The Queening of America

ISBN-13: 9780415903363 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 232 str.

David Van Leer

Opis

Since at least the end of the 19th century, gay culture - its humour, icons, and desires - has been alive and sometimes visible in the midst of straight American society. This text puts forward a series of readings that aim to identify what the author calls the queening of America, a process by which rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral. The study examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight culture. Van Leerthen critiques some current models of making homosexuality visible (the packaging of Joe Orton, the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the rise of gay studies), before concluding more optimistically with the possible alliances between gay culture and other minority discourses.

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 The Queening of America; Chapter 2 Saint Joe; Chapter 3 The Beast of the Closet; Chapter 4 The Body Negative; Chapter 5 What Lola Got;

O autorze

David Van Leer is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Esaays.