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71 In August 1991, Vanity Fair hit newsstands with a cover of a naked, pregnant Demi Moore, shot by famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) had made Moore a bankable star, and at the time of the shoot she was pregnant with her second child. In the cover photograph, Moore refuses to meet the gaze of Leibovitz’s camera; she looks up and to the left as her left hand cradles her round stomach and her right hand covers her breast. Moore’s gaze is determined, nearly defiant, and her short hair and the conspicuous diamonds on her ears and finger compete for control of the image. In a second Leibovitz-shot Vanity Fair cover a year later, the gender dissonance becomes more explicit, featuring a naked Moore with a man’s pinstriped suit painted on her body. Despite these bracing visuals, the articles that accompany the covers seem eager to contain the transgressive iconography of Leibovitz’s photo spreads. “More Demi Moore,” the 1991 cover proclaims, but the accompanying article reveals how fraught Moore’s star image was quickly becoming in the early 1990s. The article quotes Denise DeClue, co-screenwriter of About Last Night, the 1986 film starring Moore: “Demi Moore has this accessible vulnerability that makes her attractive.” In the same piece, then-husband Bruce Willis adds, “She’s so open and honest and not afraid to be vulnerable.”1 The 1992 cover fronts an article titled “Demi’s Birthday Suit” that channels the early 1990s cultural uncertainty about what Demi Moore’s star image signified: Vixen or vulnerable wife? Hardheaded businesswoman or hard-bodied plaything? The article mentions Indecent Proposal, which Moore was in the process of filming: “Chatting eagerly about the movie—­ which, as ego trips go, has got to be the best thing since Pretty Woman—­ she seems to take for granted the extravagant compliment contained in the story line.”2 Indecent Proposal’s storyline involves Robert Redford’s character offering Moore’s character and her husband (Woody Harrelson) one million dollars for a night with her. Presumably, the only compliment author Jennet Conant considers better than Robert Redford buying you for a night is Richard Gere buying you for a week. But the discourse that has Moore taking the compliment for granted is indicative of her public image, solidifying in the early 1990s, as a woman who expects too much—­ too much power, too much money, too much control over her image and what it signifies. That the authors of both articles answer this implicit charge with descriptions of her The Body at War sexual politics and resistant vulnerability in saving private ryan and g.i. jane 3 72 reel vulnerability “vulnerability” or speculations about how she can be reimagined as a sex worker reveals the female star’s body as a site of much cultural tension. The photo spread inside the 1992 magazine features more shots of Moore in the painted suit, images that have become the subject of debate among theorists trying to parse 1990s attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Judith Halberstam, in the introduction to Female Masculinity, argues that “Moore’s body suit fails to suggest even a mild representation of female masculinity precisely because it so anxiously emphasizes the femaleness of Moore’s body.”3 Presumably Halberstam here refers to Moore’s prominent breasts and the almost languid line of her pose. But the composition of these images and Moore’s posture, particularly the photo with Willis inside the magazine, is more unsettling to early-1990s notions of the female movie star than Halberstam admits. Moore sits, legs spread-eagled, on the side on the bed, arms akimbo—­ one hand on her thigh, the other on Willis’s head as he sleeps, naked, the white sheet coming up to his waist. This gender reversal of the classic “male breadwinner leaving for work” shot is a sly commentary on the public obsession with the Moore-Willis marriage and the tension the media blamed on her career’s ascendance over his. The popular-press interest in this tension built steadily between the 1992 Vanity Fair cover and the 1997 release of G.I. Jane (and the 1998 publication of Female Masculinity). Moore and Willis announced their separation in 1998 and their divorce in 2000, but the public fascination with Moore’s body as spectacle did not end with their marriage. I want to suggest that Moore’s involvement in G.I. Jane is an attempt to publicly rehabilitate...

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