a paper ill be presenting at the Modern Language Association conference in philadelphia in december

[mabel]

One perspective I'm putting forth on pin-up girl sexuality in contemporary media... this is just an abstract (haven't actually written the paper/presentation yet) but any feedback/thoughts are always welcome!

Pinning Down the Pin-Up: The Revival of Vintage Sexuality in Film, Television and New Media

Recent scholarship on pin-up girls and burlesque shows has begun to argue that contemporary expressions of vintage sexualities have something significant to say about feminism today and about performing the constructed nature of gender. This paper will begin by exploring the ways in which contemporary pin-up models and burlesque troops appropriate vintage form and style and use these pre-women’s movement sexualities to comment on the meaning of feminism and femininity for a new generation. This will examine how young women today are critiquing the narrow, monolithic conceptions of feminism and femininity pushed upon them by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s by adapting the styles and fashions of the era that that feminist movement immediately worked to critique. While I will begin with more subcultural representations of pin-up models on the internet and live burlesque troops, I will ultimately turn toward mass media. In films like The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) and Bettie Page: Dark Angel (2004) and television like Mad Men (2007-present) and a burlesque narrative on Gossip Girl (2007-present), we can see similar turns toward the use of and significance of pre-women’s movement sexualities and styles in a contemporary context. Through this juxtaposition of subcultural and mass media, I will flesh out the relationship between the appropriation of the forms and styles of progressive sexualities from a pre-women’s movement era and the post-women’s movement era in which they operate. Finally I will examine what this relationship says about how multiple generations or waves of feminism and femininity operate in relation to and in context of one another.

[Miss Coco Lectric]

I do research on gender and human sexuality. I'd be happy to help. :) This is fascinating.