Modern spectacle and American feminism's disappointing daughters: Writing fantasy echoes in The Portrait of a Lady
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2014-01-01
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Joan Scott's 'fantasy echo' is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism's failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi's 'American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide' (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi's primary argument - that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress - unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and ignores the prominent role spectacle culture plays in the circumscription of contemporary feminism. Building upon Scott's attention to literature to interrupt fantasy echoes and their inert visions of how feminism should appear, the article interprets The Portrait of a Lady (1908) through the tools of Scott's historiography. I argue that Henry James's novel, focused on an American 'New Woman', is an early account of how young women are sold fantasies of feminist freedom through spectacle culture and troubles the assumption that older women only forge benevolent relationships with younger women out of generosity. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
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Lamm, K (2014). Modern spectacle and American feminism's disappointing daughters: Writing fantasy echoes in The Portrait of a Lady. Feminist Theory, 15(2). pp. 179–196. 10.1177/1464700114528771 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32469.
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Kimberly Kay Lamm
My scholarship brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory. I have a particular interest in the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, the various ways language figures into feminism, and aesthetic practices such as fashion that challenge the devaluation of femininity. I enjoy teaching interdisciplinary courses that work with literature, art, and film to illuminate the feminist imagination.
My first book, Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press, 2018) demonstrates the significance of visual and textual manifestations of language to feminist art practices of the late 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the work of three artists –Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly—and shows that their work expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture are perceived. I argue that language (as system, text, and speech) was crucial to bringing viewers into that collective project. At the heart of this book is the ‘other woman,’ a figure who encapsulates the utopian wish to reach other women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To reveal this address, I pair the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. By tracing the correspondences between these artists and writers, I argue we can better appreciate how together they created the imaginary conditions in which feminism could take hold as a collective practice and a shared idiom.
I recently published Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book devoted to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde feminist film from 1977. I read Riddles as an essay film and explore how it utilizes voice, sound, and writing to challenge Hollywood's dominant images of women and to portray maternal care as a legitimate form of work, rich in aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities.
In early 2026, my book Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image will come out with Punctum Books. Along with Anna Backman Rogers, I am editing Laura Mulvey: Feminist Legacies, which will be published in 2026 by BFI/Bloomsbury. I have published my research in Australian Feminist Studies, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, Feminist Theory, Oxford Art Journal, Public Art Dialogue, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
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