The return of Rosie the R iveter: Contemporary popular reappropriations of the iconic World War II image

The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter played an important role in American patriotic ideological processes during World War II. Aimed at the recruitment of women for wartime work, particularly in factories and traditionally masculine occupations, this representation of a woman in overalls and head scarf, with sleeves rolled up, showing her bicep and balled fist, declaring ‘We can do it’, has been a contentious point of discussion for its significance in feminist agendas since its first appearance. While building on, and playing to, the suffrage agendas of first wave feminism, the popular image of Rosie was transcended by second wave concerns about depictions of women in the workplace, such as those in films like Norma Rae (Ritt 1979), Silkwood (Nichols 1983), North Country (Caro 2005) and Made in Dagenheim (Cole 2010). But Rosie is making a comeback. The image has recently been appropriated in various ways and for various purposes – naively, ironically, satirically, as bricolage, pastiche and in sexualised portrayals – to represent contemporary women’s issues and concerns, as well as arguably forming part of a backlash culture against feminism. Contemporary depictions have, for example, ranged from Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai and Beyoncé. This paper considers the development and transformation of the image of Rosie the Riveter and its contradictory (re)-appropriations in various contemporary popular cultural discourses.


Introduction
Iconic images often function effectively at a symbolic level because they conjure a sense of both familiarity and nostalgia, closeness and longing, in the viewer. Analyses have shown how this can be used for a variety of ideological purposes by creators, interpreters and manipulators of imagery and discourse. In this paper, I consider one specific iconic image that has become a carrier of multifarious significations -both of female potential and limitations -namely Rosie the Riveter, a familiar and often nostalgic World War II poster image. Currently, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, Rosie the Riveter is making a post-millennial comeback. It is 100 and 75 years, respectively, after the two World Wars in 1914-1919 and 1939-1945, as well as 50 years after the start of the Vietnam War in 1965. Since its creation, the image of Rosie has been appropriated in various ways and for various purposes, often in complex combinations, to represent women's issues.
The Iconic Rosie the Riveter Image (We can do it [sa]).

FIGURE N o 1
It is reported that the number of women in the American workforce increased by at least 10 per cent during the Second World War years, from 26 per cent to 36 per cent, which meant that the number of women workers rose from 14 million to 19 million, of which a large percentage was factory workers (Kopp 2007:591 cited by Baxandall, Gordon & Reverby 1976). The iconic image that came to be known as Rosie the Riveter has become part of western cultural mythology and played an important part in American patriotic ideological processes during World War II. This representation of a woman in overalls and head scarf, with sleeves rolled up, showing her bicep and balled fist, declaring '[w]e can do it', has been a contentious point of discussion for both its feminist agenda and its lack thereof. It is now commonly believed (erroneously, according to Gwen Sharp & Lisa Wade 2011, James Kimble 2016, and James Kimble & Lester Olsen 2006 to have been aimed at the recruitment of women for wartime work, particularly in the armament industry, on factory production lines and in offices: thus, for traditionally male jobs. Following the suffrage agenda of the turn of first wave feminism in the nineteenth century, the 1940s wartime image of Rosie was superseded, in the 1960s and 1970s, by second wave concerns about women in the workplace and civic spaces. Bookended by what is now viewed as the first two waves of feminist theory and activism in western culture (Evans 2015), Rosie is historically situated at the interstices of ideological cross-appropriation and re-interpretation. Paradoxically, she has now become a simultaneous contraction and expansion of the gender(ed) roles and politics of several generations.
In this paper, I consider the ways in which this image has recently been (re)appropriated in a variety of contemporary popular cultural discourses and contexts. I begin with a short description of some of the easily accessible versions of the Rosie iconography (all obtainable via the internet and a simple web search). I follow with a short contextualising his(her)storical perspective of what is now called "Rosie the Riveter" and the myths surrounding her, many of which have already been debunked and which I briefly summarise. As one example, I then consider the image of Rosie as part of the contemporary revivalist/"vintage" performance of Second World War nostalgia and its, sometimes overt, but more often subliminal, discursive and ideological implications in terms of gender(ed) performativity and masquerade (Butler 1997;2011a;2011b). I situate my reading of the imagery in the context of ideological and poststructuralist criticism and apply the thoughts of critical theorists of ideology, power and culture, such as Michel Foucault, Slavoj Žižek, Angela McRobbie and Judith Butler, to my reading.
Rosie is potentially 'a powerful platform … for communicating messages of unified yet complex political dissent' (Wiederhold & Field-Springer 2015:147), but she is also caught in what McRobbie describes as a postfeminist 'double entanglement', in Foucault's 'heterotopic experience', in Žižek's 'ideological myopia' and in Butler's 'gender performativity'. I argue that Rosie is now, and possibly always has been, an empty or open signifier, a simulacrum and palimpsest of herself, which transcends not only her original post-war intent, but also her second wave iterations. In this way, and with the increasing aid of communication and cyber-technologies, the image of Rosie the Riveter has, in less than a century, become a multi-vocal, multipurposed signifier, a contemporary ideologically distorted dreamscape where all manner of heterotopic experiences (Foucauldian crisis, deviation and compensation) play themselves out in individual and collective forms. Reclaiming Rosie for feminism requires, in the first place, recontextualising her into the historical positions that she occupied during wartime and in feminism's second wave, and then newly and productively reinscribing her with historically contextualised meaning for postmillennial generations. In one example from the internet, Rosie is used as the face of a breast cancer awareness campaign, supported by the slogan 'fight like a girl'. The latter is a tenuous connection at best, probably based on the idea of endurance in the face of adversity, inner psychological warfare in the familiar rhetoric of "a battle with cancer" (and also "the battle of the sexes"), and the "positive thinking" rhetoric of popular psychology.

Contemporary Rosie iconography and iterations
The intent is clearly counter-discursive and counter-hegemonic, but the effect is ironic for a couple of reasons. First, because the attitudinal value of "girl fight" is loaded with connotations of weakness and relational violence, rather than strength (Dellasega 2005). Relational violence is viewed as a quintessential "female" fighting strategy, as opposed to typical "male" physical violence. The entrenchment of such binary oppositions is not productive for the advancement of radical new ways of thinking.
Think, for example, of the connotations attached to a girl -or a boy -on a sports field being told "you play like a girl". The 2016 gendered unequal pay controversy in world championship tennis is a clear example of this, suggesting that many still view women's activities and exertions as inferior to those of men (see BBC News 2016).
Second, the appropriation of Rosie for the 'fight like a girl' cancer campaign is ironic and counter-productive, since the original wartime Rosie did not fight, either in combat or for women's rights, but exclusively functioned in a patriotic-nationalist and corporate ideological context, and by extension as a place-holder -at home and at work -for male soldiers. She was only retrospectively appropriated for feminism during the second wave of feminism in the 1980s (Sharp & Wade 2011). Using Rosie as a champion for women's fight against breast cancer brings together physical femaleness, implied by breasts, though men have them too and can also develop breast cancer; feminism, implying women's rights to equality with men; and femininity, the conventional and socially-constructed roles and rules associated with women (Zimbardo 2007

Postfeminism and feminist backlash
Rosie iconography, as I have argued, is not necessarily, and has never been, constitutive of a feminist agenda. "A feminist agenda", of course, does not itself constitute an unproblematically monolithic or univocal conceptual construct. In fact, exactly the opposite is true, especially in the current era of what is often called "post-millennialism", or, the third -sometimes even the fourth -wave of feminism (some have even referred to it as "postfeminism", although this is a highly contested term). In full acknowledgement of the multiplicity of feminist experience, praxis and theory, I argue that Rosie the Riveter is both a site for genealogical excavation and an example of how 'girls have become the new poster boy for neoliberal dreams of winning, and "just doing it" against all odds' (Ringrose 2007:484). Viewed as such, Rosie -the long-accepted icon of working women -is indeed today a neoliberal chimera and, arguably, 'patriarchy's Trojan horse' (Davies et al. 2017:2,4).
Rosie has arguably also, at least in some instances, been appropriated as part of World. Underpinning this attribution of capacity and the seeming gaining of freedoms is the requirement that the critique of hegemonic masculinity associated with feminism and the women's movement is abandoned. The sexual contract now embedded in political discourse and in popular culture permits the renewed institutionalisation of gender inequality and the re-stabilisation of gender hierarchy by means of generational-specific address which interpellates young women as subjects of capacity. With government now taking it upon themselves to look after the young woman, so that she is seemingly well-cared for, this is also an economic rationality which envisages young women as endlessly working on a perfectible self, for whom there can be no space in the busy course of the working day for renewed feminist politics.
This continual pseudo-feminist representational politics and economics of selfperfecting and self-surveillance is (all)consuming work in terms of time and energy, often reliant on contradictory discourses of power, choice and sexuality, that are centred around "having" or "getting" imperatives rather than those of Heideggerian Dasein-driven "being" or "belonging" (implying that being human is necessarily always also already a state of unitary [wholeness] and holistic being-in-the-world).
As neo-feminists situated within popular cyber culture, bloggists Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett argue in The Vagenda (2015)  Examples of "original" girl power popular discourses can, for example, be found in the turn-of-the-millennium pop music of the Spice Girls and Pussycat Dolls, which is re-emerging in a different guise in the work of recent popular singers such as Beyoncé, who has a very large female pre-teen following. In commenting on pop singers such as Beyoncé's commodified and highly sexualised girl power rhetoric (the word feminism is often specifically reclaimed by the new wave of post-millennial celebrity feminists), often aimed at prepubescent and very impressionable young audiences, fellow-singer and humanitarian activist Annie Lennox distinguishes between "feminism lite" and "feminism heavy" as two ends of a scale. At the "heavy" end of the scale, she situates feminists such as Eve Ensler as 'very impactful feminists who have dedicated their lives to the movement of liberating women, supporting women at the grass roots' (Leight 2014 (2014) writes, [i]t frustrates me that the very idea of women enjoying the same inalienable rights as men is so unappealing that we require -even demand -that the person asking for these rights must embody the standards we're supposedly trying to challenge. That we require brand ambassadors and celebrity endorsement to make the world a more equitable place is infuriating.
This produces a new objectification of the female as something to be looked at only in terms of the concept of "success", or its lack, which would signify "failure". Thus, it arguably creates a new form of abjection (following Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject as horrific), namely an unattainable and idealised, even idolised body (of beauty and success), which is simultaneously both obsessively sought-after and reviled, but which also serves to distract the attention from other(ed)/alternative ("failed") bodies and embodiments and other ways of seeing and being. Brigid Delaney (2017) (1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996) as examples of these "stuck old girls" (with literal emphasis on each word); postfeminist veterans, so to speak, and an extreme example of flipped laddish behaviour and self-obsession. Their younger alter egos can be found in the female characters of popular Anglo-American millennial films and television series such as Sex andthe City (1998-2004), Ally McBeal (1997McBeal ( -2002, Bridget Jones's Diary (Maguire 2001), Friends (1994-2004 and Will and Grace (19 9 8-2006). Foucault (1984:4) argues that heterotopic experience is 'a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live'. As he goes on to explain, experiencing such disparate spaces can lead to 'ideological conflicts' (Foucault 1984:1) and heterotopic anxiety (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2002:113) He goes on to describe three kinds of heterotopic experiences that are ideologically constructed and negotiated by societies. These are: first, crisis heterotopias that are socially constructed places where people in crisis go; second, heterotopias of deviation, which are also socially constructed places but, in this instance, where individuals go who deviate from the norm; and third, heterotopias of compensation that are socially constructed ideological utopic ideal places. Of the latter, Foucault (1984:8) says that 'their role is to create a space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled'. In the next section, I apply Foucault's insights to images of Rosie the Riveter.

Rosie the Riveter as heterotopic site
Rosie In the 2012 film, A pervert's guide to ideology (Fiennes), controversial psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains that 'when we think we escape ideology in our dreams, that is when we are in ideology' (emphasis added). Language and discourse, including visual imagery and iconography, present us with ideological dreamscapes through which human beings both reveal and conceal themselves at the same time and often simultaneously in more than one space (real, virtual, social, cultural, ideological, and so forth). Thus, ideology can be seen as the complex heterotopic playing field of our dreams and desires. Žižek (in Fiennes 2012) describes ideology as the distorting glasses through which we view the world. He says that critical engagement with ideology is like removing these glasses -always a painful experience, since, after all, 'we enjoy our ideology' (Fiennes 2012). Rosie is a powerfully ideological figure, having been mobilised through nearly a century in the service of contradictory ideological agendas. Coinciding with the emergence of new communication technologies at the turn of the twentieth century, "entertaining the troops" was seen as the patriotic duty of popular film and radio personalities during both World Wars (both at the front and at a distance, from radio at the home front, and from recording studios and film locations).

Morale building, closely related to propaganda in wartime, is a central part of any war effort and mainstream examples from Rosie's era are the uniform-clad Andrews
Sisters (producing up-beat dance songs with a lot of sexual innuendo), Vera Lynn and Manufacturing Company's War Production Coordinating Committee, who did not employ riveters (Sharp & Wade 2011:82-83). The poster was not widely published at the time; it was displayed for only two weeks 8 and was used by the commissioning company for their own internal marketing purposes against unionism and in favour of corporate compliance (Sharp & Wade 2011:83). Thus, ironically, and in hindsight, the poster symbolises patriotic nationalism, corporatisation and control rather than dissidence, individualism or feminist communalism. The 'we' in the slogan refers to 'the company' and not to 'women'. The poster was therefore not intended as a rallying call to feminist solidarity, but was part of a series of visual communications addressed to all company employees. This is more in the Orwellian vein of Big Brother's doublespeak than that of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan.  Despite the song and painting, it seems that the moniker 'Rosie the Riveter' was not widely used to refer to women factory workers during wartime, and only became popular when it was rediscovered and reinvented in the 1980s as part of the feminist workers' movement in the US, iconically represented by Sally Field in Norma Rae (Ritt 1979) and Charlize Theron in North Country (Caro 2005   Finally, it may be read as an ironic indication that despite the two waves of western feminism, women still face limitations that are systemically and structurally restrictive, even debilitating. These 'I' and 'you' messages can also be read as symptomatic of a reactionary shift in popular political consciousness, which coincides with the backlash theory. This further coincides with two significant forces in global culture and politics. The first of these is the post-millennial western mainstream "retro"  (Ringrose 2007:477). This paper has explored how the diverse forces at work in postfeminism affect one icon of western popular culture, Rosie the Riveter. Today, this figure carries a multitude of significations and can be considered as a site of simultaneous collective, intergenerational and transgressive gendered messages, with the potential for continued future deployment as a vehicle to counteract the often exclusively selfcentred aspirational turn of neoliberal feminist discourses. Rottenberg (2014:431) notes that, even in the heyday of the feminist movement in the early 1970s, the call for selftransformation or self-empowerment was accompanied by some critique of systemic male domination and/or structural discrimination. Today, by contrast, the emergent feminism is contracting, shining its spotlight, as well as the onus of responsibility on each female subject while turning that subject even more intensively inward. As a result neoliberal feminism is -not surprisingly -purging itself of all elements that would orient it outwards, towards the public good.
To return to Žižek's (in Fiennes 2012) statement that 'when we think we escape ideology in our dreams, that is when we are in ideology' (my emphasis), I argue that reappropriations of the original image of Rosie the Riveter provide a case study of how our dreamscapes (including visual images and discourses) both reveal and conceal complex ideological placements, displacements and dissonances. Owing to communication network(ed) technology, these images and their multifarious iterations are communicated to a global audience that often lack historical or situational context for the images. Therefore, the images, in truly postmodern ways -having become empty or open signifiers -develop lives, contexts and networks of their own, transmuting themselves in and across social, political and symbolic spaces, creating heterotopic experiences of being in more than one ideological space at the same time.
Rosie, originating in corporate institutional discourse and nationalistic patriotism, is caught between the extremes of feminist expression, anchored in discourses of war and work, and has become 'a simulacrum of a life she had never lived and yet that also had resonance with her own life' (Dahl 2014:613). Used simultaneously as both an icon of women's empowerment (which was not the original intent) and as a symbol of nostalgic traditional gender(ed) values, the image of Rosie has become a commodity. She is an open discursive signifier, possibly dangerously so and in need of vigilance (in a Foucauldian sense); she is an unmoored ship adrift in a sea of ideological currents.
In order for Rosie to reclaim her rightful place and value, both historical and ideological, she must first be reinstated in her original context, from whence she can be productively reappropriated for neo-feminist discourses and post-millennial women's empower-ment. As, in the first place, an example of how hegemonic discursive practices operate, and, secondly, of her own (dys)functional cross-generational appropriation, she can become active, useful and productive again -a reoperationalised vessel with a clear mission. We need to apply what Rottenberg (2014:433)   9. Norma Rae was pitched at the time of its production as a female Rocky -'a realist-looking film about a poor [working class] underdog' (Toplin 2010:283). This film produced another iconic image, like Rosie, relating to women in the workplace, which is immortalised in the moment when Sally Field (playing Norma Rae, based on the true life story of Crystal Lee, an American textile mill worker) literally brings the noisy factory shop floor to a standstill as she holds up a placard with the word 'union'. Robert Toplin (2010:283) provides an account of the production dynamics of this film which combines unionism and feminism in its message 'in an era when unions were falling out of favour with the American public and politicians appeared eager to criticise organised labour for harming American competitiveness in the global marketplace' (Toplin 2010:282). The British women's worker movement of the time was