Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Brion, Katherine
Area of Concentration
English and Art History
Abstract
Several “little” New York magazines and art journals that predominantly featured women as artists, writers, and editors from 1914 through 1925—including New York Dada, The Little Review, and Rogue—have become quintessential fixtures of the American modernist canon. Inspired by the same anarchic, nihilistic and ironic spirit as their European Dada predecessors, they functioned to introduce and disseminate New York Dada and a greater American avant-garde tradition. Against the destructive, mechanized landscape that emerged during and immediately after World War I, this thesis highlights the celebratory reclamation of female subjectivity and artistic agency by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Louise Norton, Mina Loy, and Clara Tice as they disrupt patriarchal, binary definitions of femininity and womanhood. These archetypal “New Women” of New York Dada utilize the experimental, subversive medium of little magazines to explore, criticize, and embrace fashion, nudity, and cyborg, hybrid subjectivity as potentially liberatory reconstructions of the subjugated female subject.
Recommended Citation
Proenza, Diana, "RECONSTRUCTED FEMININITY, SELF-CONSTRUCTED SUBJECTIVITY: LITTLE MAGAZINES, ANTI-FASHION, AND THE MECHANOMORPHIC FEMALE ENGINEERS OF NEW YORK DADA" (2020). Theses & ETDs. 5981.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5981