"Gendering the Iconography: competing images of revolutionary identity in the 1920s and 1930s"

Images of great revolutionaries populate tourist stalls around the world: Che Guevera on t-shirts, Mao profiles on buttons attached to military style caps.  These now quotidian images in the global marketplace continue to mark political revolution as male. Graphic images of female Chinese revolutionaries of the Cultural Revolution still circulate as posters and postcards, but with less wide consumer effect.  In short, we don’t wear them. 

Two revolutionary photographers represent the fluidity of gender in revolution through their art, activism, and subject matter. While many iconic photographs coded revolution as male, influential female activist photographers associated their art with both political and feminist representations, complicating the dominant imagery.

Tina Modotti worked both before and behind the camera in Mexico in the 1920s. Her photographs, reflecting labor conflicts and rural concerns, communicated Mexico to Paris and propelled her toward direct revolutionary participation in the Spanish Civil War. Hou Bo, an otherwise less internationally known Chinese revolutionary photographer, was active at the communist base of Yan'an in the 1930s and was later Mao’s personal photographer. Both were instrumental in linking art and political commitment, conveying photographic activism of everyday life across languages and cultures.  Their revolutionary lives, in combination with their artistic contributions, problematize the coding of revolution as male.

The scholarship of Harriet Evans, Steven Lee’s recent The Ethnic Avant-Garde, Christina Lodder’s art criticism, and Rosângela Rennó’s installations inform my argument that these revolutionary women and the revolutionary art they produced, redefine once definitive icons