| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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discourse on sex outside of her cinematic representation, thus loading her body to be read almost entirely in terms of sex and its corresponding contemporary social thought. In particular for this historical period of study (1930–1965), the cinematic discourse on sex, as expressed through the image of the sex goddess, is especially important to consider in relation to the pre- and post-enforcement of the Hays Production Code (1930–1968). The construct of the sex goddess during the period of classical Hollywood cinema warrants special attention because of what can be revealed in broad terms about cultural ideas of feminine sexuality, American cinema and visual culture.
Why, then, is the image of the sex goddess such a controversial fig-ure in American visual culture, yet one that continues to be so endlessly reproduced? In contemporary popular culture, her image is often revered and admired, and more often copiously imitated, especially by young, female celebrities. From the perspective of feminists, and in particular, feminist film theorists, however, the image of the sex goddess, similar to that of the femme fatale, is more often dismissed as merely a “figment of the male unconscious, the male imaginary, offering women little to identify with” (Kaplan, Women in Film Noir 6–7). This tendency within American culture to perceive the sex goddess in such polarized ways indicates her problematic positioning within American visual culture in general, as well as in feminist culture, as a figure that simultaneously inhabits binary oppositions of the ideal and the abject.
Critical Background and Discussion
In spite of a lingering feminist tendency to dismiss her image, the figure of the sex goddess has often been the image around which the feminist look has circled. The hyper or excessively feminine woman's connotative “to-be-looked-at-ness,” Laura Mulvey's coined term from her famous 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” has attracted the “feminist gaze” as often as Mulvey's ubiquitous “male gaze.” In the feminist film theorists’ concentrated look on the image of woman, especially as she is presented in classical Hollywood cinema, many early