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...

The Only Black Man at the Party: Joni Mitchell Enters the Rock Canon

Nov. 1, 2012

[1] On Halloween of 1976, a week before her thirty-third birthday, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell strutted into a Los Angeles party in dark pancake makeup and a pimp’s suit and passed for a black man. For the next six years, Mitchell appeared intermittently in this character, whom she named Art Nouveau...

A Body That Does Not Compare: How White Men Define Black Female Beauty in the Era of Colorblindness

Oct. 1, 2012

“Just the term ‘black women’ conjures up thoughts of an overweight, dark-skinned, loud, poorly educated person with gold teeth yelling at somebody in public. I hope that doesn’t make me racist but honestly that’s the 1st thing I think of.”- Lee, middle class white male in his 30’s, from Florida...

Soldiers of Feeling: Masculinity and Patriotism in Innes Munro’s Military Memoirs

Sept. 1, 2012

[1] In the spring of 1789, the impeachment of former East India Company president Warren Hastings for war crimes in India was entering its second year. The outbreak of revolutionary violence in France was still a few months in the future. And a narrative appeared by Innes Munro, a Scottish...

Phallic Nationalism: Limits of Male Homosocial Desire in A Spy on Mother Midnight

Aug. 1, 2012

[1] In this essay, I am interested in how changing expectations of masculinity are reflected in the erotic text A Spy on Mother Midnight; or, the Templar Metamorphosed and parts two and three of that text, printed the same year, A Continuation of Mr. F—‘s Adventures in Petty-Coats and A...

Performing Countercultural Masculinity: Mick, Music and Masquerade in Gimme Shelter

June 1, 2012

[1] Years before MTV, baby boomer audiences consumed images of themselves in widely popular rockumentaries that have since become key documents in our understanding of youth and music cultures of the past. In particular, the 1970 film Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles with Charlotte Zwerin, has been...

Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism: Comedy and Gender Politics on 30 Rock

May 1, 2012

[1] The title of Tina Fey's humorous 2011 memoir, Bossypants, suggests how closely Fey is identified with her Emmy-award winning NBC sitcom 30 Rock (2006-), where she is the "boss"—the show's creator, star, head writer, and executive producer. Fey's reputation as a feminist—indeed, as Hollywood's Token Feminist, as some journalists...

The Gender Entrapment of Neoliberal Development

March 1, 2012

Introduction: The new folk devils [1] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, their classic application of cultural studies, political economy, and critical race studies to the interrogation of "crime," Stuart Hall and his co-authors from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of...

Trifles, Abominations, and Literary Gossip: Gendered Rhetoric and Nineteenth-Century Scrapbooks

Feb. 1, 2012

We Perceive, by the last London Atlas, that scrapbooks and albums are going entirely out of fashion in England. This is one of those foreign examples, which, we trust, will be enthusiastically followed here. We give this information thus early for the government of misses in their teens, scribblers of...

Queering Couplehood: Robert & John Allerton and Historical Perspectives on Kinship

Jan. 3, 2012

[1] On March 4, 1960, Robert Allerton became a father. He was 86 at the time and his newly adopted son, John Wyatt Gregg, was 60. They had met 38 years previously at a "Father-Son" fraternity banquet at the University of Illinois where the single and childless Allerton, 49, had...

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