Carnival Culture and the Engendering of Florine Stettheimer

This dissertation is a feminist interpretation of Florine Stettheimer's self-representations in relation to various subject positions of the New Woman in the private and public spheres of modernity. "Introduction: Imaginary Acts, Performative Events" charts my perspectives on subjectivity and representation through the poststructuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Both chapters one and two set up Stettheimer's fabrications of the New Woman's feminized modernity in contrast to the prevailing masculinization of modernism. The first chapter, "The New Woman as Androgyne," frames Stettheimer's androgynous self-representations in relation to the gender politics of the New Woman. I also trace the pictorial and political influences of feminized visual culture on Stettheimer's self-images as an androgynous New Woman. My analysis takes up Stettheimer's resignifications of Jewish associations, which foreshadow an elaborate interpretation of Stettheimer's identity as a Jewess in the final chapter. The second chapter, "Camping a Feminized Modernity," closely reads Stettheimer's performative reiterations of the androgynous and decorative cult of the Ballets Russes in the 1910s and of the avant-garde and popular culture of the Jazz Age as an effort to inscribe her transgressive fantasy and desire as a New Woman against the grain of the phallocentric and heterosexual hegemony. I especially elucidate Stettheimer's polymorphous coding of the New Woman's erotic dramas through the poetics and politics of Camp. The third chapter, "Between Women: Signifiers of the Maternal Imaginary and Female Spectatorship," probes Stettheimer's constructions of women's subject positions in the private sphere. Through poststructuralist feminist theories it charts Stettheimer's utopian inscriptions of an alternative female-centered "herland" in her family portraits. My speculation focuses on Stettheimer's fashioning of a female spectatorial desire and identification in regard to her significations of the maternal imaginary. Chapters four and five explore Stettheimer's negotiations of women's subject positions in the public sphere. The fourth chapter, "In the Mirror of Mass Culture," lays out Stettheimer's ambivalent mapping of feminized mass culture as a vigorous impetus in the making of a feminized modernity. I particularly examine Stettheimer's portrayals of bourgeois women's liberating and manipulated participation in the consumption of mass culture. The fifth chapter, "Feminine Dandyism and the Flaneuse," continues arguing for Stettheimer's representation of women as prominent participants in the public realm of modernity through the invention of her personae as flaneuse and female dandy in the age of mass culture. I also attempt to distinguish Stettheimer's representation of the different female character types of the absorbed consumer and the alienated artist in the public domain. The last chapter, "Irony as a Jewish Woman of the Diaspora," analyzes Stettheimer's enactment of her diasporized identity as the wandering and masquerading Jewess through the theories of the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas and other writers. The dissertation's epilogue, "Posing Modernism's Other," concludes with a deliberation of Stettheimer's feminist deconstruction of masculined modernism and her invention of a feminized and proto-postmodernist modernity.