Female Embodiment in the Marketing of Modernism
Jennifer SorensenTexas A&M—Corpus Christi
This article explores the hypervisibility of women’s gendered bodies circulating within modernist print culture. How are these bodies imaged and imagined? How are these bodies mystified and gendered? What kinds of violence do these constructions of feminine embodiment do to authorial bodies? I argue that the print circulation of several prominent modernist female editors and authors underscores the gendered marketing of modernism and the unsettling embodiment of these women within advertisements of their work. Many of these cases construct an uncanny doubleness in the authorial image: at once a heightened embodiment and an increased abstraction. I argue that the marketing of these women authors often leads to haunted and ghostly effects through this double edge that positions the female modernist as simultaneously mythical and manifest, concrete and spectral, material and abstract.
KEYWORDS: Modernism, Women, Images, Marketing, Advertising, Print Culture, Embodiment