in feminist new materialism – presents the body as a styled set of desires.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 24692921 and 2469293X
- Volume :
- 2
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- Feminist Modernist Studies
- Publication Type :
- Periodical
- Accession number :
- ejs48543440
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2019.1575045