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VANISHING WOMEN: MAGIC, FILM, AND FEMINISM. By Karen Beckman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003; pp. xi + 239. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
In Vanishing Women, Karen Beckman constructs a fascinating visual and cinematic cultural history through an examination of the disappearing and reappearing female body. Despite the book's classification as cinema studies, Beckman's subject is not restricted to the female image as shuttled through a projector; rather, Beckman is interested in the female body as it occupies space both on stage and in the world. In fact, Beckman demonstrates that the female body becomes subject to disappearance-or, at least, a collective fantasy of disappearance-just as it threatens to take up political space, and that film aids in this disappearance by blurring the boundaries between real and illusive bodies. But Vanishing Women is no simple narrative of women's oppression, because Beckman defines vanishing as "always in process" (19). The vanishing woman is neither fully absent nor fully present, which offers her a mode of resistance, if only to her own commodified visibility. Moreover, the vanishing woman always threatens to return. Thus, she "produces desire and longing but also unrest" (5), much like the cinema itself.
The book's methodology is varied, but Beckman's wide-ranging approach produces insights that would not have come had she stayed confined to a single period or discipline. Beckman admits that a reader might well wonder "how a book that begins with Victorian stage magic and ends with Bette Davis finds itself considering Nazi editing practices" (9), but these peculiar juxtapositions make this book valuable not only to a cinema studies audience but...