A FEMINIST MODERNIST STUDY

Dear The Curmudgeon's Agony Aunt

I'm confused, really confused.

My parish priest, Father Manly Withadresson told me, via a sermon (I don't actually talk to anyone in church except for the Virgin Mary) that feminism and modernism are not mutually exclusive.

How could I be a feminist and a modernist?

I don't like women and I mistrust anything modern.

Women are scary and getting scarier. They got the vote a while ago and now they want to kill babies and are anti motherhood! Where are the nice women like Mrs O'Connor who I used to watch through her window at Garden Road when I was young?

 - A. Sinner

Dear A. 

You touch on the fact of women's spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women's bodies, as you did when you were a young perve hiding in the bushes outside Mrs O'Connor's house, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women's illegibility. Women's visual prominence made apparent their 'unknowability', recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women's opacity in the fashion and beauty press, it is arguable that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women's place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. This suggests that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity.

I trust that this is helpful,

The Curmudgeon's Agony Aunt