Recent PhD grad Kara Watts has published an article, “Designing women: modernist mass culture and the formation of the female body,” in the March 2019 issue of the peer reviewed journal Feminist Modernist Studies. 

According to the abstract, “This essay argues for charm as feminist heuristic through which we may re-examine contemporary theories of gendered embodiment. Charm as a form of bodily habitation for women in modernity seems to be another facet of cultural or sociopolitical control over female subjects. . . . I argue that charm denotes a superficiality or refusal of depth in female embodiment that interrupts, yet also acknowledges, the physiological marks inscribed upon socially written bodies by addressing theories of the body. I then locate these interruptions in the early experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein and in selected works of mass culture including magazines, beauty pamphlets, and self-help books.”

Read more about the article here.