"The Original Flapper is a Copy"

The lecture interrogates the modernist aesthetics of multiplication in its particular impact on ideas and fantasies of gender. Looking at chorus girls as the emblematic figures of multiplication in the 1910s and 1920s, Prof. Mayer challenges the reading of these figures as reified „mass ornaments“ and shows how the chorus brought forth the flapper.

Ruth Mayer holds the chair of American Studies at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.