Review of Liz Conor: The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

Contrary to what the catchy title of her study may suggest, Liz Conor in The Spectacular Modern Woman argues for a reconsideration of women's increased public visibility in the 1920s which does not relegate women to the object position of the "spectacle," but probes into the ways in which visibility invests women with a "newly emerged subject position" (16) that is based on modern woman's new agency to "execut[e] [...] [her] visual effects and status" (2). Her term for this new formation of feminine subjectivity, produced by the "visual conditions of modernity" (2), is the "Modern Appearing Woman." To buttress and structure her argument, Conor extends Butler's notion of the "scene" of linguistic performativity to the modern visual scene and proposes "that in a cultural field that privileges the visual, the visual itself might become privileged in repetitive signifying acts that constitute gendered identity." (6) Hence, her study is divided into six chapters that focus each on women "appearing" in one modern visual "scene." As "[i]mages of women were increasingly homogenous" (30) due to the technologized and commodified visual field, she focuses on visual "types" within these scenes: "The City Girl in the Metropolitan Scene," "The Screen-Struck Girl in the Cinematic Scene," "The Mannequin in the Commodity Scene," "The Beauty Contestant in the Photographic Scene," "The 'Primitive' Woman in the Late Colonial Scene," and "The Flapper in the Heterosexual Leisure Scene." Through the term "appearing" she effectively describes a new, and ambivalent, practice of the female self and investigates whether and how this new female subject position may challenge the gendered subject/object and spectator/spectacle divide.