This project is part of the larger project "Multiplications"
The subproject plans to explore the gendered and sexualized imageries and narratives emanating from a tangle of different scenes and media. Against the backdrop of contemporary discourses around ‘girl cultures’ and the ‘mass ornament,’ it will focus specifically on the interactions between the popular stage, the cinema, and the magazine culture before the advent of sound in the late 1920s, and here on the chorus girl as an emblematic signifier of the cultural logic of doubling and multiplication.
The chorus girl is often metonymically conjoined with the phenomenon of mass culture at large. Like mass culture, the figure of the chorus girl promises immediate readability while actually lending itself to widely divergent purposes and serving a broad range of functions. Chorus girls epitomize both robotic doubling and glamorous uniqueness. The figure thus serves to both substantiate the ‘mass ornament’ idea of industrial streamlining, and popular fantasies of individual determination and exaltation.
The dialectics of standardization and singularity, which ultimately points to the emerging star system, is exemplarily captured in the phenomenon of the ‘sister act’ that manifests on all sites of popular entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. These acts owe much to the aesthetics of the circus or the 19th-century traveling show, and they are tinged with the ‘queerness’ that inhered in variety’s staging of gender. Since this exemplifies the multiplicatory logic and the trans-medial appeal of revue-style performances, the SP will pay special attention to this phenomenon particularly with regard to the ‘ornamental’ aesthetics of star sisters. It will then proceed to take into account that as the movie industry strived to distance itself from its roots in popular entertainment in the mid- to late teens, ornamental opulence tended to be embedded in the increasingly sophisticated diegesis of films; and the extravagant storytelling around lookalikes, doubles, stand-ins and twins was toned down. The revue aesthetic now entered films and periodicals on the level of the narrative, and chorus girl characters abounded in films that self-reflexively revolved around theater or movie productions. The fascination with female doubling and multiplication persists, and it unfolds on many different levels.
Narratives of the 1910s and 20s often negotiate cultural concerns around femininity and desire, ambition and responsibility by implementing parallel narrative tracks—laying out different trajectories and choices next to each other (and thus narrating different female life stories ‘at the same time’). They reflect the predilection of the mass-cultural imagination for choice and contingency, but do so in ways that deviate markedly from the standard patterns laid out in the contemporary narratives of male self-assertion. The SP intends to explore these deviations by tracing the dynamics of multiplication through the scenes of entertainment culture.