@article{BodiesThatShimmer:AnEmbodiedHistoryofVienna'sNewWomen:1447,
      recid = {1447},
      author = {Motyl, Katherina Maria},
      title = {Bodies That Shimmer: An Embodied History of Vienna's New  Women, 1893-1931},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-08},
      pages = {281},
      abstract = {Fin de siècle Vienna is often remembered as a place  saturated with sex, calling to mind the eroticism of Gustav  Klimt’s paintings, Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the sexual  unconscious, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s sexology.  According to contemporaries, Vienna was in the throes of a  “sexual crisis.” Historical scholarship has retained this  language of sexual crisis, examining the milieu from the  perspective of the male cultural and intellectual elite.  Yet, as social historians have observed, the majority of  Viennese residents were not familiar with Klimt’s  paintings, nor were they patients of Freud. Turning away  from the perspective of the male cultural and intellectual  elite, we might wonder if there was any correlation between  the constant talk about “sexual crisis” and everyday life.  "Bodies That Shimmer: An Embodied History of Vienna’s New  Women, 1893-1931" attempts to answer this question. Drawing  on methodologies from cultural and social history, as well  as feminist theory, it examines how ordinary Viennese  women, the objects of sexual knowledge, experienced this  sexually vibrant milieu.

"Bodies That Shimmer" argues that  the “sexual crisis” corresponded to real changes in gender  and sexuality, as embodied by the city’s new women: urban  working-class and bourgeois women who subverted gender  norms and sexual conventions by articulating a new kind of  femininity. Women articulated this new femininity not only  through their changing roles in society, family, and  politics, but also through their bodies. Whether they were  walking more expansively on city streets, emulating the  emotional expressiveness of the silent film actor, or  learning to inspect their bodies as medical objects, new  women began using and experiencing their bodies in  radically new ways. At its core, then, "Bodies That  Shimmer" reveals that femininity is neither a stable nor a  unified category, but one that changes over time.  

Ultimately, this dissertation argues that new Viennese  womanhood was not necessarily emancipatory, but rather,  complex and contradictory. Despite casting aside their  corsets and cutting off their hair—acts that have come to  be viewed as incontrovertibly liberating—Vienna’s new women  were engaging in a new script of femininity. That is to  say, the very performance of new womanhood was just that: a  performance that could be learned and reproduced.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1447},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1447},
}