Editors: Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Over the past three decades, scholars of art history and visual culture have considered a range of iconic female forms which dominate the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Suffragettes, flappers, “Girls,” garçonnes, female sports stars and adventurers, and other Amazons are all embodiments of the dashing „New Woman“ who symbolized a break with tradition and the newfound independence of working and unmarried women. One of the first global icons, such New Women took on particular local significance in their many iterations. These figures heralded an expanded role for women through the rise of consumer and media cultures during first-wave feminism, wartime and the post-suffragette era. The New Woman was depicted in magazines and films as sexually liberated, politically astute, and socially fearless. Yet she was also critiqued as inherently superficial and a passing fashion, and some even saw her as presaging
the downfall of conventional society. More recently, a few scholars have begun to explore how female liberation found in New Womanhood could be linked to the oppression of Others through imperialism and colonialism and how the imagery of the flapper signified in non-western contexts.
For our edited volume we are seeking essays that treat the figure of the New Woman or Girl in photography, film, and mass culture. We are particularly interested in work that explores the ways in which the New Woman — as a type or in the case of real individuals — crossed national or temporal boundaries, or participated in discourses on internationalism, colonialism or transnational modernity through visual representation.
Please send expressions of interest to Elizabeth Otto (eotto[at]buffalo.edu).