Front cover image for Evil sisters : the threat of female sexuality and the cult of manhood

Evil sisters : the threat of female sexuality and the cult of manhood

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
Print Book, English, 1996
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996
History
x, 480 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780394569451, 0394569458
34412871
The lords of creation battle the vampires of time
Vital essence and blighting mildew : dimorphic gender evolution and the natural philosophy of lust
For the blood is the life : hysteria, Freud's jewel box, transcendent manhood, and the mark of the beast
A Congo song in the heart of darkness : the vampire-woman's African genesis
The physiology of vampirism : the root of all evil and the womb of production; seminal economics and spermatophagy
And fools they were : the biology of racism and the iron law of the jungle; love rituals of the socialist vampire
Real vampires : the sexual woman and her allies : Bolsheviks, Semites, and Eurasians; the yellow peril of the Aryan imagination
Domesticating the vampire : Hollywood and seminal economy
Rigging the great race against the beautiful and damned : cultural genetics of unclean women and emasculate men
Dualism enthroned : oak trees and destroyers; Hitler and the hammer of death; genocide as gynecide in the mythology of popular culture