Queer Sensations: Postwar American Melodrama and the Crisis of Queer Juvenility (original) (raw)
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This work utilizes a feminist historical interpretation of film to examine the vexed relationship between heterosexuality and youth culture in US film. Sampling a variety of 1950-80s social guidance films, this presentation examines the relationship of power between youth and heterosexuality which operates through particular frameworks that render and naturalize heterosexuality as a suitable and viable expression of an ideal life for the American youth. As a form of Cold War domestic politics, I examine how naturalized assumptions of heterosexuality within the social guidance film genre interact with notions of homosexuality. Particularly, I examine the films Perversion for Profit and Boys Beware and analyze how tropes of heterosexuality, in the face of the Lavender Scare, were particularly successful in creating imagined communities of youth as sexual citizens on heterosexual lines. I argue, heterosexuality was used as "stage of development" posing the heterosexual teen as a source of stability and upheld values of community in the post-war era. Tropes about homosexuality, then, were used offset and threaten American national stability as the inappropriate "Other" sexuality. Taken together, heterosexuality fused with American nationalism, through film coalesced into popular conceptions that heterosexuality was an appropriate and ideal for sexual expression and, often times only, form of legitimate sexual citizenship during the post-war era.
“Gays and Queers: From the Centering to the Decentering of Homosexuality in American Film.”
This article examines independent cinema's depictions of homosexuality from 1990 to 2000. Using mainstream Hollywood films of the 1990s as the context for their development, I show significant differences in how homosexuality is represented outside mainstream films. Specifically, I divide independent films into two types: gay and lesbian standpoint films, and queer cinema. Gay standpoint films are distinguished by their narrative focus on a gay and lesbian subculture, whereas queer cinema generally depicts representations of a character's sexuality as decentered. I suggest that if we understand gay and lesbian standpoint films as a response to mainstream Hollywood ones that exclude subcultural depictions, then queer cinema can be seen as a challenge to both gay and lesbian standpoint films, and mainstream Hollywood films that center and normalize homosexual identity.
The Politics of Queer Time: Retro-Sexual Returns to the Primal Scene of American Studies
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2008
This article examines Mark Merlis’s 1994 novel American Studies in order to analyze the performative potential of “queer retrosexualities.†In re-visiting the history of the field through the fictional account of F. O. Matthiessen’s life, Merlis’s novel makes the 50s a primal scene of its narrative. By returning to the 50s, Merlis not only ‘exposes’ the heteronormative exclusions that informed
The films American Beauty directed by Sam Mendes , and Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater present seemingly conflicting forms of masculinity: the modern and outdated, techniques such as comedy, satirisation, parody and tragedy to emphasise which is to be emulates and which to no longer serves it function. There is, under the surface, a reoccurring narrative that as America modernises, the traditional constructs of masculinity leave middle-class white men as inadequate members of society; emasculated and dysfunctional. Before focusing on the presentation of white middle class male, with stable finances, a nuclear family and a lucrative career that is supposed to bring fulfilment, within American cinema, it is necessary to first define several terms within this essay. The term masculinity will refer to a set of traditions or traits associated with what society deems to be a ‘true male’ who takes full advantage of their high social positioning, which results from confirming to patriarchal values. Whilst it could be seen that these traditions and traits change over time, they mostly stay within the existing constraints imposed by society which are harder to transform and redefine some traits no longer functional for the time.
Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film and Television
Journal of Popular Culture, 2007
patronage: e.g., if US tax codes were changed to favor political advocacy patronage by foundations; if government agencies helped; if advocates favored an incrementalist policy strategy that would provide emotional incentives of small wins rather than failed swooping national strategies that have been preferred; and if the issue were framed to appeal to the universal need to protect children.
Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. Addressing these issues from a variety of different angles, including historical, aesthetic, cultural, phenomenological, and psychological approaches, these essays present a complex picture of the cultural work and passionate politics accomplished by melodrama over the course of the past two centuries, particularly at times of profound social change.
Introduction: Queer Subjectivities and the United States
Comparative American Studies, 2020
According to the Human Rights Campaign, less than two hours after being sworn into office, the Trump administration removed all mention of LTBQIA+ issues from the White House webpages. 1 This reignited what has turned out to be a systematic erasure of the subjecthood of queer individuals living both within the borders of the United States and in countries all over the world. Despite acts of resistance ranging from the Women's March and activism by the HRC and Black Lives Matter, the contemporary moment has become increasingly precarious for those who identify, or are identified, as queer. Faced with an administration that is actively hostile towards those who do not fit into the increasingly restrained confines of the heteronormative, the politically disruptive focus of queerness has become even more prescient. The articles contained within this special issue therefore investigate the ways in which queerness is a mode of being and resistance, exploring a range of identifications and subjectifies from different theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives. Indeed, it is the variety of these perspectives on US queerness that is foregrounded and celebrated. The expansive nature of the queer subject also validates how queer studies can be incorporated into other theoretical arenas, whilst the particularity of this historical juncture highlights how queerness can be understood in specific times and placesdemonstrative of how static norms can no longer function yet continue to exert culture force.
Boys in Trouble? White Masculinity in Contemporary American Cinema
Examining the popular notion that masculinity -and, in particular, white masculinity -in contemporary American culture is in a state of 'crisis', this course interrogates representations of normative -white, heterosexual and middle-class -men in recent Hollywood cinema. Looking in detail at key film texts of the last fifteen years, students will be encouraged to consider the political investments in rhetorically potent narratives and images of beleaguered white males. The films' complex negotiations with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality will be explored in depth from a variety of theoretical standpoints as the course works through the output of iconic male stars such as Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks and films including "Die Hard", "Falling Down", "Forrest Gump" and "Fight Club".