| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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and make the suggestion that her 1950s open acceptance, celebration, and public promotion of her feminine sexuality, both onscreen and off, makes her not only a precursor of the more sexually liberated 1960s, but also, like the other actresses discussed here, a kind of prescient performance artist, even theorist, of feminine sexuality in particular, and cultural ideas about sexuality more generally.
The image of the sex goddess, among other things, is an image of taunting desire. Hyper-femininity possesses a power in itself: it is an active look. The sex goddess is both empowering and subversive. This book responds to a historical trend in feminist film theory that attempts to write hyper-feminine women as active agents out of the discourse. Beyond recouping her image as feminist, I will show how the kind of desire aroused by the sex goddess, a desire which remains endlessly suspended, works as a supreme example of the aesthetic apparatus of cinema itself.