Feminist Relocations of Gender and Modernism: A Review Essay

Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, edited by Lisa Rado. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997, 386 pp., $115.00 hardcover.

Women Intellectuals, Modernism and Difference: Transatlantic Culture 1919-1945, by Alice Gambrell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 253 pp., $23.00 paper.

Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, by Susan Stanford Friedman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, 360 pp., $82.50 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study, by Tim Armstrong. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 265 pp., out of print.

Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, by Janet Lyon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999, 256 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, 1908-1934, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. London: Cambridge, 2001, 252 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper.

Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital, by Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston. New York: New York University Press, 2001, 304 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $19.00 paper.

In order to discover how discussions of gender and modernism are progressing, this review article surveys seven books published since 1997. Since the early 1990s, modernity has become a twin concept to modernism. Given that aspects of modernity like mass culture and consumerism were regularly dismissed as feminine in the modernist era, modernity lends itself well to gender analysis. Particularly as it enters a complex of various intersecting forms of identification (e.g., becoming queered or racialized), gender remains powerful. Through these texts one can see how modernism, within cultural studies, discovers its gender and its modernity (including technology and transnationalism). The women of modernism grow more diverse in these works, and equally varied, men are comprehended by gender.

Rado's Modernism, Gender, and Culture is hardly the most radical example of the new cultural studies of modernism. For one thing it does not emphasize the discourse of "modernity" noted above. More than any of the other books reviewed here, however, every article does take up the paired concerns of gender and modernism. Contributors look at the contexts in which a considerable array of low (popular, neglected by the canon) as well as high (formally experimental and selected for canonization) modernist works are produced. They inquire into the rules of gender as they pertained historically and they present actual texts in some detail, still serving the function of recuperating lost texts by women, and of interest to gender studies, a major goal for Rado's 1994 collection, Rereading Modernism. A cultural studies inquiry was already well under way in that valuable compilation. Several of its essays define cultural groupings, invoke cultural studies, or discuss mass commercial culture (e.g., Rita Felski's "Modernism and Modernity: Engendering Literary History," Deborah Jacobs's "Feminist Criticism/Cultural Studies/Modernist Texts: A Manifesto for the '90s," and Angela Hewet's "The 'Great Company of Real Women': Modernist Women Writers and Mass Commercial Culture"). Indeed, Rado carries over another of her goals of the first volume to the second: "I made a very impassioned case for the necessity of 'a more historical and interdisciplinary approach' to a period in which science, art, psychology, technology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy were simultaneously undergoing a period of revolutionary change" (8). Rado concedes certain gaps in the 1997 work—"writings involving the discourses of psychoanalysis, gay and lesbian cultures, [with some exceptions] minority cultures, technology, and politics" (12).

Though Rado tries to avoid grouping work by traditional academic discipline in Modernism, Gender, and Culture, I admit to really liking the group titled "Gender and Modernist Arts," which offers discussions of modern art and dance through various approaches that dismantle disciplinary assumptions. That modernist studies have become more visual in emphasis is certainly borne out in this section and in illustrations provided in the "Gendered Modernism from the Margins" section: Bonnie Kelm's presentation of Madge Tennet's representations of Hawaiian women and Henry Louis Gates's discussion of Allon Freelon...