Kylie Minogue as a gay icon: artistic reinvention as coming out, drag aesthetics and the diva

In recent years Margaret Thatcher has come to be represented as a gay icon by a number of prominent right-wing gay men in Britain. This appears to clash with her record in office, on the basis of which she has previously been seen as a staunch enemy of gay liberation. The origins of a queer presentation of the former Prime Minister lie in the attacks made upon her during her time in office which portrayed her as androgynous and perverse. Such attacks were based on the complicated and ambivalent position she occupied by virtue of being a radical pioneer in her career and a believer in traditional moral standards. Aspects of her ambiguous image were subsequently available for appropriation by interest groups, such as Conservative gay men, who wished to obscure the political record of her government in the context of attempts to legitimate their status within their party in the twenty-first century. There has been extensive study of the ways in which movie stars and other public figures have been established as inspirational figures for the gay community, but the example of Thatcher is exceptional in that she was previously widely attacked for presiding over an allegedly homophobic government. The study of the queer afterlife of Margaret Thatcher as a gay icon, therefore, develops understanding of the ways in which the canon of gay iconicity is a contested cultural field.

In his entry “Who is a Gay Icon?” the Tenoru Gay Times blogmaster notes, “There is a word, gei aikon (gay icon). It probably comes from America. Although I’ve heard it … I’m unfamiliar with it” (Maruyama 2008). The blogmaster’s uncertainty highlights two ambiguities characterizing male gay culture in Japan. While it is evident that some celebrities—for example, pop singer Matsuda Seiko—hold special appeal for gay men, it isn’t wholly clear why their “charisma” is such that they attract the “worship” specifically of these men.1

Is Straight the New Queer?

“We’re All Born Naked and the Rest Is” Mediation: Drag as Automediality

164 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 Stroud, Matthew D. Plot Twists and Critical Turns: Queer Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. 267 pp. MATTHEW STROUD’s interpretations of early modern Spanish plays in Plot Twists and Critical Turns are somewhat polemical and quite personal. Stroud, like many of us, came of academic age when it was standard for our scholarly elders (Maravall et al.) to decree that seventeenth-century Spanish theater is state-oriented and monolithic. But, he notes, scholarship during the past twenty-five years or so has opened up to subversive subtexts, thanks to such alternative theoretical orientations as feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory. He himself is a gay man whose treatment of the plays includes this self-disclosure and who uses the tools of the profession, both venerated traditional philological and historical ones and current cultural studies, to tease out new and sometimes provocative readings. Stroud’s views are unashamedly postmodern, oriented toward twenty-first-century reader-response, and informed by queer theory, buttressed by Freud, Lacan, Butler, Foucault, and those who follow in their intellectual footsteps. “Here it is enough,” Stroud writes, “for a text to ‘read queer,’ or for a play to resonate with a modern gay [or] lesbian spectator, or for one to notice theatrical themes currently associated with alternative sexuality (such as cross-dressing and the like)” (24). His analyses deal with issues as resonant today as pride, shame, and passing. Stroud discusses in detail Lope’s La hermosa Ester, a comedia based on the Old Testament story of Esther. The discussion is inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s observations about the figure’s passing in The Epistemology of the Closet and relies on Isaac Asimov’s biblical scholarship. Stroud works on performativity and cross-dressing (in Calderón’s Las manos blancas no ofenden), the masculine fear of penetration (Fuenteovejuna), and camp (in Moreto’s El lindo don Diego and Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa). The author deals in the sixth chapter with the wonderful character Gila of Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la Vera. She is a cross-dressing mujer varonil who rejects men and loves women; the object of her desire is Queen Isabel, whom Gila also impresses favorably (133). Men are fascinated by and pursue the serrana, to her misfortune and theirs. Eventually embittered by mistreatment and deception, for revenge she lures men to have sex but kills them instead. Before being executed for the deaths of 2,000 men, she bites off her father’s ear because he had brought her up too Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 165 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ indulgently (138). (That Stroud calls her a “monster” [137] uncannily recalls the 2003 movie by that name that won an Oscar for Charlize Theron.) In death, Gila is said to resemble St. Sebastian who, Stroud reminds us, in his image of martyrdom became a gay icon (139). While traditional contexts are not of primary concern to Stroud, he brings them in to make important points. This is the case, for example, in chapter 8’s linguistic exploration of the various double- and triple-entendres in the Juan Rana entremeses, demonstrating persuasively that, in fact, “the ‘sin that dare not speak its name’ was apparently not so silent after all” (177). Chapter 9 applies Foucault as well as Freud’s death wish to Cervantes’s Algerian plays, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel. The consideration of Francisquito’s martyrdom in the latter comedia sets up the tenth chapter’s comparison of the spectacle of Fernando’s martyrdom in El príncipe constante with sadomasochistic gay pornography. Stroud points out that Christian iconography “has a long history of images and stories that are both devotional and sensual, if not overtly sexual, at the same time” (203). One might disagree with Stroud’s characterization, following John Champagne, that martyrdom, like pornography, is “nonproductive expenditure” (205), or having “no future,” to cite Lee Edelman’s phrase. Nevertheless, the discussion is fascinating. The religious martyr attains honor by a total letting go of the ego, by complete...

Reviewed by: Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America by Guy Davidson Jeff Solomon Guy Davidson. Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America. Stanford UP, 2019. 227 pp. How can there be queer celebrities when sexual queerness itself is censored? Guy Davidson incisively explores this paradox through the literary careers of three mid-century US writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—whose queerness was undeniably present and presently deniable in the public eye and ear, even as it contributed to their celebrity. All three constantly invoked homosexuality, either directly in their work or indirectly in their literary personae, though they actively denied or passively refused to confirm their own sexual practice. They certainly had no desire to be queer icons or activists—or, if they did, they kept that interest private. Baldwin was highly invested in his value as an icon of the Civil Rights movement and knew that his homosexuality lessened his public value to the movement. Nonetheless, he offers a preeminent example of gay fame or, as Davidson describes it, proto-gay fame, as gayness in the post-Stonewall, identitarian sense was still coagulating. Sontag was not proto-lesbian as Baldwin was proto-gay, but her association with camp and other aspects of gay male culture indicates how "gay male culture, as the most widely publicized version of queerness, may enable other kinds of queer cross-identification" (5). At the same time, she rigorously maintained her straight bona fides. While Vidal's fiction and life were preoccupied with homosexual acts, Vidal himself, a queer theorist avant la lettre, took great relish in insisting that homosexuality was an act unto itself, independent from any orientation, much less the marker of a distinct population. Nonetheless, Vidal, like Sontag and Baldwin, was unable to control either his celebrity or its association with homosexuality. Davidson explains how the specifics of public life in the 1960s led to a strange parallel between the status of celebrity and homosexuality, as both were entangled with sexual liberation. The changes in the parameters of acceptable inquiry into the private lives of public figures were coeval with the same forces that shaped gay men and women into a newly politicized minority. If the personal is the political, then so was the sex life of James Baldwin, whether he wrote about it or not. And he did not: There are only three mentions of homosexuality in all his nonfiction, all considered by Davidson, though sexual queerness suffuses Baldwin's novels. Davidson carefully explains how these three writers—who, for most or all of their lives, did not assert a gay or lesbian identity—nonetheless served the nascence of gay and lesbian liberation. And as homosexuality was "fundamental to the [End Page 590] cultural shifts and the political effects collected under the differently weighted but overlapping rubrics of the 'sexual revolution' and the 'counterculture'" (13), so the queerness of these writers reverberated through 1960s US culture, and not just in queer communities. For the counterculture, "unorthodox lifeways constitute forms of political resistance" (187), and homosexuality was the least orthodox form at large in the public eye. One of the most valuable aspects of Categorically Famous is Davidson's analysis of how Sontag's celebrity relates to her simultaneous identification with and distancing from gay male culture. How did "Notes on 'Camp'"—an analysis, tribute, and repudiation that anticipated the counterculture through its fusion of politics and unorthodox sexual styles—place Sontag so firmly within the proscenium of the public intellectuals? Sontag's repudiation of her own queerness is not surprising, but her indirect assertion of it is. Davidson illustrates how, despite the claims of "Against Interpretation," "responses to [Sontag's] persona indicate that erotics and hermeneutics are not easily separated" (86). Her overt eschewal of the personal is contradicted by the "flirtation with the autobiographical—and the sexual—that flickers through and tempers [her] otherwise austerely deindividualized style" (73). Davidson reconciles Sontag's studied performance of a celebrity intellectual with her frequently reproduced glamour shots, which use Hollywood Golden Age techniques to halo her supposed austerity, and shows how her critical devotion to form rather than content often served as "a...

Popular mainstream cinema often sensationalizes, stigmatizes, and even ridicules religions, faiths, congregations, and the religiously observant. The (mis)representation of religious communities is sometimes even more negative in films that centre on religious gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people, and their presumably homophobic congregations. This article offers an initial exploration of a new kind of Israeli film at the beginning of the third millennium, defined here as the New Israeli Religious Queer Cinema. These films, mostly created by religious filmmakers who are members of sexual minorities, are intended to promote tolerance and greater acceptance of homosexuality by the Jewish Orthodox communities in Israel. This research, particularly focused on Chaim Elbaum's acclaimed short film And Thou Shalt Love (2008) [Ve'ahavta], examines the cinematic attempts to reduce hostility towards sexual minorities among religious believers, and problematizes the portrayal of the young protagonist's angst and this new cinema's politics of martyrdom and victimhood. The article also analyses the creation of a sort of Jewish version of Saint Sebastian, the ancient Christian martyr who is often perceived as a gay icon, and this new cinema's genuine attempts to explore homoerotic subtleties in Jewish tradition.

On June 13, 1934, the infamous ‘General Principles’ of the Production Code acquired the sharp teeth of enforceability when Hollywood's studios agreed to submit all scripts to a central censoring agency, the Production Code Administration, for approval. ‘No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented…’1 But several silver linings immediately emerged around the darkening clouds of compulsory inhibitions, particularly sexual restrictions. For one thing, screenwriters and directors quickly realized that if they removed the sex from sexual combat they would still be left with the combat, and the subgenre of screwball comedy was born: bickering, bantering couples became a mainstay of US comedy for at least the next two decades.2 On another front, though in a somewhat less chronologically definitive way, an increased level of sexual repression onscreen only served to encourage a particular segment of the mass audience to react in a radical way in terms of identification: certain men crossed genders and adopted a new kind of female star as their own. I am referring to gay men's appropriation of Bette Davis as a screen icon par excellence.3

Review: <i>Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in the Twenty-First Century Popular Music</i>, by Kai Arne Hansen

Media representations are often thought to be reflections of reality; however, we know that the depictions of sexuality that we are exposed to often diverge far from the norm. The representations that are put forth for consumption often set unrealistic expectations for behavior and pleasure. These expectations are also different for men and women in terms of what is considered to be acceptable or morally right. Depictions of sexuality are often heteronormative and may not address variations in sexual orientations and sexual expressions. This entry discusses historical and current representations of sexuality in media, differences in portrayals of male and female sexuality, representations of alternative sexualities and sexual orientations, and current and future directions of media representations of sexuality and their analysis.

The first “camgirls” of the late 1990s placed cameras in their homes and broadcast their private lives on the internet. This chapter examines the “lifecasting” practice of two “camgirls” from the late 1990s: Ana Voog of anacam.com and Jennifer Ringley of JenniCAM.org and argues that such autobiographical media contributed to the changing contemporary media landscape where “reality” (or at least its appearance) was a valuable entertainment commodity. This chapter locates Voog and Ringley’s lifecasting within a rich history of art practice in which women artists have used their own bodies as media, and considers camgirls as pioneers of webcam technology who engaged with anxieties around identity on the internet, feminine embodiment and the gaze, visibility, and the consumption of eroticised female bodies.

Just Fantasy? Online Pornography's Contribution to Experiences of Harm

This chapter begins with a more extensive discussion of gay and lesbian cinema since 2010; outlines Linda Williams' notion of carnal knowledge; and finally offers a discussion as to how 120 BPM extends carnal knowledge in the cinema through realism. Gay male sex is often equated to heterosexual, vaginal sex in cinema because anal sex in particular is commonly represented as something gay men can just ‘do', without the need for preparation, douching or anal stretching. French cinema began to become increasingly extreme in its depiction of sex and also violence in the latter stages of the twentieth century. European and North American gay and lesbian cinema has been noticeably marked by two factors since 2010: a turn towards realism and an increase in sexual explicitness. Linda Williams' notion of carnal knowledge is important within the study of sex on-screen, but it has been either ignored or under-developed by academics in film and media studies.

Zhou Jielun, more famously known as Jay Chou, is the most popular Chinese music artist of the past decade. Credited with inventing a new pop genre, Zhongguo feng (中国风) music, Chou enjoys record sales, a massive fan base, and packed concerts. Despite rampant piracy in China, which typically causes a 90 to 95 percent decrease in the sales volume of the Chinese recording industry (Fung, 2008), each of his records has exceeded 2 million in sales (baidu.com, 2010). It is difficult to measure the exact number of Chou fans, but Chou has been named the most popular music idol among Chinese aged 9–14 across at least five urban centres (baidu. com, 2010). In 2006, he was the number one favourite star among people aged 8–25 across seven East Asian and Southeast Asian countries (baidu.com, 2010). He has also been noted as a top Asian celebrity endorser for sports marketing (Liao, Chen, and Hsu, 2009).

222 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 Keith McMahon. Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Durham and London : Duke University Press, 1995. xii, 378 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 08223 -1555-6. Paperback $19.95, isbn 0-8223-1566-1. Keith McMahon continues to map out new terrain in his second book, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists. By surveying a wide range ofeighteenth-century novels (here broadly defined as works from 1680 to 1820) for depictions ofpolygamy, Professor McMahon has compiled a rich sourcebook on fictional treatments oflateimperial gender and sexuality. The issues raised in this book will be important for those scholars interested in literary history, gender studies, and cultural studies. The first two chapters contextualize the fictional world ofthese novels within two other textual representations ofsexuality: the household manual, which warns of the social threat to the stability ofthe household ofexcessive emotional attachments, and the ars erotica, which reveals the potentially life-threatening danger of improper sexual behavior. The depictions of sexuality in the novels are often casebook illustrations of these two discursive traditions. Though brief mention is made of actual elite marriage and sexual practices, the study is about texts rather than practice. The distinction between fictional constructs and real people is occasionally muddied when McMahon ascribes psychological agency to the fictional archetypes, as in the following passage: "Crossing ofgender thus appears to be another form ofescapist regression, like the miser's, a self-centered, makeshift, and infantile attempt to preempt sexual division. In other words, all such regression is infantile and make-believe, an indication of the man's refusal or inability to give up the authority he has or thinks he has" (p. 289). It is unclear in this passage whether McMahon is ascribing psychological agency to the fictional characters or to the individual or collective unconscious ofthe author(s), where psychological agency truly lies. A much larger issue raised by McMahon's analysis of male sexual behavior is whether Freudian models ofpsychosexual development are universally applicable. What, for example, is the normative male subjectivity from which these characters are "regressing"? What Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists does best is introduce a wealth ofnew material on eighteenth-century fiction and the sexual imagination. The novels discussed range from shorter, formulaic scholar-beauty novels to lengthy and hybrid scholar novels. A number of these novels are available only in rare-book col-© 1996 by University lections, and manyhave received litde more thanbibliographic attention in either Chinese or Western scholarship. Chapter-length studies are devoted to Yesou puyan (A country codger's words of exposure) (for the sake of clarity, I will follow McMahon's translations of titles), Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamofHawai 'i Press Reviews 223 ber), QiIu deng (Lantern at the fork in the road), and the less well researched Lin Lan Xiang(The six wives ofthe wastrel Geng), Lu ye xianzong (Trails ofImmortals in the green wilds), Shenlou zhi (The mirage oflove), and Emu yingxiong zhuan (Tales ofboy and girl heroes). The chapters defining chaste and erotic romances discuss more than a dozen shorter scholar-beauty romances. For each of these novels, McMahon provides a quick synopsis and briefbibliographic notes; lively translations from the novels are woven throughout the analyses. However, from my perspective as a literary historian, I wish more information on editions and textual history had been provided, especially for the rarer novels. The complicated mosaic ofsexual and gender variations which emerges from McMahon's discussion ofthese novels reveals that sexuality was a major preoccupation ofthe late-imperial literati imagination, despite the supposed disinterest of Confucianism in matters sexual: monogamy, polygamy, celibacy, male and female homosexuality, female domination, and transvestism are just some of the themes treated. The sheer number ofworks discussed in this study provides a clearer vantage point from which to consider the depictions ofgender and sexual practices in mid-Qing fiction: which images are repeated so frequendy as to be "normative" of fictional standards, and which can rightiy be called subversive or transgressive? With the exception of the discussion of the narrative of successful polygamy in Emu yingxiong zhuan as a response to Honglou meng (chapter 13), the...