Electrolysis and Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body in Classic Hollywood

Kerry McElroy

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Electrolysis and Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body in Classic Hollywood

In: Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

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Kerry McElroy

Kerry McElroy
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 111–120

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848881105_013

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In the first several decades of the twentieth century, the processes of new and novel ways of controlling the female body began to solidify with cinema, just as they had with the emergence of each new medium that came before. With the big business of selling new mass entertainment that happened to be visual, combined with the ultimate strategic success in the commodification of female beauty to sell films and products, women's looks and physical standards were scrutinized, policed, and controlled as never before. Beauty standards became far more rigid, new technologies allowed a painful pursuit of perfection, and a complicated dance of ‘self-improvement’ for career success versus outright coercion went into full swing. This chapter meets at the nexus of social control of the female body and policing of beauty from a perspective of feminist theory and a materialist narrative of cultural, film, and women's history. The goal is to explore the actress body in early classical Hollywood. Upon arriving in Hollywood, there were a rigid set of tasks to literally, turn the woman into someone new and then firmly keep her there. Once she was a star, the importance was to maintain the illusion of the goddess at all costs. Numerous autobiographical narratives and histories of the film business contain the common story of the young woman newly arrived in Hollywood and ‘acquired’ by a studio, which would immediately set about drastic and oft-times painful changes to her appearance. Early forms of plastic surgery and electrolysis could be painful or unsuccessful; names were changed and strict diets enforced. Racial and ethnic features, accents, or idiosyncrasies were amongst the first elements of identity to go. The actress was reborn and thus transformed into a new product who could sell anything from stockings to whiteness to proper American womanhood.

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Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848881105

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2012

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- Philosophy
  - General
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Electrolysis and Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body in Classic Hollywood

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Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

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