Women’s Politics, Art, and Faith: National, Transnational, and Colonial Perspectives

This issue presents new scholarship on gendered meanings of women’s politics, art, and faith from the mid-nineteenth century to the years immediately following World War II. The contributors employ two different yet overlapping approaches. Four authors use feminist biographical methods to illustrate broader patterns of gendered experience through the lives of individual women. They investigate such disparate topics as surrealism in Prague and Paris, women’s antifascist transnational networks, Christian faith as inspiration for women’s rights struggles, and nationalist photography in the former German colonies. The other three articles featured here investigate carefully contextualized societal gender norms and assumptions through such varied themes as advertisements and consumer culture in late Imperial Russia, anti-collaboration mobilizations in nationalist China after World War II, and colonial charity in Hong Kong. The authors advance our understanding of women’s history through transnational inquiry, extending their analyses into colonial settings and comparative national histories. Their arguments encourage us to expand our definition of politics to include the politics of history writing itself. They also advance historical uses of visual culture and demonstrate the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue.

We begin with an examination of the relatively obscure but fascinating gender-defying Czech artist Toyen, a member of the avant-garde in interwar Prague and thereafter in Paris. Art historian Karla Huebner, author of “In Pursuit of Toyen: Feminist Biography in an Art-Historical Context,” follows Toyen as a detective might. She had to; the talented (some called her “great”) yet “mysterious” artist carefully hid her own biography and gender throughout her life, making her known, yet not-known, among art historians. Huebner’s painstaking work of recuperation involved research in memoirs, diaries, correspondence, artwork, and police records—a mixed-media strategy that bridges the two methodological approaches featured in this issue. “Toyen requires,” Huebner writes, “examination through her known biographical data and historical context.” Marie Čermínová became Toyen in the early 1920s when she joined the ranks of Prague surrealists and claimed a new, gender-free political identity by assuming a nomme de plume taken from the French word for citizen. With this step she became a “fully sexualized being where only a gendered one had stood before.” In other words, she could present herself as either sex and appeal to either sex, sometimes dressing as a man, sometimes as a woman, but usually referring to herself by masculine pronouns, rejecting feminine norms and expressing attraction to women. This liminal identity allowed her to enter boldly into the erotic, “not traditionally associated with female artists.” Her graphic representations of gender and sexuality ran from orgy scenes to vaginal depictions to visions of desire, bestiality, and fetishism. Sexuality, indeed, was central to Toyen’s understanding of human liberation and to her contributions to postwar French surrealists’ theorizing about sex and gender.

Visual images and the political uses of art are also at the center of Willeke Sandler’s article “Deutsche Heimat in Afrika: Colonial Revisionism and the Construction of Germanness through Photography,” which explores the times and travels of the colonialist and nationalist photographer Ilse Steinhoff. In 1937 Steinhoff published a “picture book” of her trip to the former German colonies of Southwest and East Africa. The German empire, though relatively neglected in the histories of colonialism, is instructive. The colonial imagination powerfully shaped German cultural identity prior to the country’s formal era of settlement and administration (1884–1919) and continued into the Weimar Republic and Nazi period even after loss of Germany’s overseas empire. Sandler describes these phases of colonial visual culture and shows the resonance of shared claims of “space, race, and community” for post-colonialists and National Socialists. Examining Steinhoff’s 160-page album in the context of a wider visual culture, Sandler reads the visual text as a fantasy about the past combined with ideals and aesthetics associated with the current Nazi regime. Thus the photographs highlight the raced and gendered world of the colonial settlers, the centrality of domesticity and thus of the woman to the construction of Germanness, the regenerative importance of colonial land...