The pin-up girl is hyper-feminine and hyper-sexualized. I think that the pin-up girl can be used as a mascot for feminist art if it draws attention to the falsehood and artifice of and overtly sexual identity. I enjoyed Annie Sprinkle's "Anatomy of a Pin-Up Photo" and the way that she draws attention to the false nature of "beauty" in the pin-up model with phrases like, "Hair dyed to cover gray" and "Corset makes waist 4.5" smaller but I can't breathe."
It seems that much of second wave feminism was concerned with becoming more masculine in order to show equality, while third wave feminism is more concerned with retaining feminine identity and using it as a power source. The tension between the "mothers" and "daughters" of feminism that Buszek mentions seems to only be hurting their cause.
Third wave feminists are also embracing commercial or "kitsch" culture with the pin-up. The "sex sells" attitude of the media could be seen as detrimental to the feminist cause, yet third wave feminists are using the commercialization of the female body as a form of satire against stereotypical views of women in the media. However, I believe that there is a fine line between using commercialization as a tool and buying into the stereotyped views of women. This is also the fine line between portraying a woman as an object and portraying her as a subject.
For me, this subject/object paradox is heavily reliant on audience interpretation. I feel that the woman portrayed has no control over whether or not she is viewed as an object or a subject. Joanna Frueh's statement, "As long as I am an erotic subject, I am not averse to being an erotic object," solidifies my view on this paradox. She has accepted the notion that in portraying herself in a sexualized manner, she may be objectified. She explains more about her feelings toward erotica on her site Her work is an example of women assimilating to a visual language created by man, but expanding it to fit their own purposes. However, I believe the danger still exists of having the subject objectified. There is also the danger of playing into the commodity culture that objectifies women. This is where the older feminists mistrust of third wave tactics seems particularly credible. I think that if the work is done in a self-aware manner, it can still incorporate sexual imagery, but it is difficult to critique a social issue from within. This made me think of Erwin Olaf's fashion work pictured below.
He has done a fashion spread that is intended to sell products based on the "sex sells" phenomenon, yet at the same time he is poking fun at the fashion world buy over-exaggerating the sexualization of the imagery. Is this technique effective? It seems to be the same technique prosex feminists use to critique the sexualization of the female body.
One of the women mentioned in the excerpts reminisces about being fascinated by pin-ups as a younger girl. She compared her lesbian gaze on the pin-up woman as one of caring, while the man's gaze was objectifying and "dirty." This seems like a double standard that she would assume that the male gaze is objectifying while her own is not. As a lesbian woman, would she not see the woman as an object of sexual desire? Is her gaze not tied to notions of scopophilia? I feel that the lesbian woman's gaze and the straight man's gaze would both be looking at the woman as a sexual object. This made me think of Robert Mapplethorpe's work. He has admitted that much of his work has to do with his own fetishes and desires. I believe he sees his subjects as both objects and subjects. Just because he is a man photographing other men does not eliminate him from the hierarchal viewer/subject relationship, and in fact, he admits that this is part of his work.
The pluralistic nature of postmodernism also poses a problem for feminism and the incorporation of evergrowing individualistic views on feminism. How are all these overwhelming views incorporated into one cohesive movement? Can a cohesive movement even exist?
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