Abstract
Morna Laing, a specialist in and scholar of textile design in London and the author of the book, Picturing the Woman Child: Fashion, Feminism and Female Gaze, offers a nuanced and layered analysis of the childlike characterization of ideal femininity in a male-centered world. Eminent feminists in the first through fourth waves of the movement have issued multiple penetrating critiques of the portrayal of women as childlike. Nonetheless, recent trends in digital imagery continue that denigrating trend, despite many decades of feminist efforts to represent the intersectionality of female identities and their socially constructed natures.
The book consists of two parts, the first part of which acknowledges the fact that, despite gains that feminism has accomplished, women continue to be represented in the fashion media as childlike. Part one unravels the seeming contradiction between the visibility of female “empowerment” in media discourse and the concomitant proliferation of the fashion industry's portrayal of women as naive and inexperienced.
This first part of the book presents a framework of the relationship between fashion photography, gendered spectatorship, and the history of characterizing femininity as an inexperienced and guileless condition. This section of the book is divided into three thematic chapters. The first chapter details fashion photographers’ approaches to rendering visible versions of gender and are devoted to unpacking what we mean by the “genre” of fashion photography and the relationship it has to ideas about “truth.”
The second chapter in the first segment focuses upon the history of feminist critiques of the verbal depictions of femininity in patriarchal cultures and traces the work of feminist writers from the eighteenth century onwards who have exposed infantilizing ideals about femininity. To understand what is being said when one positions a woman as childlike, one has first to establish the meaning(s) of childhood itself.
The last piece in this first part, “Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology,” explores Laing's experimental method for studying fashion photography. This innovative approach combines reception studies with visual analysis. The basic aim behind this strategy is the principle of polysemy, the embrace of multiple meanings of a concept. Polysemy also presumes the ideas of an active audience, the female gaze, and practices of looking critically at both context and text.
The second part of the book comprises different instantiations of the woman-child as she appears in fashion photography from 1990 to 2015. Each chapter within this section assigns different thematic tropes to the visual and verbal representations of childlike femininity. Chapter 5, for example, discusses the themes of the “Romantic Woman-Child” and “Lost from Home,” together with the themes of nostalgia, utopia, and melancholia. The concept of White beauty and powder-puff Whiteness is a “re-colonizing mechanism” which “re-instates racial hierarchies within the field of femininity by invoking, across the visual field, a norm of nostalgic whiteness” (p. xx). Gender melancholia here ties in with nostalgia for girlhood or, in psychoanalytic terms, nostalgia for the lost object of same-sex desire. Such melancholia can range from disorders such as obsessive dieting, anorexia, self-harm, and binge drinking to a negative attitude towards the self, which might involve “female self-beratement, low self-esteem and post-feminist discontent” (page xx). Feminist nostalgia looks back not only to what feminism has desired at different points in the past, but to what it desires differently now.
Chapter 6 reports on what Laing deems the key themes of the fashion world: “Femme-Enfant-Fatale,” Surrealism, Curiosity, and Alice in Wonderland. Each concept investigates a different version of “woman-child” that appears in fashion photography. The author investigates Surrealist strategies of subversion, as well as themes associated with the femme-enfant, such as the character of Alice with her aspects of stereotypes, curiosity, and violent subordination.
Chapter 7 interrogates imagery of the iconic Lolita in the discourses of fashion photography. Repetitive references to Lolita in the fashion media, therefore, involve a suppression of the fully developed, womanly body and somehow depict women's growth and development as perpetually stunted.
The last chapter in this second segment of the book is entitled, “Kinderwhore: From Catwalk to Slutwalk.” It conveys a parodic version of childlike femininity that appeared in the 1990s. Kinderwhore was a practice of dressing women that fused signifiers of childhood—dolls, dummies, and gingham—with signifiers of overt female sexuality, such as tight-fitting clothing and red lipstick. The chapter highlights Whiteness, slutwalk, and the politics of exclusion where the “post-feminist” masquerade is underpinned by the politics of race as well as the politics of gender. Lastly, the concluding chapter in the book reinforces the author's thesis that the notion of woman-child suffuses fashion magazines despite some feminist measures of empowerment.
The book illuminates childlike femininities that challenge the concept of women's empowerment. The author expresses hope that feminisms can make a difference with the application of a major change in fashion, of a female gaze, of curiosity in the post-pandemic world, and of critical questioning of why such infantilizing images of women still hold relevance in contemporary times.
Morna Laing's method involves the close inspection of numerous magazines and draws various parameters around her research on the portrayal of a modern woman. She argues that gender is not some immutable essence, but instead is socially constructed through discourse. Fashion photography constitutes the dominant currency of images of women; it follows that unpacking and reorienting those discourses will be key to progressive social change. The book inspires women's empowerment as it details all the topics that are covered with elaborate research on the reasons behind men's insistence on claiming and picturing women's inferiority. The child-like socialization of girls pre-determines the identity of women and, therefore, makes evident the need to transform how girls are raised and pictured.
