Content area
Full Text
Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. By Maria Elena Buszek. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 444, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations.)
Maria Elena Buszek's complex and thoughtful analysis of the history and impact of pin-up girl images, culture, and aesthetics coincides with a resurgence in popular interest in pin-up girls and burlesque culture. This interest is evident with the recent 2006 biopic about the life of Bettie Page and (perhaps unfortunately) continues on today with the omnipresent Pussycat Dolls (a musical group that began as a burlesque revival art but morphed into a girl band whose lip-synced, top forty pop tunes dominate radio station playlists). Fortunately, rather than simply lauding all such expressive performances as sex-positive paragons, Buszek offers a much more nuanced critique of the subversive potential and patriarchal subservience in pin-up imagery over time. She argues that since its origins, which she traces to nineteenth- century cartes de visites used by actresses and dancers to advertise shows, the pin-up "has presented women with models for expressing...