Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919-1945

by Alice Gambrell

How do gender and race become objects of intellectual inquiry and evaluation? In this book Alice Gambrell examines the careers of a group of women intellectuals -- Leonora Carrington, Ella Deloria, H.D., Zora Heal Hurston, and Frida Kahlo -- whose scholarly rediscovery coincided with the rise of feminist and minority discourse studies in the academy. Gambrell offers new ways of thinking about the relationships between cultural studies, feminism, and minority discourse within the ongoing reassessment of Modernism.

254 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 1997

About the author

Alice Gambrell teaches, writes, and makes experimental projects about relationships between physical and digital media, and is particularly interested in mixtures of or points of contact between the two. Her book in progress (Making Work) looks at below-the-line labor as visible and invisible presence in a range of artforms that mark the analog/digital shift.

Alice Gambrell's research interests include modernism, gender studies, minority discourse analysis,and relationships between analog and digital media. Her published research includes essays on stop motion animation, fashion journalism, the history of feminist theory, and the pleasures and torments of office work.

(from https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-a...)

Reviews

[Alasdair Pettinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating study of the work of five women writers and artists who were closely associated with surrealism (Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington), anthropology (Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria) and psychoanalysis (H.D.) between the two World Wars. What interests Gambrell is the fact that they all actively engaged with cultural formations in which they would otherwise figure only as the exotic ‘untutored other’ (such as the prostitute, the ‘native’, the hysteric).

Emphasizing their hyphenated status as ‘insider-outsiders’, Gambrell aims to avoid the usual moralistic assessment in terms of collaboration or resistance, which - either way -allocates them a fixed position in relation to a single institution. In fact these women constantly changed their position and were multiply affiliated, an argument she pursues in several directions. Firstly, she draws attention to the practice of self-revision common to all five. And secondly, she identifies ways in which they engage with traditions other than surrealism, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Such intertextual complications are not only the occasion for a subtle critical response to the schools which claimed them but they also uncannily parallel the disciplinary uncertainties of their founding fathers (Breton, Boas, and - particularly - Freud).

Perhaps the least satisfactory section of the book is the one where Gambrell tries to show how the women engaged with each other. She offers only one substantial example - Deloria’s re-writing of Hurston - and she admits it is difficult to establish direct links between them. After all, women intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s did not belong to a ‘network’ as perhaps they do today. But they did not exactly stand alone either. And thus offer an interesting historical perspective on what turn out to be not-so-recent preoccupations with inter-disciplinarity and ‘othering’.

Review first published in New Formations 34 (Summer 1998).