| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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and perhaps even more intriguingly, manipulates contemporary cultural ideas about the hyper-feminine and its ambivalent relationship to commodity fetishism.
Through her reference to classical Hollywood films’ capitalistic production, Turim makes another direct connection between the spectacle of the body of the sex goddess and its aesthetic medium, film: “the female body is not only a sex object, but also an object of exchange; its value can be sold (prostitution) or it can be incorporated into another commodity which then can be sold (the film)” (106). While clearly taking the position that, in her view, classical Hollywood film is itself both a medium and a commodity reproducing the sexual oppression and exploitation of women, what Turim further suggests is the notion of the womanly or excessively feminine woman as coded for sex itself. This view takes a decidedly negative stance on this coding and thereby iden-tifies the sex goddess as abject, effectively disallowing the excessively feminine or even sexually suggestive woman any agency or positive value. This negative value assigned to the image of the hyper-feminine woman, or any woman who in fact boldly displays her sexuality, is representative of feminist thought in general in the 1970s. Paradoxically, the sexualized image of woman was being attacked at the same time that sexual liberation for women was being touted. Turim, like several earlier feminist theorists, thus effectively reads the image of the sex goddess through Mulvey's notion of the male gaze, where a woman in visual representation becomes sexually objectified through a projection of male desires, and the male desire gets represented in capitalistic terms.
Early feminist readings of the sex goddess, therefore, place her rather squarely in an abject position, demonstrating how as victim she is manipulated by culture as well as by her mode of production, film, as she all the while embodies some of its worst aspects of sexual, economic, and at times even racist oppression, especially in the problematic Aryan connotations of her blondeness. By demonstrating how not only the actresses performing the sex goddess, but the characters they play, as well as their screen images, manipulate culture more than they are manipulated by it, and in fact, often drive capitalist modes of consumption rather than