Queer Sensations: Postwar American Melodrama and the Crisis of Queer Juvenility (original) (raw)

This essay examines the melodramatic genre convention of the “sensation scene” as a vehicle for the representation of queer crises in American juvenility during the postwar era. Through popular cinema, the nation aesthetically organized and communicated concerns about the production of “fit” masculine and heterosexual juveniles, who would be capable of carrying out the postwar expansion of American democratic and capitalist ideologies. During an era in which heightened policing of sexual and gendered behavior began to replace racialization as a major obstacle to full American citizenship, postwar American films reflect new obsessions with the developmental tracking of male juveniles into proper manhood, and out of/away from queer “phases” or “tendencies” that would delay or prevent the achievement of ethical adulthood. In this essay, I read two signature postwar-era melodramas, Rebel Without a Cause and Tea and Sympathy, as containing defining examples of what I call a “queer sensation scene”: a scene that signals the potentially tragic failure to achieve correctly embodied male citizenship in the nation. In both Rebel and Tea, the queer sensation scene appears as an affective point through which codes of developmental citizenship are deployed, consumed, and reinforced, generating symbolic pathways that justified the institutional “sorting” of male youth according to quality and ability. The result is a popular cinematic rhetoric in which the emergent citizenship of white, heterosexually conforming male juveniles is prefigured through the failure of other, less “fit” queer masculinities. In conclusion, I argue that this genre device continues to structure popular representations of and common thinking about the relative value of young, male American lives.