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Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. By Maria Elena Buszek. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xii, 444 pp. Cloth, $89.95, ISBN 0-8223-3734-7- Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8223-3746-0.)
In Pin-Up Grrrls, Maria Elena Buszek offers a "feminist history of the pin-up," drawing on a range of cultural, feminist, and literary theory even as she trains her art historian's eyes on popular media (p. 1). In doing so, she joins a recent wave of scholars-Susan Glenn, Nan Enstad, Kathy Peiss, and June Sochen-all of whom have reinterpreted popular culture as a site of women's agency. Beginning with depictions of women in nineteenth-century carte de visite (a photographic medium used by legitimate theater and burlesque performers alike) and working her way through Life's Gibson Girl, Esquires Varga girls, Playboys centerfolds, Judy Chicago's art, and Annie Sprinkle's self-portraits, Buszek argues that women have shaped the pin-up genre. Where scholars have assumed a male audience, Buszek espies female consumers, and where feminists have found exploitation and...