The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes – Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004; Juliette Peers. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004 [Review article]

“Dolls raise so many issues about the representation and cultural positioning of the feminine in society,” writes Juliette Peers in the “Introduction” to her book The Fashion Doll (Peers: 8). Liz Conor might well have begun her text about feminine visibility by using the same statement, substituting for “dolls” the words “mass media images of women.” “Appearance” and “appearing,” in their multiple meanings, are also key words for both authors. Peers’s primary interest is fashionably dressed dolls’ appearance (looks) and appearance (emergence) in the market-place, while Conor elaborates on the emergence of the “new formation of subjectivity” she calls the Modern Appearing Woman in the technologically enhanced ocular field of the 1920s.