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a selfie with two paper doll props. the bible belongs to Anita Bryant and the Oscar belongs to Mary Pickford.
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the hand of Anita Bryant’s doll caressing Mary Pickford’s signature smile.
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playing with the intersection of paper dolls and drag. i’m trying on one of Anita’s wigs, this one coming from one of her infamous Florida Orange Juice commercials.
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Anita’s americana look, referencing a photo taken from her beauty queen days.
Anita and Mary both represent the ideal white American woman from their respective time periods. Anita, a born again Christian whose fame started with Miss Oklahoma and sang to the troops with Bob Hope, became a symbol of the New (Religious) Right in the 1970s by crusading against LGBTQ+ rights. Mary was one of Hollywood’s first starlets of the silent movie era who pivoted to directing and producing with the threat of talkie technology. She remained a symbol of pure American white womanhood by starring as ingenues, strong-willed little girls (well into her 20s) and rustic women of the frontier. In her 1919 film, Heart O’ the Hills, Mary plays a Kentucky country girl fighting for her land against developers, in which she dresses in a Klan robe with her white brethren to terrorize the outsiders. Her association with D.W. Griffith & public praise for Birth of a Nation are incredibly alarming as she is still widely recognized as a pioneer of women’s roles in entertainment and the gendered history of filmmaking.
Through this exploration of paper dolls and the aesthetics of 1950s-70s American pop culture, I want to connect the political unrest and rise of the Religious Right to prominent white women figures throughout American history.