Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (review)

Maria Elena Buszek’s complex and thoughtful analysis of the history and impact of pin-up girl images, culture, and aesthetics coincides with a resurgence in popular interest in pin-up girls and burlesque culture. This interest is evident with the recent 2006 biopic about the life of Bettie Page and (perhaps unfortunately) continues on today with the omnipresent Pussycat Dolls (a musical group that began as a burlesque revival art but morphed into a girl band whose lip-synced, top forty pop tunes dominate radio station playlists). Fortunately, rather than simply lauding all such expressive performances as sex-positive paragons, Buszek offers a much more nuanced critique of the subversive potential and patriarchal subservience in pin-up imagery over time. She argues that since its origins, which she traces to nineteenth-century cartes de visites used by actresses and dancers to advertise shows, the pin-up “has presented women with models for expressing and finding pleasure in their sexual subjectivity” (p. 12). Such models, Buszek suggests, “not only image and provoke desire but also, by penetrating and influencing the cultures of fashion and consumption, succeed in the feminist aim of changing the rigid, patriarchal terms by which desire has historically been framed” (p. 12). She adds that because the pin-up is fundamentally associated with images of women, its very structure “makes it a more subtle and publicly visible statement of female sexuality than legally defined pornographic imagery” (p. 13).

In detailed chapters and through carefully selected images, Buszek traces the “theatrical origins” of the pin-up, following its evolution in image and setting from burlesque dancers and actresses, to Hollywood studio publicity stills, to pin-ups “in the wake of the women’s liberation movement” (p. 268). She successfully poses wide-ranging questions about the relationships between feminist movements, art history, popular culture, and the radical cooptation of pin-up images by contemporary artists (like Renee Cox, Peregrine Honig, Lisa Yuskavage, and Ann Magnuson, among others). Pin-up Grrrls even explores the tensions between “third-wave” pin-up artists and “secondwave” women artists and activists, whose critical reception of this later generation of artists has been well reported within the context of the “porn wars” of the late 1980s. Buszek asserts that for much of its history, the pin-up genre reflected idealized images of women and femininity, and the advent of postmodernism expanded the ways in which contemporary artists have appropriated and reimagined it. This proliferation of complex images is likened by Buszek to the increasingly plural feminist movements, and she finds useful parallels between the history of the pin-up and the history of feminisms, arguing that pin-up expressions are inextricably connected with, and respond to, these wider movements.

Buszek persuasively grounds the history of the pin-up within classical art and its interest in the single, nude female form (one who is not engaged in a sex act, but who somehow alludes to one), as well as the rise of print reproduction technology, which made poster and card duplication and mass circulation possible in the late nineteenth century. She acknowledges the complexity of seeking to establish a feminist analysis of pin-up culture, arguing that feminist critics rarely grant pin-up images a feminist interpretation because the genre operates by suggestion and the cultivation of “the kind of desire and dissatisfaction that leads to consumption” (p. 5). Ultimately, Buszek suggests that the pin-up “may have been created as a tantalizing but unreal object for the delectation of heterosexual men, [but] the pin-up would also find ways to reject this role to reflect and encourage the erotic self-awareness and selfexpression of real women” (p. 364).

On the whole, although it is directed at an audience familiar with cultural studies, feminist theory, and art and fashion history, Buszek’s work is a complex and specific extension of the contributions of performance and visual studies scholars like Valerie Steele, Laura Mulvey, and Peggy Phelan...