I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser.
— from Naked, 2003
Most acclaimed
Idols of Perversity
1986
In the years around 1900, an unprecedented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential were first formulated during this period, as intellectuals of every stripe throughout Europe and America banded together to picture women as static beings whose sole function was sexual and reproductive. This text explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including such figures as Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Maurois, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer, not to mention a host of now-forgotten others.
American Expressionism
2003
Presenta un análisis del Movimiento Expresionista Americano que prosperó en los Estados Unidos principalmente durante los años 1920 y los años 1930, mirando las preocupaciones sociales expresadas en pinturas del período, y hablando del papel del gobierno en la primera ayuda, luego suprimiendo la forma de arte. Incluye más de doscientas ilustraciones.
Evil sisters
Bram Dijkstra's new book, ten years in work, is a stunning inquiry into the idea of woman as seductress: how, in many areas of twentieth-century high and popular culture, the female came to be portrayed as a regressive, primitive force whose sexuality could destroy the social order, undermining the supremacy of the white male - and shows the devastating historical effects of this portrayal. Dijkstra begins his analysis with the 1915 silent film A Fool There Was, in which Theda Bara first embodied our century's vision of the Vamp - kohl-eyed, predatory, seducing respectable men and destroying them with her voracious appetite. The part played by turn-of-the-century biologists, gynecologists, psychologists, geneticists, and sociologists in helping to develop distorted ideas of gender, sex, and race is examined. And Dijkstra shows how these distortions have been reflected in painting; in popular and literary fiction, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to the novels of Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner; and in cinema's femmes fatales, from Louise Brooks, Garbo, and Dietrich to the fatal women of the 1990s. Finally, the book makes shockingly clear how the parallel paths of the new style of misogyny and racism merged in the 1920s during the rise of nationalist politics - converging in Hitler's Mein Kampf and the politics of genocide.