newsletter fall 2001

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travel notes: bettine birge in china, betsie ann gross at the smithsonian, annalisa zox-weaver at the lee miller archives

bettine birge. in china. . .

I had a wonderful and very productive research trip to China in June, and I am very grateful to the Center for Feminist Research for helping with the costs. The two weeks turned out to be full of surprises.

I began my stay with attendance at an international conference on "Tang-Song Women in the Context of Historical Studies" at Peking University. The paper sessions were packed into two days, scheduled from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.. Then on the evening of the second day, we boarded an overnight train to Shanxi province for a four-day study tour. We had been warned that the trippp would be "strenuous," and that we should only go on it if we were in good health. We were booked in "hard sleeper" cars, which had open alcoves with lightly padded bunk beds three high on either side (and no air conditioning). At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, we got off the train and piled onto a bus for a two-hour ride to our first venue. The trip was well organized and very worthwhile. We were able to visit all sorts of ancient temples and archaeological sites not usually open to the public. These included, among many other things, the two surviving examples of Tang-dynasty temple architecture (one of which has beennn closed ever since the theft of one of its 7th century Buddhist statues), a working Buddhist nunnery, and the mansion where Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern was filmed. The trip also provided time for discussion with other scholars, experts in Chines women's and feminist studies from around the world.

The rest of my time was spent doing research and collecting materials for my project on how issues of gender and ethnicity played out in the legal arena during the Mongol occupation of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (the era of Chinggis khan and Khubilai khan). My colleagues at the university gave me an introduction to the director of the rare materials department of the China National Library to facilitate my research. The rare book reading room (and the whole library) had no air conditioning, only fans. The weather was very hot and humid in June, and the staff checked the temperature and humidity levels before they would agree to bring out certain texts. One of the staff members told me that this rule could be overridden for me, since I had an introduction from the director, but I didn't need to take advantage of this special privilege. The only document that I was denied access to was available on microfilm.

I also visited the Academy of Social Sciences and met members of the research group on Yuan law. I learned that the promising scholar I had met on my last visit had just returned from a required stint in the countryside, and thus had done little research since we last met. The researchers shared invaluable resources with me including computer disks they had made.

On one evening, I was invited to a peking duck dinner with several Chinese, most of whom had studied abroad. One of them was now an underground Christian minister, who described the upsurge of numerous underground religions in China, not just Falungong. He also described how Geomancy, or Fenshui has made a big comeback in Beijing because people are afraid of the ghosts of those killed in the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. Changes in building plans, he claimed, have included city and university buildings, as well as private residences.

All in all, the trip was very productive and exciting. My sincerest thanks go to CFR for making it possible.

betsie ann gross. stereotyping and its discontents. . .

In my dissertation, I am interested in deconstructing Black stereotypes, particulary how the racist constructs of "Aunt Jemima" and the "Mammy" circulate in American consumer culture. I endeavor to examine the Black stereotype broadly, focusing on the intersection between visual imagery and the capitalist economy. I gegin by investigating the commodification of racist Black collectibles.

This, subsequently, serves as an entree for me to broach works by contemporary artists who critique such racist constructions, the assemblages of Betye Saar, the paintings of Robert Colescott, and the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, Renee Cox, and Coreen Simpson foremost among them. I examine the replication of ideological manifestations vis-a-vis the circulation of Black racist stereotypes throught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, particularly the appropriation or replication of objects originally imbued with racist sentiment. The process of replicating and/or appropriating Black racist stereotypes, in some cases, entails the subversion or the attempted subversion of a racist ideology. However, political critiques of Black racist stereotypes are highly fraught endeavors, as exemplified by the photographic images of David Levinthal and the oeuvres of Kara Walter and Michael Ray Charles. Whether or not a stereotype can be recuperated by employing parody or irony as tools of political critique lies at the heart of that investigation, a question that cannot easily be answered.

The grant from the Center for Feminist Research partially paid for the airfare for two research trips to Washington, D.C. to consult archival sources. Washington is so rich in materials that I could spend a year researching there. My time was spent accessing newspaper sources at the Library of Congress and learning the ropes of that institution to facilitate future research.

[Gross, continued] What proved to be exceptionally fruitful was my access to the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana in the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute. The museum has what is perhaps the largest collection of American advertising images from the years 1880 to 1920. There I uncovered a wealth of unpublished materials. Prior to accessing this archive, my knowledge of Black stereotyping in American advertising centered largely around the figure "Aunt Jemima." Doing this archival work allowed me to understand how ubiquitous racist images, not only of Blacks, but of other racial groups as well, are the American advertising campaigns for practically every commodity prior to 1920. It will be a challenge to discuss this substantial body of images that heretofore have beennn forgotten. Thanks to USC's Center for Feminist Research for helping to partially subsidize my dissertation research on "Stereotyping and Its Discontents."

annalisa zox-weaver. when the war was in vogue...

It was only when I visited the Lee Miller Archives in East Sussex, England that I began fully to understand her contribution to the photographic history of Word War II. In the three days I spent at the archive, I focused on those images that demonstrate Miller's scrutiny of and fascination with fascism's agents and victims. The travel grant from the Center for Feminist Research allowed me to examine some of the 40,000 images and hundreds of pages of written correspondence housed at the archive, most of which are not available anywhere else. I was also able to meet with Antony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, to discuss my project and specific interest in the war correspondence his mother published in American and British Vogue magazine.

Like many scholars of her work, I first became aware of Miller through her role as model and muse to Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and other surrealist artists. Though brief, Miller's career as a Vogue model tends to eclipse her role as a prolific fashion photographer and surrealist artist in her own right. Because there are only two monographs on her photographic work and a handful of critical articles on her surrealist representations, Miller's contributions as a war correspondent still remain underexamined and largely overlooked for her earlier -- and decidedly more glamorous -- images. My objective in going to the archive was to expand upon "When the War Was in Vogue: Lee Miller's War Correspondence, 1944-1945," a piece I began in the fall of 2000 and will eventually develop into a chapter of my dissertation.

That Miller brought the war into the pages of Vogue is just as intriguing as the irony of her personal transformation from a Vogue model and staff photographer to Vogue's only war correspondent. Miller's unflinching documentation of the war's horrors includes her coverage of the last Nazi stronghold in St. Malo and her visits to Buchenwald and Dachau, each within twenty-four hours of its liberation. Like many photojournalists who visited recently liberated concentration camps, Miller characterizes the act of witnessing as at once queasy and poignant, traumatizing and necessary. At the same time, it is the chilling intimacyh of so many of her photographs that distinguishes them from the work of other photojournalists -- such as Margaret Bourke-White -- and lends her work its intense cathartic quality.

One piece of my project is concerned with Miller's use of the camera, and indeed the photographic medium, to record and stage the fascists' abrupt loss of power. Her photographic representations, such as those of bloodied and beaten S.S. officers begging for mercy, involve a curiously stagey element of visual orchestration. Such photographs may be seen as "documenting" repeat performances of desperation and loss that seek in the Vogue reader a commingled response of pleasure and repulsion. Certainly these pictures are thrown into relief by Miller's coverage of the fashion trends of a liberated Paris a few months before.

For Vogue readers, a nexus between the fashion magazine's passive consumption and the connotative encouragement to gaze punitively at bodily agony would have been a profound act of cognitive dissonance indeed. Her consistent questioning of documentary boundaries culminates when Miller billets with the 45th Division in Hitler's Munich apartment. During her stay, Miller bathes and poses bathing in Hitler's bathtub and visits Eva Braun's house, where she models and naps in Braun's bed.

Allowed access to Miller's copious written correspondence and other primary source material, I was able to gain a greater understanding of the often very personal motivations that drove Miller to seek out and intimately engage with such gruesome and horrific bodily suffering. Her movement across conventional thresholds of photographic inquisitiveness results in images that solicit -- and even embody -- the viewer, assigning new meaning to the documentation of bodily disaster.

In continuing my research into Miller's intimate encounters with fascist bodies, and her complex alliance of death and consumerism, elegance and evil, I will be able to draw upon the invaluable material gathered in my visit to the archive. The volume, diversity, and complexity of Miller's work and personal history forbid easy assessment. Certainly the creative abundance at the archive testifies to the inadequacy of Miller's circulation in art history as a muted beauty of surrealist discourse. In seeing the largely unpublished primary documents of her war correspondence -- volumes of yellowing, fragile onion skin paper, thousands of meticulously classified negatives -- I was able to gain greater insight into Miller's profound effort to witness and record horrors that persistently defy adequate representation.