Duke University Press Log

Buszek on Farrah as Last of the Iconic Pin-ups

CNN interviewed Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, in a piece on the legacy of Farrah Fawcett. Buszek places Fawcett at the end of a long line of twentieth-century pin-ups. "The Farrah Fawcett poster really is one of the last iconic pinup images of the 20th century," Buszek said. "By the 1970s, because of the sexual revolution and mores about sexuality becoming looser in the west, the pinup does start to become more nostalgic."

Two Books on Iran Praised

Everyone wants to learn more about Iran right now, and two Duke books have recently been singled out as excellent references. The Globe and Mail's Martin Levin compiles a list of books about Iran and praises Roxanne Varzi's Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran, "an anthropologist's look at the generation that has come of age since the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and which belies the view that Islamic values dominate Iran." And at the blog One-way Street, Richard Prouty discusses post-Revolution Iranian cinema in the context of the current crackdown. He cites Negar Mottahedeh's "terrific" book Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema which argues that Iranian clerics sought to promote "a cinema of the veil based upon a 'modest and averted gaze.'"

Agnès Varda and the French New Wave

Sunday's New York Times featured a story about Agnès Varda, "the only woman filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vauge at its highwater mark." Varda, now 81, continues to produce films, with her latest opening in New York this week. Geneviève Sellier, author of Masculine Feminine: French New Wave Cinema, believes it is a "noncoincidence" (p 37) that all the filmmakers of the New Wave were men. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. If the Times article has whet your appetite for more information about gender and French film, check out Sellier's fascinating book.

Farrah: Symbol of Sex in the 1970s

A guest post by Elana Levine, author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television.

I gave up.  I decided I would be Jaclyn Smith’s Kelly instead of fighting with my friend and my sister to be Farrah Fawcett-Majors’ Jill.  Besides, I could play with my two different Farrah dolls when they weren’t around and would refuse to swap my Jill trading cards next time they wanted to do an exchange.  Maybe I couldn’t be Farrah that day, chasing down the bad guys as we rode bikes around the driveway.  But she could be mine—I could be her—at other times, in other ways.  Such was the life of a girl like me in times like those.  In the mid-1970s there was no greater symbol of non-threatening feminine attractiveness and power.  Farrah was it.
The simultaneous appearance of Farrah’s famous swimsuit poster and the debut of ABC’s new series, Charlie’s Angels, in 1976 made Farrah a household name, an American icon, and an object of widespread admiration and desire.  She was the first, and the most recognizable, of American television’s homegrown brand of female sex symbol for the post-sexual revolution era.  She would only remain a full-time Angel for one season, but her fun-loving, sporty, beach-goddess aura set the template for a number of TV sex symbols throughout the decade.  

It was easy then, as now, for pretty young women to get attention when they appeared on TV, the main stage of American popular culture.  But Farrah’s fame was assisted by a confluence of forces, making her symbolic weight all the greater.  By the mid-1970s, the women’s liberation movement had made clear that women and girls could do anything their male counterparts could do, not least of which were holding starring roles in action-oriented television series, wielding guns, and capturing villains.  Yet the forces of backlash were plenty vocal, as well, insisting that “women’s lib” was seeking to erase the fundamental, natural differences between the sexes to the great peril of society. Amidst such a climate, Farrah happily posed for a pin-up poster.  She reportedly had included in her Angels contract a provision that she be home in time each evening to make dinner for her “bionic man” husband, Lee Majors.  And she declared in the press, “One of the things women are blessed with is their femininity and their intuition.  Maybe we use it a little on the show, but I don’t think it’s wrong.” These dimensions of her star persona made her the ideal mediating figure for a time of confusion, change, and anxiety over gender and sex. Her Angels character could go undercover as a centerfold and fit the part beautifully, but would be most concerned with busting the crooked male owners exploiting the hard-working girls.  And Farrah herself could work full-time and engage in hard-line contract negotiations all the while playing the part of the traditional everywoman who, after a day on set, would come home and  “do women’s work . . . take off my nail polish, figure out a menu for tomorrow, maybe clean a room.” 

Farrah made comfortable and reassuring the landmark changes in women’s roles during the 1970s.  Girls like me could adore her for the promise she seemed to hold—the grown-up girl capable of daring adventure yet wildly desirable to boys, so pretty but so down to earth.  She was the perfect symbol of sex—the sex “roles” we might fill and the sex appeal we might covet—in a time of vast sexual change.

ICAS Book Prize Shortlist Announced

Duke Press is pleased to learn that two Duke authors are on the ICAS Book Prize (IBP) 2009 Social Sciences shortlist. Xudong Zhang's Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century and Sanjay Seth's Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India are two of the four books nominated for the ICAS Book Prize in Social Science. The IBP is presented by the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) to honor the best of Asian Studies. The prize will be awarded in August during the next ICAS, which will be in Korea this year.

Inside Higher Ed Praises Duke Press Presence on Twitter

Are you following us on Twitter @DUKEPress? Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed thinks you should be. "The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary," he writes. He cites in particular, the diversity of our tweets: "Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran." Come on over to Twitter and check us out!

Charters on WPR's "Here on Earth"

Samuel Charters was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders" program on May 28, 2009. Listen to the interview here. Samuel Charters, one of the very first musicologists to study Afro-American music, has summed up his life's work in A Language of Song, which details his journey to Africa and to find Africa-influenced music in the United States, Brazil, and the Carribean.

Celebrating John Hope Franklin

A celebration honoring the lives of John Hope and Aurelia Whittington Franklin is taking place on Duke University's campus today. President Bill Clinton will be among the speakers honoring the Franklins. John Hope Franklin, a Duke University Press author and beneficiary of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, passed away on March 25, 2009.

Dana Polan in Inside Higher Ed

Dana Polan's The Sopranos was reviewed in today's Inside Higher Ed. Scott McLemee writes that, "Rather than going along with the familiar judgment that The Sopranos stood above and apart from the usual run of mass-cultural fare, Polan reads it as continuous with both the traditions of genre television and the hierarchy-scrambling protocols of the postmodern condition." Halfway through the review, McLemee addresses a previous review from the New York Times blog Paper Cuts. "Someone posting at the New York Times blog Paper Cuts a few months ago took the entirely predictable route of charging the book with 'taking all the fun out of our favorite unstable texts' by smearing jargon on slices of the show. But surely I cannot be the only reader who will respond with a kind of wistful nostalgia to Polan’s recurrent, urgent insistence that postmodern irony is organizing principle of The Sopranos." McLemee also writes that "Polan’s book is often insightful about the visual dimension of The Sopranos."

Birla in Times Higher Education Supplement

Ritu Birla's Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India was cited, in the June 4 "What are you reading?" section of the Times Higher Education Supplement, as a book that scholar-reviewers are reading right now. John Chalcraft writes that Birla's book is "important for putting together non-Western capitalism and postcolonial studies."