Reading Feminism into George Lois’ Esquire Covers

Seminar paper; MARCH 2018

Abstract:  George Lois’ “Women (With a Vengeance)” and “My Reluctant Pinups” covers can be studied through a staged interaction with feminist studies as works that aimed to question the traditional notions of the pinup in alignment with Griselda Pollock’s definition of feminist art. He acted to “subvert the normal ways in which we view art” While Lois himself was never that explicit with the goals of these covers, we can still look at what we see, and what he did write as an act of subversion of the traditional male gaze. This act of staged interaction can been quite similar to Linda Nochlin’s accounts of her early work in creating a feminist art history, of “looking at old themes in new ways.” Reforming and revitalizing history is how we can both move forward in time and restore the untold past.  Nochlin remembered that she, and other “liberated women, were actually intervening in the historical process and changing history itself.”