Perversely feminine, uniquely feminist: Mina Loy’s superficies

Mina Loy’s intellectual and artistic formations, especially the ambivalent influence of Victorian femininity, alongside her plastic arts training and interest in fashion design, situate her work at the vexed intersection of multiple modernist strands and phenomena. Loy’s reprisals of Victorian femininity, particularly in her earliest poems and in Songs to Johannes (1917), cultivate and ironize feminine softness as a transgressive modernist agenda not widely embraced by her contemporaries and difficult to integrate into modernist canons or narratives of nascent feminism. This essay explores two extra-literary sketches that bookend Loy’s career as a poet. The first, “Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays” (1916) satirizes Victorian femininity in its depiction of a seductively poised, corseted woman. The second, a template for a feminine suit of armor or “corselet” (1941), interrogates the chaotic female body and suggests that fashion mechanizes and modernizes it. Loy’s radical poetics and neologisms (the inspiration for Pound’s logopoeia) and continued explorations of sexuality and the material conditions of mother- and womanhood reflect the complementary feminisms conveyed in these sketches. They likewise epitomize Loy’s ironic investment in feminine artifice as futurist aesthetic, a quality that made (and makes) Loy an unassimilable figure of the avant-garde: perversely feminine, uniquely feminist.