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The Queer Optimism of Jessie Tarbox Beals' Greenwich Village Postcards

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the white female camp sensibility of a group of postcard advertisements of Greenwich Village women shop proprietors that photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals created and marketed around 1917. In their display of Greenwich Village bohemian female entrepreneurs' performative play between person and thing, Beals' postcards capture white women's repudiation of abstracted sentimental womanhood in favor of a performative embodied identity, and their embrace of the utopian possibility of a female political community achieved through the commodity form. In this way, Beals' Greenwich Village photographs provide a queerly optimistic vision of the production and commodification of white femininity in early twentieth-century mass culture. Finally, the article considers the queer labor of these postcards in relation to turn-of-the-century orientalism and US imperialism in Asia, exploring how their camp aesthetics risk reinscribing a vision of female liberation contingent upon exclusionary racial performances.