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LECTURE 4What contexts (political, economic, cultural, scientific etc.) facilitated
the emergence of the Modern Girl as a signifier across national borders
between the 1920s and the 1930s?
In the USA, Germany and China, advertisements featuring the modern girls were
more frequent than in Africa and South Asia. Here, ads of the modern girl weren’t
that commonplace. The US had a leading role to create new markets abroad.
They were the biggest producer of magazines and print advertising
Modern girl image designers took advantage of the most advanced visual
technology available.
Over the decades, influenced by developments in photographic technology and
techniques such as the close-up shot in filmmaking, modern girl ads in all locales
demonstrated changes in the method of representing the female figure, shifting
from locating her in the middle of a landscape or room to showing only the
portrait of her head, highlighting her hair, eyebrow, eyes, cheeks, lips or teeth.
Occasionally, a facial feature was emphasized by depicting the modern girl’s
hand touching or caressing it.
Period between the 20’s and 30’s: between war period. Increasing global
interdependence and an ascendance of forms of political nationalism to
challenge such interdependence.
What were the typical ways in which the Modern Girl was represented?
The modern girl was portrayed with carefully made-up faces, bobbed hair,
exposed arms and backs and bodies clad in the latest fashion. The ads frequently
depicted girls as involved in efforts to alter their skin colour through use of make-
up, whitening, colouring and tanning products. The modern girl usually
possessed an elongated, wiry and svelte body. The modern girl’s body is also
depicted as excessively refined; individual female body parts are elegantly
polished, carefully scrubbed, sprayed, cleaned and covered so that lips, teeth,
mouth, hair, skin, armpits, legs and vagina are all stylishly produced. Moreover,
the beauty and the youthfulness of the modern girl are often linked to scientific
hygiene.
They were depicted as
- Filmstar: reflecting observations of female bodily practices performed on
screen, the modern girl acts to mimic the movies
- Outdoor/sports enthusiast: portraying strength, adventure, physicallness
and thereby representing an unwillingness to be restricted in the domestic
domain
- Romantic/intimate poses: self-aware of her allure and using that as an
advantage. It was also a representation of lesbianism, not interracial (to
not evoke images of interracial sex and thereby scaring others) and
transgression of sexual and racial boundaries and norms
- Not cooking, cleaning or caring for the family, but as self-possessed:
celebrated modern girl’s sexuality and the obligation to judge herself
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LECTURE 4
, against beauty/social standards. Commodities opened up the possibilities
for self-reflection and self-valuation. This represents femininity that is self-
consciously elected and crafted.
In some cases, they were all portrayed in the same way, for example the
pepsodent ads: a young white woman with bobbed hair flashing her bright teeth
evoking an Americanness: a wide smile, big white teeth and a body that is
noticeably athletic, sensual, relaxed and at leisure.
In other cases, the ads are portrayed differently in different countries for the
same products, for example Pond who appealed to the beauty among local elites,
while at times also stressing the global reach of its products.
The modern girl was used as an heuristic serving to find out and discover: as a
sign of visual representation and with commodities focused on the corporal body.
Discuss the Asianization of the Modern Girl in relation to Orientalism in
the particular historical context. What may "Asianization" have meant
for Americans and Europeans according to the authors?
In cosmetic ads that are focused on the body or face, the authors found that
asianization involved creation of caricatured, elongated and slanted eyes,
especially in modernist art deco. Those women are not clearly identifiable as
Caucasian, black or East-Asian though only her eyes are specifically asianized. In
Europe and the USA, where orientalism was a tradition and advertising cultures
were predisposed to be racist, so called slanted eyes probably denoted
asianness, especially during interwar years, when things oriental gained cachet
as part of the spread of a worldwide art deco aesthetic that incorporated both
Chinoiserie and Japonisme into stylized depictions of bodies ad faces. It
expressed an ambition to make the self more exotic, if only from a position of
relative privilege. Though Orientalism was seen as mysterious, feminine and
unchanging.
Identify two different ways (one European or Euro-American and one
Asian or African) in which the Modern Girl participated in national racial
formation. What are similarities and differences between the two cases?
Pay attention to the specific contexts.
The modern girl participated in racial formation in 2 ways: lightening and
darkening. Such appeals evoked notions of nature, science, race, social status,
refinement, Americanism and exoticism.
White skin: beauty ideal in the 1920’s: luxury. One’s goals were to achieve the
right white look, feeding and protect fair skin, white skin as a racial phenotype
(superiority in hierarchical structure or moral order). White women were
advertised to bleach their skin in order to maintain whiteness and thus to banish
the so called fearful tropicality. It was coupled to looking natural, even though
one had to evade nature in order to achieve such a skin tone. Light skin tones
signified as higher states and white racial superiority. Thus this notion of
whiteness was coupled to pre-colonial skin references, where darkness was seen
as something dirty. The products that can make one white were seen to give
women a cosmopolitan upper class look that makes one desirable and modern. A
healthy radiance of rosy colour accompanied this ideal.
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LECTURE 4
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