Pin-Up Grrrls | Maria Elena Buszek

Subverting stereotypical images of women, often revelling in their own sex appeal, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated and used by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up since its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre's 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published. Beginning with the pin-up's origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire magazine during World War II, the Playboy pin-up, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.