Since the beginning of her career in the early teens of the twentieth century, the British born poet Mina Loy was concerned with rethinking, redefining, and often rejecting, traditional ideas about gender identity. The poet's concern developed out of her personal and aesthetic dialogue with contemporary artistic and cultural phenomena, such as Italian Futurism, Gertrude Stein's experimental prose, Pound's modernism and Surrealist poetics, with which she came into contact during the years spent in Paris (1900-1907), in Florence (1907-1916), and after she moved to New York in 1916. In Loy's early poetry the reflection on gender is inextricably linked with the exploration of the aesthetic and epistemological possibilities of language as well as with the creation of new poetic forms, which were to influence and inspire numerous American early modernist poets. Loy's interest for questions of gender identity did not stem just from her involvement with first wave American feminism, as Linda A. Kinnahan suggests 1 , but was also the result of her observation and refusal of the restriction of gender roles both in the middle class conservative social environment in which she grew up, as well as in the bohemian and wealthy expatriate circles that she frequented across Europe. Moreover, it was related to her contact with the Futurists and the debate internal to the movement on the role of women in the group and in society. Marriage, sexual freedom, sexuality, gender identity, prostitution and procreation were some of the themes that the swashbuckling Futurist manifestoes and works openly confronted as part of their project of
This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the glamorization of the courtesan image as proposed by Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge. The film sparked the appearance of high-street fashion inspired by the image of the 19th-century Parisian courtesan, which prompted the authors to examine how and why such images might appeal to female consumers. The critical analysis reaches beyond the images themselves to identify and discuss the modes of circulation of such images, and their function in achieving both the material ends of capitalism (ever-increasing consumption and production) and the promotion of one of the system’s core values (patriarchy). Moreover, the article hopes to illustrate the possibilities offered by integrating cultural and structural analyses of current social phenomena
In Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism, Laura Scuriatti argues that Loy’s corpus of works produces a kind of “critical” modernism, making the case that Loy’s corpus exhibits a skeptical, detached attitude toward its own simultaneous celebration and criticism of modernist aesthetic paradigms. Most modernist works are self-reflexive in this regard, but Loy’s corpus creates for itself a space of dis-affiliation, which combines critique with self-critique, rather than forging a space of rebellion and antagonism. Scuriatti investigates the notions of the masterpiece and the sacred art object, especially in their relation to the market; the figure of the author and the value of authorship; the embattled relationship between art and politics; the artwork's relationship to national language, identity and rootlessness. Scuriatti provides a new, in-depth investigation of specific aspects of the Florentine and Italian context in particular, which have so far been neglected by scholarship. Specifically, attention is devoted to the Florentine avant-garde journal Lacerba, and to the works of Giovanni Papini, Ada Negri and Enif Robert. The volume presents new insights into Loy’s feminism and argues that her texts respond to the rewriting of Otto Weininger’s then widely influential theories in the magazine Lacerba. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s, Luisa Muraro’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s claims, this study also rethinks the concept of eccentricity, conceived not as “aberrant”, but as consciously anti-normative, anti-idealistic and self-critical, in relation to modernist aesthetics. It shows that Loy’s texts present dialogic, “narratable,” “eccentric” selves and subjectivities, which create uncomfortable critical spaces within modernism as a broad movement.
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