Vanishing Women

[Dave Monroe]

Beckman, Karen.  Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and
   Feminism.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators,
photographs, and film, women vanish and return in
increasingly spectacular ways throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman
tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the
vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage
magic through her development in conjunction with
photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new
visual technologies projected their anxieties about
insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female
body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly
unstable and constantly prone to disappearance.

Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well
as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and
photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of
female vanishing at specific historical moments—in
Victorian magic's obsessive manipulation of female and
colonized bodies, spiritualist photography's search to
capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of
bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis's multiple
roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the
vanishing woman in the context of feminism's
discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores
not only the problems, but also the political utility
of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between
visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings,
Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman
repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less
immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures,
and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so
ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century
culture, provides a new space through which to
consider the relationship between visibility, gender,
and agency.

http://tinyurl.com/oavvx

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