Mina loy feminist manifesto

By this time separated from her first husband, English photographer Stephen Haweis, Loy pursued many such schemes and inventions to support herself financially. I have shown as well that modernists invested in impersonality—rather than simply denying embodied identities—sought to establish what such a subjectivity meant for gender, sexuality, and race.

If her early prose indeed expressed her life-long aesthetic, what it signals is that Loy always intuited certain limits to a self-centered creativity, pertaining not only to gender politics but more broadly to embodied identity. It does, however, help explain why Loy would worry about the latter.

Mina loy feminist manifesto analysis

The generalized neutralization of bodies inherent in this ideological hybridization is neither incidental nor sufficient to Loy. She goes on to advance a more individuated disciplining of the body and so introduces another, divergent ideology into her mix. She rhetorically violates the body, hoping to control anatomy and thereby challenge the cultural and biological imperatives that constitute female gender identity.

Both facts diverge from the autonomous, self-disciplined model of identity and production advocated in the manifesto, suggesting instead a far less stable, more relational notion of personality and creativity. However, it seeks to recuperate the self not only from the natural aging process, but also from the modern condition—namely, the scientific, philosophical, and artistic recognition of the embodied and impersonal nature of subjectivity.

However, the commodified facial image of personality is quite distinct from the natural mimesis Loy hopes to recuperate. Indeed, its constructedness implies that personality is likewise constructed, relational, and unstable. Seeming to understand these implications, Loy offers a sleight-of-hand substitution. More importantly, it also mirrors a key oversight in his method.

While Myers presumes a stable dualistic subject in whom willful self-expression takes precedence over a distinct body, his focus on telepathic media from automatic writing to vocal possession depicts personality as fully dependent on a body to express it.

Mina loy, feminist manifesto pdf

She thus implicitly performs herself as an advertisement and admits that her method, like painting, creates constructed objects i. With this shift, Loy began to engage personality not as a threat to her primary political goals, but instead as a subject that would consume her art in its own right. Her acceptance of modern personality was, in retrospect, the first step in her development of a truly impersonal aesthetic, which she would first offer in an unpublished memoir of early youth, The Child and the Parent, composed just a few years later.