Abstract

Abstract:

On the cutting edge of culture with its American slang and iconic flapper image, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes pokes fun at the body—via sex—and the brain, linking the two in ways that both plays on ancient arguments and modernizes those arguments to amuse a contemporary audience. While Loos notes that her intention in writing Blondes was to mock the mind, especially to tease good friend H.L. Mencken, after reading Blondes Mencken proclaimed she had written a book that mocks sex. Loos' work, then, inadvertently conjoins the mind with sex, tapping into the archaic mind-body binary. Indeed, she taps into this tradition, but her mischief with the tradition intersects with her stated intentions resulting in modernizing and queering the convention between the women and the men in the novel, and especially, I suggest, queering the relation of the two main characters Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw.

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