Fantastic Adventures

Mieke Bal's essay, "Reading the Gaze, The Construction of Gender in Rembrandt" offers an interesting analysis of images, gender, and art. I came upon some pulp journals from the 1940s with images of women that are provocative and performative. Most of the essays are silly and border upon the realm of being unbearable (for example, prose ridden with lines like "She was not Marsha Hunter, but a Goddess; the Goddess of Love. All-loving. All loving. Then Sarndoff squeezed the trigger and the last shot blasted the silence." The images, however, are powerhouse, mythological, and fantastical. Women, in the 1940s, occupied new roles that were empowering, and many of us are familiar with images like Rosie the Riveter with the phrase, "We Can Do It." The images of women on the covers of pulp journals may reflect both anxieties but also a sense of power: women holstering guns while straddling winged creatures, zapping laser guns, seductively smiling in the midst of conflict. These images may be worth investigating, in light of the cultural history of gender in the 1940s.