Swimming Pretty: The Spectacle, Strength, and Star Text of Esther Williams

Abstract

As a champion swimmer-turned-movie star, Esther Williams had a fascinating career that encompassed her own film genre, the “aquamusical,” and a complicated star text that presented her as a devoted wife and mother, a sensuous pin-up, an incredible athlete, and an ambitious, business-savvy careerwoman. With her athleticism, her strong, self-reliant characters, and her contributions to the construction of her own star text, Williams emerges as someone whose capabilities, bodily and otherwise, interrogate ideas of heteronormative romance, female strength and containment, and women as spectacle. While the aquamusical and Williams’s swimming are without a doubt vital to this thesis, they limit one’s perspective, and so other materials, such as her dramatic films, her TV work, fan magazines, and various ephemera, are brought in to further explain how the actress was such a destabilizing force on and off the screen.