Liberated Women and Travesty Fetishes: Conflicting Representations of Gender in Parisian Fin-de-Siècle Music-Hall Ballet

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Sarah Gutsche-Miller

This article explores the multiple and often contradictory representations of women in Parisian music-hall ballets staged at the turn of the twentieth century as reflections of shifting conceptions of women's social roles in fin-de-siècle France. Music-hall ballets mirrored both the broadening of gender norms and the societal fears which accompanied these changing social mores; they helped reinforce shifting perceptions of women while simultaneously undermining them. Created at a rate of six or seven per year for fun-loving socialites, music-hall productions were as up-to-date as they were ephemeral, serving as an unusually direct theatrical barometer of middle- and upper-class Parisians’ tastes and values.

1996 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-359
Author(s):  
Peter Lawler

Author(s):  
Soledad Quereilhac

This chapter analyzes the uses and appropriations of scientific discourse in Argentine magazines from the fin de siècle: a period in which literary modernism coincided with the development of spiritualisms that aspired to the status of science (or “occult sciences”) like Spiritism and Theosophy. The aim is to examine concrete examples that relativize the sharp division between science, art, and spiritualism in the culture of this period. The main sources explored are La Quincena. Revista de letras (1893–1899), Philadelphia (1898–1902), La Verdad (1905–1911), and Constancia (1890–1905). In addition, the chapter focuses on how the astonishing growth of science in Argentina, as well as the social legitimation of scientific discourses, influenced other fields, giving shape to new literary expressions, beliefs, and utopian projections that synthesized the material and the spiritual.


Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective. Mapping the literary trope of the New Woman detective, and the part played by modern technologies in these narratives, the chapter considers the nature of forensic evidence and the gendered use of technologies in producing this knowledge. Reading M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), the chapter considers New Woman detective fiction as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle.


Author(s):  
Catherine E. Clark

In the first decades of the twentieth century, understandings of how photographs served the study of history again changed. These changes emerged from practices at Paris’s municipal historical institutions and within publishing houses. Attention to the pages of illustrated histories, or photohistories, reveals both the increased presence of photographs, often used as indexes of historical places, and a new mode of interpreting older photographs as a haunting slice of lost time and a way of accessing emotional links to the past. Photographs became particularly haunting in the years after World War I, when nostalgia for the much-photographed prewar fin-de-siècle, or Paris 1900, made Parisians seem stranded in the present.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hood

This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled ‘dodo’, ‘phoenix’, and ‘chameleon’. The ‘dodo’ interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British Public Administration as in serious decline from early promise and former greatness. The ‘phoenix’ interpretation is a more optimistic perception of the subject as advancing in scientific rigour and conceptual sophistication over the century, leaving behind the outmoded styles of the past. A third view, the ‘chameleon’ interpretation, is a picture of lateral transformation, with the adoption of new intellectual colouring and markings to fit a new era.


2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Minowa ◽  
Pauline Maclaran ◽  
Lorna Stevens

This article explores how marketing influences ideologies of femininity. Tracing the evolution of femme fatale images in Vogue magazine in 1890s America, we develop a typology around four archetypal forms of the femme fatale that prevailed during this period. In doing so we respond to calls for more critical historical analyses on femininity. While studies on masculinity ideologies proliferate, there is a paucity of research on dissonant representations of femininity in popular culture media. The femme fatale, often a self-determined seductress who causes anguish to the men who become involved with her, is an intriguing and enduring challenge to traditional notions of femininity. Thus, in studying the femme fatale in her historical context and revealing the multiplicity of feminine ideologies contained within this trope, we contribute to a deeper understanding of marketing’s role in both reflecting and reinforcing societal assumptions, attitudes and problematics around gender norms.


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