Making a Meal of Manhood: Revisiting Rope and the Question of Hitchcock’s Homophobia

Dec. 1, 2012

[1] When D. A. Miller published “Anal Rope,” an essay about Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948), in 1990, the AIDS crisis was still raging in the United States, no effective treatment for it was available, homophobia was at its height, and George Bush had taken office, extending his predecessor Ronald...

Misfortune and Men’s Eyes: Voyeurism, Sorrow, and the Homosocial in Three Early Brian De Palma Films

May 1, 2009

[1] In her groundbreaking essay “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams argues that “Brian De Palma’s film Dressed to Kill extends Psycho ‘s premise by holding the woman [Kate Miller, played by Angie Dickinson] responsible for the horror that destroys her” (94). De Palma extends much more than Psycho’s premise...

Flesh in the Word: Billy Budd, Sailor, Compulsory Homosociality, and the Uses of Queer Desire

March 1, 2003

[1] Providing the meaning to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, has become an initiation rite in theory and criticism culture. The meaning of Billy Budd usually comes in the form of the position which the critic takes on the novella’s presumably central moral question: the Case either For or Against...