| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004. Pp. xviii, 334. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

In this book, Liz Conor seeks to understand how the technological advances that transformed Western industrial societies into visual cultures affected women's lives in the 1920s. Conor's theoretical approach extends Judith Butler's formulation of the relationship between the feminine subject and "scenes" of signification encompassing all forms of language and meaning. She takes Butler's notion that feminine subjectivity "appears" through the performance of repetitive acts carried out within a significatory scene and argues that since the visual is a particularly privileged part of the modern significatory scene, the visual itself becomes privileged in constituting gendered identity. The modern, "appearing" woman is critically constituted by spectacle, and intervenes in the modern scene primarily in visual, or spectacular, ways.

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