| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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a history of blonde hair in Western culture, Joanna Pitman, a photography critic for the London Times, comments that:
Within American cinema, the cultural repetition alone is enough to make the blonde sex goddess an object worthy of study in a sense similar to the argument film theorist Richard Dyer makes when he studies whiteness. In his book White, Dyer states that representations of white people in visual culture have been left relatively unexamined as a category in terms of how such images function in the “cultural construction of white people” (xiii). Similarly, this book will explore the previously unexam-ined issue of how the blonde sex goddess, as she appears in American film, circulates in American culture, contributing to the cultural construction of “hyper” femininity; thus, this critical discussion will narrow its focus to such a typology.
Beyond the convergence and compilation of formal, cinematic, and bodily elements, the cultural coding surrounding such issues as sex and gender, political and institutional structures of the meaning(s) of sex, as well as cultural stereotypes, all come to bear on her image as a signifier of these ideas. Therefore, through her representation as an embodiment of the abstract, transhistorical, sliding signifier of sex, the category of sex goddess becomes additionally relevant from both filmic and cultural theoretical perspectives. Through her image, the problematic idea of sex thus becomes a category which finds a dominant mode of its expression in cinema, not only in its representations, but theoretically through psychological relationships of both imitative performance and spectatorship as well. Cinema thus becomes a place where the sex goddess’ designation as sex itself can further suggest her bodily signification as a whole