Screen-Struck Girls and Hollywood Starlets: Modern Bodies, Beauty and Sexuality in Popular Culture in the 1910s and 1920s

My paper will trace the intersections between commodities and bodies central to the cultural production of the Modern Girl in the late 1910s and 1920s as cinema, beauty culture, and new meanings of sexuality developed in tandem. I am interested in tracing the intersections between commodities and bodies central to women’s self-production through the lens of cinema and related media, notably fan magazines and advertisements. I will explain how these visual technologies together with mass consumerism ushered in a multitude of new ways for young women to appear in public. I argue that the idea of the Modern Girl sponsored by the film industry was an amalgamation of cultural nostalgia and technological progress, upheld tradition and youthful rebellion. By exploring modern womanhood as a series of contradictions I can uncover the extent to which debates about modern women upheld and destabilized gender norms. I posit that the movie star and her same-sex admirer the screen-struck girl, the beauty contestant, and the imagined female consumer exposed contradictions about modern womanhood while revealing also how cultural differences surrounding modernity were consistently expressed in feminine bodies. I will develop this argument using five beauty contests sponsored by two fan magazines, Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine in the 1910s and early 1920s, advice columns for women in the two magazines, and the 1926 silent film The American Venus which combines the manufacture of cold cream, a beauty contest, and romance.