The Impossible Aviatrix

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whose solo ights, along with the 1929 Charles Kingsford-Smith ight of the ...... Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson (White Lion) London, 1967, p. 132. 24.
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The Impossible Aviatrix Justine Lloyd Published online: 09 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Justine Lloyd (2000) The Impossible Aviatrix, Australian Feminist Studies, 15:32, 137-152, DOI: 10.1080/08164640050138662 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164640050138662

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Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 32, 2000

The Impossible Aviatrix

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JUSTINE LLOYD Who was she? Shopgirl, typist, mechanic, lone  ier, Wonderful Amy, the Aeroplane Girl, never much good at landing. May 1930. Millions thrilled at her heroic … She’s crashed … No, she’s safe! Are you ready? One! Two! Three!! 1 Amy, Wonderful Amy In 1930, a popular song ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ celebrated the  ight of Amy Johnson, ‘aviatrix’, from England to Australia. The song’s lyrics, set to a kind of jazzy foxtrot, have a male voice narrating the different stages of her  ight based on the press reports of the time, starting out from her takeoff from England and eventually reaching Australian shores by the end of the song. The singer breaks into speech as she approaches, as if commentating on the ‘live action’ of Amy’s landing in Darwin: ‘She’s crashed … No, she’s safe! Are you ready? One! Two! Three!’ Then and now, the song’s listeners were invited to ‘visualise’ Amy Johnson as she dared to  y solo, from the British Empire’s centre to its furthest reaches. The breaks in this description—represented above as ellipses in the text—draw us into a momentary suspension of the aviatrix’s journey and, in that moment, keep us guessing at the outcome of her  ight: will she make it? Or is she going to ‘crash’ spectacularly? Or as Amy herself did, is she going to do both—come down to earth with a bumpy landing that damaged her plane but from which she emerged more or less alright. Without giving away the ending, I can tell you now that this description of Amy Johnson’s  ight illustrates a certain tension around the visibility of women in public space and their relationship to new technology. Descriptions such as these deŽ ned and positioned women’s relation to technology and the modernity that technology represents. In what follows I trace a line of thinking about gender that draws a connection between attitudes to women moving in the new public spaces of the nineteenth-century city and the construction of a modern ‘sublime’. I ask how the ‘sublime’ as a category of experience increasingly associated with technology, speed, and travel in the twentieth century, rather than the grandeur of nature in the nineteenth century, was appropriated for feminism through the Ž gure of the aviatrix. In what can be seen as a particularly male anxiety about modernity, this modern sublime, on one hand, and on the other, worry about women’s presence in public space, became linked. The image of the woman in the machine, rather than signifying progress and perfection, operated as an icon of ISSN 0816-464 9 print/ISSN 1465-330 3 online/00/320137-1 6 Ó

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transgression and error. One does not have to look far to Ž nd instances of women like Amy who  ew, who were constructed as risky, dysfunctional bodies and subjects (‘She’s crashed …’). At the same time, however, these women offered to modernity’s ‘others’ an alternative to the dominant discourse of modernist heroics that strove for ‘mastery’ of the machine (‘She’s safe …’). Despite the predominant association of women with the failure of technology, their obvious survival of such crash landings challenged the modernist sublime. The euphoric and lofty passions of the sublime, namely a terror tinged with excitement and wonder at the expansion of human powers, were forced to fall back to earth by the more modest disposition of female travellers such as Amy Johnson.

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Are you ready? One! Two! Three!! The sudden appearance and disappearance of this curious Ž gure in the history of female adventurers and explorers in the twentieth century marks a signiŽ cant transformation in popular understanding of the relationship between space, time and gender. Created at the intersection of subjectivity and technology, the emergence of the aviatrix, or female aviator, marked an important new stage in the development of a culture of mobility and speed in the West in the 1920s and 1930s. The adoption of many new technologies, such as the telephone and radio, in the immediate post-World War I period was associated with the activities of women as ofŽ ce and domestic workers, and women were also very much present in the popularisation of air travel. These new communication and transport technologies emerged from the social and political context of war, but they also established new time/space relationships in everyday life. The combination of transport and communication technologies in the interfacing of powered  ight with radio (as a navigation tool), constituted new subjects, or human agents, who could now be in more places than ever before. These technologies symbolised the changing relationships to proximity and distance that were becoming present for many people, through the media if not yet through air travel. The new political and social arrangements after the war did open up the possibility of global travel for ordinary people. Travel was no longer exploration , arduous labour to be performed in the service of Empire. Travel involved pleasure, adventure, and glamour. The Ž gure of the aviator, heroically male, was now transformed and doubled by the Ž gure of the aviatrix. Women did  y before the 1920s, 2 and women pilots visited Australia throughout the 1920s. 3 But despite the earlier fascination with women travellers, I wish to suggest that it was only during the late 1920s and early 1930s that the act of  ying for women cohered into an agency which mediated and embodied discourses on gender, technology, and spatiality. These discourses converged within the Ž gure of the ‘aviatrix’. Although her outlines shift in stories told about her at the time and since, the aviatrix symbolised the new popular enthusiasm for air travel in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One of the most widely known British aviatrixes, Amy Johnson, arrived in Australia at the end of a month-long  ight from Croydon, England, to Sydney in June 1930. Called the ‘ apper ace’ in popular songs and articles celebrating her  ight, Johnson, in uenced by her newspaper sponsors, chose Sydney for the Ž nal stop on her England to Australia solo  ight. Johnson’s journey followed closely the  ight of other aviators such as Bert Hinkler, whose solo  ights, along with the 1929 Charles Kingsford-Smith  ight of the Southern Cross from California to Sydney, consolidated the persona of the hearty air hero. Flights by individual women like Johnson seemed to usher in a set of possibilities of freedom for women as a group. These freedoms included opportunities to travel

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independently and partake of the new spaces of modern life on an equal footing with men. The wide public attention that these  ights attracted in the new media forms also meant that women visibly acquired and demonstrated their competency as pilots and navigators. Widely represented in 1930s popular culture such as newspapers, radio music and magazines, the Ž gure of the aviatrix offered a role for women as participants in an urban and international modernity. The  ights of other female pilots like Amelia Earhart had been widely publicised as newsworthy and unusual events, and aircraft manufacturers used public fascination with women  iers to promote the safety of their latest models. In a chapter called ‘Women Pilots and the Selling of Aviation’ in his book The Winged Gospel, American cultural historian Joseph Corn describes this ‘domestication of the sky’ that women such as Earhardt performed as crucial to making ‘ ying thinkable to so many people’. 4 Women aviators were central to the understandings of  ying as a mode of transport available to everyone, but they were marginal to the institutions that controlled and regulated  ying: commercial airlines, aviation manufacturers, and civil and military aviation authorities. Long after Johnson’s  ight, the aviatrix remained a border creature, constructed through what Andreas Huyssen has called the ‘deeply problematic homology between women and technology’, in which both woman and technology are ‘other’, requiring a relationship of mastery and domination. 5 Johnson’s  ight also transgressed a key relationship of women’s ‘otherness’ implicated in travel narratives. In these narratives women were represented as the ground, or matter to be given form, not as the agent producing that form, here that of the hero at the centre of the travel story. The position of women in relation to new technologies and their popularisation has always been, and continues to be, contested and highly charged. As the Ž gure of the aviatrix demonstrates, deep contradictions existed between these extraordinary, spectacular performances of sublime feats of travel, and the social relationships that women had to negotiate in daily life. In this analysis I argue that the construction of the subjectivity of the aviatrix in this period operates through Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s thesis of ‘constitutive ambivalence’. Stallybrass and White, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, assert that a ‘mobile, con ictual fusion of power, fear and desire’ operates in the construction of subjectivity, resulting in ‘a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level’. 6 Thus the discourses on the relationship between women and technology implicated in the Ž gure of the aviatrix were processes of power. These political technologies work through the highly visible representation of women as ‘modern’, at the very same time that women were being excluded from the power relations embedded in the technological complex of aviation, and of modernity more generally. For the aviatrix, participation in an international modernity, signiŽ ed by her act of travelling as a single woman, was shot through with contradictions. As Stallybrass and White suggest, ‘what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central’. Visible and Invisible Travelling As Amy Johnson was to Ž nd, female travel in the early twentieth century was far more easily performed as a spectacle outside of everyday life, than as a female travel hero within the spatial practices of everyday life. Representations of the  ight thus implicated Amy Johnson in modernist myths of travel as personal freedom, at the same time as they struggled to produce a new, more democratic kind of space for women. In order to

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explore the risks and dangers as well as the potential of this discourse of international travel for women, I am going to make a brief detour via recent debates concerning the aˆ neur. 7 This was the urban dandy depicted in Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s writings on nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin posed the aˆ neur as a key Ž gure of modernity as a spatial practice. The identifying activities and pleasures of the aˆ neur were wandering in public space, mingling with the crowd and gazing at urban spectacles. This practitioner of aimless urban wandering and speculating began wandering the Parisian streets in the 1800s, until the increasing speed of trafŽ c on the boulevards forced him into the arcades—the labyrinthine shopping malls of the nineteenth century. It has been argued that in the twentieth century this Ž gure was re-located from the cities at the centres of empires, to an urban diaspora of peripheral colonial cities. Amy Johnson’s  ight might even be understood as part of this relocation. Janet Wolff, however, has commented on the irreducibly gendered nature of this persona and his milieu: The experience of anonymity in the city, the  eeting impersonal contacts described by social commentators like Georg Simmel, the possibility of unmolested strolling and observation Ž rst seen by Baudelaire, and then analysed by Walter Benjamin were entirely the experiences of men. 8 In the same period, the aˆ neuse as public woman was visible only as either prostitute (one translation of aˆ neuse means literally ‘streetwalker’) or as the female shopper—again ‘domesticating’ the public sphere. These associations of women in moral danger in metropolitan space, as Elizabeth Wilson has argued, posed disciplinary difŽ culties for urban planners and social reformers: ‘the problem of nineteenth-century urban life was whether every woman in the new, disordered world of the city … was not a public woman and therefore a prostitute’. 9 How was the male aˆ neur so easily identiŽ ed, described, represented, Ž gured and taken up as a subject-position in the early metropolitan era and the female not? How does the aˆ neur function as a ‘mobilising Ž gure’, or ‘mobile’, to negotiate and generate the space–time of the metropolis, when, again, the aˆ neuse cannot? 10 I would like to position the invisibility of the ‘aˆ neuse’, a female version of the aˆ neur, as a strange precursor to the overexposure of the aviatrix. And following from this crucial relationship between materiality, visibility and subjectivity, what preconditions are necessary to produce the aviatrix as a mobilising Ž gure, and what space–times does she generate? Tracing the genealogy of a travelling female subject from her invisibility in the nineteenth-century imperial city to her intense and highly mediated imbrication with the twentieth-century ‘world’ city, I am interested in the aˆ neur. My interest is in the aˆ neur as the embodiment of a new kind of metropolitan space, characterised by mobility of people, commodities, and information that depended on new transport and communications technologies. The Ž gure of the aˆ neur emerged as a possible body formed by the new urban spaces, after railway transportation brought large numbers of people to the city for travel, work and consumer pleasures. Appearing near these transportation hubs, the boulevards and arcades, and the crowds themselves, constituted a new urban form. 11 The subject of this kind of urban space is spatially and temporally signiŽ ed as the aˆ neur; as much as he is a literary and imaginary construct, he ‘is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing “social spatialisation”’. 12 The practice of aˆ nerie was then primarily a response to the new relations of the urban by-way; it offered a way of of appropriating space and time for one’s own pleasure. This practice is not that far from the ways in which early women pilots described their adventures in aviation.

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The continuities between the urban and the aerial practices of aˆ nerie develop through a ‘fascination with the new’ and an obsessive desire for freedom from temporal and spatial constraints. Amelia Earhardt noted in her life and attitudes ‘certain threads … that were fully as important in leading me to aviation as being mechanical perhaps was’. 13 These threads comprised ‘liking to experiment’ and of her father ‘being a railroad man … by which I discovered the fascination of new people and places’. 14 Readings of Johnson’s  ight, both contemporary and historical, raise questions about the conceptualisation of technologised travel as freedom that I wish to explore with reference to the gendering of  ying in the 1930s. The aviatrix was produced in this conŽ guration of dreams, technologies, grounded bodies, and desires for the aerial. The aviatrix’s journey crossed some of the existing boundaries drawn for women, such as those between home and travel, private and public, body and mind. But instead of erasing boundaries between all people, her story was recruited to re-perform and re-stabilise divisions between Britain and its Orient, as the Empire was disintegrating in the early twentieth century. To elaborate this conŽ guration of gender and technology, imperial centres and national space, I will be drawing on a range of texts that placed Amy Johnson on these borders. From these fragmentary glimpses of a woman, helmeted, standing by her plane made from wood and fabric, a heroine was constructed and then lost. Despite a call by the emerging feminist movement for her arrival to inspire girls to  y—‘for women too to hold the heights’—Johnson was soon being portrayed by (male) aviation journalists as ‘nervous’, ‘febrile’, and ‘excessively secretive’. Instead of a utopian Ž gure celebrating women’s entrance into modernity, the predominant readings of Johnson (and other women  iers) were of her as a subject lacking the required mastery over the machine to really be a successful pilot. By the mid-1930s, the utopian image of the ‘lone girl  yer’ had declined, and she instead became part of a circuit of technology-out-of-control, her mental state seen to be insufŽ ciently defended against the shocks and stresses of  ying. The aviatrix was produced as a body, historically and institutionally, through tensions in discourses on women’s mobility. These conceptions of mobility have operated metonymically for what has been at stake in women’s participation and access to technology, and modernity. The tensions established in these discourses—between a feminism imagined as a spatial practice of liberation of selves and others, and a Western geographic imagination based on the domination of territory—make the aviatrix an inherently unstable persona. This imbrication of the spatial and the social in the subjectivity of the aviatrix can be interrogated through close examination of a ‘female’ technological sublime, and the ways in which the questions of mastery, liberation, and spatial conquest are troubled by such a re-conceptualisation of the sublime. Because the sublime has been a foundational category through which relations between spaces, selves and technologies have been organised in Western culture, it offers a unique opportunity to get a Ž x on the problems and possibilities of feminist engagements with technology. It is through an investigation of socio-cultural formations of the aesthetic states that oppose and underpin the sublime, namely the grotesque and the abject, that we might understand the journey of the aviatrix as a transgressive practice. A Mobile Feminism In this convergence of feminism and travelogue, Laura Mulvey’s work on the gendered spectator and object of the gaze interpolates the story of Amy Johnson as female

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adventurer. Mulvey’s writing and Ž lmmaking critiqued representations of femininity in, and for, cinematic space. Not accidentally, given Johnson’s symbolic status for a feminism based on woman as narrative agent, in 1980 Mulvey made AMY! with Peter Wollen, a short Ž lm about Amy Johnson as a spectacular body. In the Ž lm, as in 1930, Amy Johnson embodies certain hopes and anxieties about women, travel and narrative space. In a recent essay in the collection Sexuality and Space, Mulvey reiterates her concern with gender and space in the western and the melodrama, as genres that construct a particularly gendered spatial imaginary through ‘[their] narrative structures … and [their] narrative landscape[s]’. She refers to a familiar structural analysis of the narration of the folktale, which can be seen to intersect with stories told about female travel: … a minimal story must follow an established pattern. It begins with a point of stasis. A home characteristically marks the formal space of departure for the narrative, the stasis which must be broken or disrupted for the story to acquire momentum and which also marks the sexual identity of the hero, both male and Oedipal, as he leaves the conŽ nes of the domestic, settled sphere of his childhood for the space of adventure and self-discovery as an adult male. The horizontal, linear development of the story events echo the linear of narrative structure. The two reach a satisfying point of formal unity in the literal linearity of the pattern drawn by the hero’s journey, as he follows a road or path of adventure, until he comes to root in a new home, a closing point of the narrative, a new point of stasis, marked by the return of the feminine and domestic space through (as Propp has demonstrated) the function of marriage. 15 In the introduction to Visual and Other Pleasures, published in 1989, Mulvey says that in making the Ž lm AMY! she was ‘dealing speciŽ cally with the narrative spheres allotted to female protagonists, and the fate of a heroine who adopts an active relation to narrative space and resists the intimidating look of the camera in its role as sculptor of passive femininity’. 16 The fate of such a heroine has been contested in many places, and the need for a heroic feminine remains an originary moment in feminist historicising (the Ž rst woman who … ). On a narrative level, this strategy challenges representations of women as the domesticated subject, solely a marker of the distance travelled by the male hero. This narrative structure has had actual effects on the spaces available to women, whether in the spaces of the city, globe, or stratosphere, as well as in the spaces of the text. An example here would be the link drawn in studies such as Laurie Pickup’s between women’s choice of low-paid jobs close to home and gender constraints on women’s access to modes of transport. 17 Judy Wajcman observes in her chapter on the built environment in Feminism Confronts Technology that gender has been implicated with liberation in the popular imagery of travel, speciŽ cally car travel. She says that ‘For men, cars afford a means of escape from domestic responsibilities, from family commitment, into a realm of private fantasy, autonomy and control.’ 18 Feminism has constituted women’s mobility as an escape from domesticity, reading travel as freedom. Thus Wajcman allows that While the car constitutes a major environmental hazard, for women, at least in the short term, demanding ‘equal access’ to the car is an important assertion of their right to independence, mobility and physical safety. 19 Jennifer Laurence, in her article on the female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, has made a sustained critique of this appropriation of the travel narrative in and for feminism. Laurence calls it a ‘coalescence of the identity of the feminist around the idea

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of the occupation of hitherto prohibitive and prohibited spaces’. 20 The readings of Amy Johnson’s  ight in Laura Mulvey’s Ž lm, and more broadly across a variety of feminist projects that investigate the gendering of social space, run the risk of continuing this trajectory: narrating a linear progression of a woman from the home to the world as a positive, desirable move into freedom. Mary Russo’s theorisation of the possibility of transforming Ž xed notions of gender and space by representing women in excessive, carnivalesque, unruly situations, provides a methodology that avoids a simple appropriation of this model of a freely travelling subjectivity. By embracing both the sublime and the grotesque, she offers a way to negotiate the line between liberation and responsibility. She argues, in The Female Grotesque, that ‘women’s liberation … [imaged as boundless  ight] is imbricated with … bourgeois exceptionalism which marks off categories of irregular bodies to leave behind’. 21 For Russo, the discursive formation of the ‘aerial’ relies on separating off a zone of abjection, which is Ž lled by the contents of modernity’s others: the feminine body, carnivalesque displays and uncanny experiences. The modern ideal relies on both ‘sleek, transcendent, spectacularised bodies that modelled the ideas of progress and liberation and the grotesque’. 22 The aviatrix, like the  apper, introduced a modernised female body, emphasising the new streamlined forms of everyday technologies in the 1930s. This was a body that reveals much about its context of production, as it had to be continually reinterpreted. It was both inside and outside established gender norms— ‘not woman’ yet feminine, fundamentally altered yet never grotesque. My argument wagers that representations of Amy Johnson engaged directly with these ambiguities. Indeed, sometimes these representations fall out of one symbolic domain into another, unintended, one. Sports Girls and Flapper Aces: How Not to be a Woman Before Amy’s  ight to Australia she had been longing for the kind of liberation from the claustrophobic city that  ying could provide. She wrote to her lover in 1927 (the year that Lindberg crossed the Atlantic) I just hate streets and houses and tubes and buses and stuffy rooms and typewriters. I wish I could climb up a mountain and be high above all these things … where there’s light and air and sunshine. 23 This description resonates with the sense of a contrived precariousness and orchestrated vertigo that appealed to and constructed the Romantic sublime within the age of Enlightenment. This sublime functioned as a repository for the inexpressible feelings and emotions that were tied to the emergence of the modern individual subject, through sublimating his relationship to nature. The most represented form of the sublime in the Romantic age was the mountain, in particular the Swiss Alps, a conceptual space signiŽ cantly distant from the world of science and reason, and a site that expressed a fast disappearing sublimity in an age of explaining previously mysterious phenomena. 24 The Romantic sublime re ected broader cultural obsessions with elevation, purity, the remote, the inexplicable and the ephemeral. However, the Romantic sublime was never against reason; it appeared beyond it where reason confronted its limits. The Romantic sublime has often been gendered as a limit experience of masculinity. A key text on the Enlightenment sublime, Edmund Burke’s 1759 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, distinguished between the sublime as a category of exteriorised experiences of the terrors and powers of nature, and the

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merely beautiful as an interiorised, picturesque, domesticated experience. 25 This gendered interpretation has been perpetuated. Bertrand Russell, summarising Kant, described the sublime through a set of familiar binary oppositions: ‘Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful and so on’. 26 Recent historians of a modern sublime within industrial culture note the association of the domestic with the feminine and beautiful, and the public with masculinity and the sublime. 27 The quote from Johnson above demonstrates how  ying offered a ‘beyond’ to the stuffy interiors of ‘typewriters, tubes and houses’. According to her biographer, Amy decided to  y to Australia as a way of ‘winning a place for women’ in aviation. In 1930 Johnson wrote a newspaper article extolling the ‘Joys of the Air for a Woman’: You who  y—Do you tell your friends of the joys you experience in the air, of the exhilaration of knowing yourself free and alone in the glorious freedom of the skies, of the wonders to be seen … Do you show them by your example as a Ž ne, careful pilot, how safe it is to  y a machine so shining, clean and well-cared for as your own? I hope you do—you will be helping to make Aviation History. 28 She urged women to save money out of their salaries, as she had done from her job as a typist, in order to ‘help bring  ying within the means of us all’. 29 Her desires to democratise  ying were consistent with those of other women  yers. US pilot Louise Thaden wrote that ‘ ying is the only real freedom we are privileged to possess’. 30 In 1930, American journalist and amateur pilot Margery Brown declared Women are seeking freedom. Freedom in the skies! … The woman at the wash-tub, the sewing machine, the ofŽ ce-desk, and the typewriter can glance up from the window when she hears the rhythmic hum of a motor overhead, and say, “If it’s a woman she is helping free me, too!” 31 These perceptions of a new sphere for women linked them to a modernist trajectory of technological progress and spatial conquest and gave the readings of Johnson’s  ight a political in ection, although not an effective politics. Amy’s transformative  ying identity was articulated with the construction of a healthy modern femininity based on physical exertions. In Sydney, the Sydney Sports Girls’ Association issued a souvenir publication, Johnnie, you’re a Bird. The magazine contained drawings and testimonials to Miss Johnson’s achievement, but it also drew her  ight into a wider discourse on sexual difference within commodity culture. The expense of her  ight demanded sponsorship to Ž nance the purchase of the plane. Her funds came from Lord WakeŽ eld, manufacturer of Castrol Oils. 32 Advertisements for Castrol Motor Oil, KLG Spark Plugs, Shell Oil and Dunlop Tyres (all good British companies) were interspersed in the souvenir publication with advertisements for Permanent Wave Treatments and Berlei Bras. This created an analogy between the maintenance of her  ying machine, a Gypsy Moth, and the fashioning of a feminine ‘girlish’ body. The image of the sports girl was a very ambivalent one. The transformation of gender from a nineteenth-century womanhood, that constrained women through clothing and conŽ nement to the domestic sphere, was being displaced by the new ‘outdoor girl’ who showed ‘contemptuous independence’. Cartoons in Johnnie, you’re a Bird celebrated the youthfulness and healthiness of the outdoor girl. Men’s discomfort with the example set to Sydney women by Amy Johnson, and the seeming ‘elegant insigniŽ cance’ of men in comparison, were parodied. The men were portrayed as emasculated, effeminate and decidedly non-sporty, drinking and smoking as the sports girl canoed and  ew around

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FIGURE 1. Amy as disembodied through the technology of underwear. Source: Sydney Sports Girls’ Association, Johnnie, you’re a Bird (Mortons) Sydney, 1930, p. 32. Mitchell Library collection.*

the world. Some anxieties surrounding this new femininity were expressed in an editorial in the Adelaide Advertiser which cautioned: when the whole world is acclaiming Miss Amy Johnson’s great performance, which few men would even attempt, the voice of those who cry out against athletic feats by women is apt to be lost. Yet certainly there is an uneasy feeling that they are overdoing things … it is quite possible that women may push to excess the liberty given them now for the Ž rst time since the days of the Amazons—who after all may have existed mainly in fable.33 The press coverage of Johnson’s  ight linked girlhood and modernity, positioning youth as a sign of the modern. 34 Like the  apper, the aviatrix was decidedly contemporary, having no past, and like the  apper she was positioned as falling short of a stable gender identity. In an interesting and telling factual error, started in England and continued by newspapers in Australia, Johnson’s age was misreported as 22 years old at the time of her  ight to Australia; she was in fact 27. The need for an image of a girlish achievement, rather than an act unbeŽ tting a woman who should be domestically occupied, was

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FIGURE 2. The new outdoor girls. Source: Sydney Sports Girls’ Association, Johnnie, you’re a Bird (Mortons) Sydney, 1930, p. 12. Mitchell Library collection.

underlined by the streamlined lightness and youthfulness of the representations of the aviatrix. Amelia Earhart, 30 years old in 1928, was called the ‘girl Lindbergh’ after her  ight across the Atlantic in the same year. She promoted a new aerial style of ‘sports’ clothing she designed saying This is an era of feminine activity. The stay-at-home and the hammock girl are gone … I tried to put the freedom that is in  ying into the clothes. And the efŽ ciency too.35 The notion that ‘Woman too could  y’ symbolised the safety and comfort of  ying by air: the air was democratised and domesticated, with un-homely aeriality becoming associated with the narrative space of the feminine. Equally, the feminine was being freed from being deŽ ned purely in domestic terms. The ‘ apper ace’ was a powerful Ž gure: the ace was a fusion of man and war machine popularised after World War I, while the  apper was a new Ž gure of femininity, embodying sexual freedom, bodily mobility and fashion. To put these two together is to acknowledge what Mary Russo calls woman’s ‘burdensome duty to forever represent the new’.36 These historical shifts in the representation of gender were also employed to reinforce

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and re-perform representations of geography and Empire. Although Amy Johnson’s  ight was seen to create a new relation of time and space between Australia and the world, representations of the journey emphasised the centre of the Empire and its margins, erasing the spaces in between. The Ž gure of Amy Johnson becomes giant in many drawings and advertisements, appearing out of the clouds, literally from ‘nowhere’. In Fig. 3, her body becomes a bridge between England and Australia. A cartoonist draws Johnson as a giantess standing across a sea of pure distance with no land in between the two islands, the empty space marked only by lines of latitude and longitude. The gigantism of the aviatrix further underlines her position as a ‘public woman’, a link between distant nations and a mediator of the territorial displacements of colonialism.37 Such an exteriorised longing for connection to an imperial centre is expressed in many drawings which show her leaving one home to come to a safe landing in another home. Amy proclaimed on her arrival in Brisbane (on Empire Day 1930) ‘I stand for Empire … and Aviation and Empire stand together.’38 Newspaper accounts of her  ight focused on her dealings with exotic and dangerous places during her stopovers, but she relied on outstations of Empire, Royal Air Force Ž elds or colonial administrations, in the various points she stopped to refuel and repair her plane. Sir Samuel Hoare, British Secretary of State for Air, had a couple of years earlier advocated the use of aviation to strengthen a sense of British imperial unity.39 Johnson expressed such longings in a speech that she gave on her arrival in Sydney: I shall be very happy if this  ight of mine can bring together people so far apart but so near together in fellowship and friendship, and everything except mileage. If you could get aeroplanes to bring you together that would be so much better, if you could get people coming out every week or so as I have done.40 Thus Johnson’s  ight was implicated in discourses of British dominion over its Empire. Amy Johnson’s  ight was articulated with and within an imaginary of a more closely allied British Empire. The aviatrix was a new Ž gure, representing a break with women’s roles in the nineteenth century. But she was also a bridge between modernity and tradition. Amy’s ‘strangeness’ had to be explained to herself and to other women and men in familiar terms. She had to be shown as—and to perform an identity that was—young, happy, adventurous, feminine, and patriotically British. Defending the Hero

Despite her ‘triumph’, the meanings surrounding Amy Johnson’s  ight were thus never completely uniŽ ed. Perhaps it is Ž tting then that she was unable to complete her intended itinerary. She crashed her plane in Brisbane, and had to be  own to Sydney by an Australian pilot. Norman Ellison, an aviation journalist, commented on her difference in deportment from the male aviators in his biography of Kingsford-Smith: The women record breakers were a marked contrast; that is in journey’s end condition. Amy Johnson was a jittery nervous wreck when she reached Darwin. She was still over-taut, nerve-crackly, after weeks on Australian soil.41 This ‘nervousness’, despite Ellison’s attempt to use it to dismiss her  ying ability, seemed not to be brought about by the stresses of the  ight, but by the overwhelming attention from crowds. Constance Smith in her biography of Johnson notes that on her arrival in Charleville in Queensland she was rushed by the local population:

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FIGURE 3. Amy as conquering heroine (the Ž gure behind Amy is Nike, goddess of victory). Source: Sydney Sports Girls’ Association, Johnnie, you’re a Bird (Mortons) Sydney, 1930, p. 19. Mitchell Library collection.

Amid frantic cheering and pushing Amy was trapped until rescuers fought their way to her. By the time she had been bundled into a car and driven to the hotel where she was to stay she was weeping hysterically. It is hardly surprising that during the next few weeks an irrational horror of crowds and strangers beset her.42 Amy  ew, but she had to come back to earth some time. There her freedom was not guaranteed by emulating the hero, whose freedom depended on others being left behind. Amy Johnson’s ‘freedom’ had to be practised within institutions and discourses which were especially constraining to women. Despite her attempt to reverse gravity and sustain women’s visibility as free technological agents, Johnson’s tenuous hold on such a public identity was soon overwhelmed. In October 1930 she wrote to her family: I detest the publicity and public life that have been forced upon me … I have therefore been driven to tell you … that I am seeking hard to lose my identity of ‘Amy Johnson’ because that personage has become a nightmare and

The Impossible Aviatrix abomination to me. My great ideas for a career in aviation have been annulled, for a long time to come, by the wrong kind of publicity and exploitation which followed my return to England … I strongly resent interference and efforts to rule my life or control my actions … I’ve lived my own life for the last seven years and intend to continue doing so.43

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The absence of an easy landing for the aviatrix, who never quite reached ‘home’, illustrates the riskiness of endings that intertwine discourses of spatial and personal progress. Moreover, her complex and simultaneous participation in imperialist and feminist discourses, demonstrates the problematic nature of political strategies of liberation that remain caught in modernist ideals linking technology, progress and purity. The aviatrix was deeply implicated in a Western modernism that drew on these ideals to support colonialism by enacting a race hierarchy. A Sublime (In)difference

Within these descriptions of  ying women (and men) can be discerned a characterisation of the modern sublime, a way of narrating technological change which was contingent on a particular aesthetic relationship to technology. In the early twentieth century an earlier Romantic aesthetics of ‘Nature’ fused with a Modernist enthusiasm for the new. These traces of the Romantic sublime have exerted a powerful in uence on the forms of technology that have been considered feasible and worthwhile and have shaped the kind of technosphere that has developed since. Admirers of the technological sublime are with us still. To acknowledge that this sublime has a history offers a way of coming to terms with its hold on the modernist imaginary. In order to dislodge the technological sublime from its lofty position, it is necessary to ‘bring it down to earth’, and examine it as a Ž ction that has contradictory effects when deployed to narrate the modern. The sublime rests on a logic of rational discipline, in which the human subject recognises that which is beyond human control, yet tamed and distant from any real bodily threat. Occurring at the threshold of terror and pleasure, the sublime represents the point at which humanity’s other (nature, technology) is really no longer life-threatening, but still contains that element of risk. This structure of feeling is repeated throughout descriptions of  ying as a technological engagement with limits, especially in its earliest manifestations. For the aviator and the public to make sense of this new experience, the anxieties associated with the new form of travel were ‘sublimated’, that is, displaced and elevated above abject terror to the register of the sublime by a concentrated effort of reason. This rationality ‘manages’ the modern will to reach towards limits of understanding in order to move forward, and thus towards dislocation and displacement. It simultaneously holds in tension the sense of freedom that  ying engendered with the sense of vulnerability of a  imsy machine travelling at a hugely increased speed. Quite understandably, this modern sublime has appealed to feminism. Patricia Yeager demands equal access for women to the sublime.44 In this feminist translation of the sublime, access to it is access to a sense of power.45 Such a structuring of the self, however, emerges from a pre-eminently modern enlightenment spatial imaginary, and it must organise the social by placing ‘otherness’ at its disposal. I believe that feminist critiques of this relationship must also be critiques of the

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sublime itself; any attempt to construct a transcendent female sublime is an extremely problematic enterprise. The pursuit of a female sublime is, in the end, a grotesque gesture. I hope that the collapse of the lofty sublime into its low ‘other’, as outlined in this article, might prompt a new, more unstable imaginary of the relationship between human and non-human, sublime creatures and abject monsters. Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg subject’ neatly articulates this post-Enlightenment selfhood.46 Haraway argues that the cyborg, as a messy hybrid of human and machine rather than a transcendence of both, deŽ nes our existence in the late twentieth century, and provides a new territory for feminist politics. This identity contains elements of a freakish sublimity, thereby simultaneously mobilising and ironising our nostalgia for the sublime. A scene from Amy Johnson’s autobiography, recounting a mechanical breakdown en route to Australia, describes such a cyborg moment, but reveals also the limits of the sublime: I was delighted to see Jason again, surrounded by this ring of grinning savages … On this frail machine rested my one hope of getting away from this place, and it was here far more than when I reached Australia that I had the impulse to throw my arms round him as being the most faithful friend I had.47 This is an appealing image, an expression of friendship and kinship to the machine. That a ‘ring of grinning savages’ provides the background for the techno-corporeal complex of the aviatrix emphasises an estrangement that is necessary for this connection to take place. When Johnson found herself in this strange inter-space of travelling, she was so alienated from other humans that she could be moved towards a ‘sublime of nearness’ to her ‘frail machine’. Kingsford-Smith’s biography, in contrast, ends with a very different kind of conversation between human and machine. Describing his Ž nal  ight from Mascot in the ‘Southern Cross’ on 18 July 1935, Kingsford-Smith wrote: It was an emotional moment for me personally. That was my last  ight in the ‘Old Bus’ which had meant so much in my  ying life. She had been a living thing to me. In her, I had spent about one hundred and Ž fty  ying days and twenty whole nights. During all her long  ights she had never let me down. Even on that last  ight across the Tasman, it was not the ‘Southern Cross’ that failed me. When the propellor was smashed, I seemed to hear her call out: ‘It isn’t me, boss! It’s that new bit of cowling.’ The ‘Southern Cross’ was ‘the father of the Fokkers.’ The Dutch, who always refer to an aeroplane as masculine, call her that, for she was the Ž rst big-wing three-engined Fokker ever built. One day, I want to put a brass plate on the old plane. It will bear an inscription something like this: ‘To my faithful old bus, in grateful memory and regard, from her boss.’48 Kingsford-Smith’s account does not admit his proximity to the machine, but emphasises the distance between them. He insists on the position of the machine as subservient rather than equal: he is her ‘boss’, ‘she’ the faithful servant. It is only through acknowledgement of the proximity of the technological to the organic, as Haraway has made, that the feminist notion of ‘empowerment’ through technology can be reconŽ gured, as Haraway suggests, to become an architectonics of possibility: a freakish but less obscene imaginary for embodiment. Perhaps then the longing for ‘something more’ that has been under investigation throughout this article

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can be seen to be produced by and constitutive of the tension between subjectivity and spatiality that the aviatrix represents. The continued appeal for feminism of the notion of a ‘female sublime’ is imbued with this longing. But rather than offering Johnson as an instance of such a female sublime, I would like to suggest that she is an embodiment of the incompleteness and impossibility of this project. NOTES

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Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to several people for their comments on and generous discussion of this project. As well as very helpful comments from anonymous reviewers for this issue of AFS, the ideas discussed also beneŽ ted greatly from conversations with Dr Zoe¨ Sofoulis, Dr Anni Dugdale and others at the ‘Technology in the Making’ seminars. This paper was also presented in an earlier version at ‘Feminism in Transit’ at the Australian National University in 1995 and I most appreciate the comments of the conference organisers and participants on that occasion. Kirsty MacKenzie, Wanning Sun and Jean Bedford have all been careful and interested readers at different times. * 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

All reasonable efforts have been made to locate the copyright owners in the images accompanying this article. The publisher would appreciate any relevant information on the owners of copyright. Opening intertitle in Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s short Ž lm, AMY!, British Film Institute, 1980. Australian National Library Film Collection, Canberra; script transcribed by Rosemary Jackson published in Framework, no. 14, Spring 1981, pp. 37–41. Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It (1932) (Academy Chicago Publishers) Chicago, 1992, pp. 181–3. ‘Lady Pilot’, Sea, Land and Air, 1 April 1921, p. 56. Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel (Oxford University Press) New York, 1983, p. 89. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1986 (see the chapter ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’), pp. 44–62. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Methuen) London, 1986, p. 5. See Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flaˆneur’, New Left Review, no. 191, 1992, pp. 88–110; Janet Wolff, ‘On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism’, Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 224–39; Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flaˆneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, no. 2/3, 1985, pp. 37–46. Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flaˆneuse’, p. 37. Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flaˆneur’, p. 91. Wilson concludes her discussion of the contradictory nature of the regulation of women in nineteenth-century public space by arguing that the aˆneur was a phantasmic construction, ‘a shifting projection of angst rather than a solid embodiment of male bourgeois power’. For Wilson, the aˆneuse can be seen as an impossible subject, mythical like the aˆneur himself (see p. 109). A ‘mobile’ in Bruno Latour’s terms. Bruno Latour, ‘A Note on Some Religious Paintings’ in John Law and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (Routledge) London, 1988, p. 25. Guilana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1993, p. 56. Rob Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flaˆnerie’ in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flaˆneur (Routledge) London, 1994. Earhart, The Fun of It, p. 3. Earhart, The Fun of It, p. 3. Laura Mulvey, ‘Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity’ in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press) New York, 1992, pp. 55–6. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1989, p. ix. Laurie Pickup, ‘Hard to Get Around: a Study of Women’s Travel Mobility’ in Jo Little, Linda Peake and Pat Richardson (eds), Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment (Macmillan Education) London, 1988, pp. 98–108. Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991, p. 134. Wajcman, Feminism Confronts, p. 135. Jennifer Laurence, ‘Women in Orbit: Satellites and Spacejunk’, Australian Feminist Studies, Summer 1993, p. 89. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (Routledge) London, 1995, p. 11. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 15. Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson (White Lion) London, 1967, p. 132. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Harper Collins) London, 1995, pp. 447–513.

152 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

J. Lloyd Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Scolar Press) Menston, 1970, originally published 1759. Bertrand Russell quoted in Meaghan Morris, ‘White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime’ in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Routledge) London, 1998, p. 244. Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: an Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (MIT Press) Cambridge, MA, 1992; David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (MIT Press) Cambridge, MA, 1994. Smith, Amy Johnson, p. 159. Smith, Amy Johnson, p. 159. Louise Thaden, High, Wide and Frightened (Stackpole and Sons), New York, 1938, p. 138. Margery Brown, ‘Flying is Changing Women’, Pictorial Review, 31 June 1930, pp. 30, 109, quoted in Susan Ware, Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism (W.W. Norton) New York, 1993. C.B. Smith, Amy Johnson, p. 178. The magazine features a portrait of Lord WakeŽ eld, ‘The Patron Saint of Aviation’, p. 24. Advertiser, 6 June 1930, p. 20, quoted in Julian Thomas, ‘Amy Johnson’s Triumph’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 20, April 1988, p. 82. Thomas (pp. 72–84) points out that the author of this article was obviously not concerned about women endangering their health by excessive domestic labour, and one could add here other activities in which women were ‘overdoing things’, such as factory work. See Lesley Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, 1993. Ware, Still Missing, p. 101. Russo, The Female Grotesque, p. 30. Susan Stewart’s useful analysis of the symbolism of giants seeks to understand such exaggeration of bodily size as an ‘interface’ between the natural and the human. Stewart suggests that ‘the gigantic represents inŽ nity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural’. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1993, p. 70. Advertiser, 3 June 1930, p. 15. Sir Samuel Hoare, ‘Aviation in the British Empire: the Result of Five Years’, Talk to the Royal Geographical Society of Scotland, reprinted in Aircraft, October–November 1928, pp. 165–6. Fox Movietone News, ‘Queensland Welcomes Amy’, 1930, NFSA. Australian National Library, Canberra, Ellison Collection MS 1882/1/1, early draft of Flying Matilda book, typescript and pencil changes, p. 10. Smith, Amy Johnson. Quoted in Mulvey and Wollen, AMY!, Scene 11. ‘Amy Through the Mirror’, p. 40. Patricia Yeager, ‘Toward a Female Sublime’ in L. Kauffman (ed.), Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (Basil Blackwell) London, 1989, pp. 191–212. Yeager, ‘Toward a Female Sublime’, p. 212. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (Routledge) New York, 1991, pp. 149–81. This article was also published in Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 4, Autumn 1987, pp. 1–42. Smith, Amy Johnson, p. 223 (emphasis mine). Charles Kingsford-Smith, My Flying Life: an Authentic Biography Prepared Under the Personal Supervision of and from the Diaries and Papers of the Late Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith with a Preface by Geoffrey Rawson (Andrew Melrose) London, 1937, p. 280 (emphasis mine).