Bunny's Bunnies: The Intimate Sphere of Bunny Yeager's Photographs

The Western history of the female nude is often analyzed through the lens of the male gaze as the sexualized construction of femininity produced by and for heterosexual men. Yet this approach ignores more complicated productions of women by—and as I argue—for other women. In this paper, I analyze one such complicated site: the iconic nudes, Playboy covers, and pin-up girls in the photography of Bunny Yeager (1929-2014), including her self-portraits and her “how-to” instructions for women to photograph themselves nude. I demonstrate that Yeager’s photographs can be read as “woman-coded text(s)” that produce an affective realm of play. In this space of play, there is room to register pleasure in both the constructions of (sexualized) femininity and in the female consumption of the images. Further, Yeager’s photographs can be analyzed as an extension of the sentimentalized “intimate spheres” that many women have been socialized to occupy, activities such as playing dress-up that involve the production of a gendered self. In approaching Yeager’s photographs as potential pleasurable sites for women, I relate Yeager’s approach to drag performance and the inherent agency in exposing constructions of gender through performance. Yet I also delineate the political limitations to this reading, the potential for the images to comfortably reside alongside or within the political without informing or challenging gender/sex norms. I maintain that there is affective labor in the making of the photographs, and a potential shared affective realm and homosocial aspect to their consumption.