Gay Icon Research Articles

Cogiendo en luto

Chavela Vargas is widely known for her unique approach to some of México’s most celebrated musical genres. Though undoubtedly a queer icon within and outside of México, critical scholarship has only recently begun to focus on the way her queer migrant subjectivity and marimacho voice, persona, and performances reinvent Mexican sonic history and interpellate listeners queerly. Importantly, her aching vocals and tragic life story coexist with pulsating sexual energy. In this essay I argue that Chavela inaugurates a postmortem politics in which grief and the erotic are held together, instead of separated or silenced by taboo. Inspired by Chavela, I introduce the practice of cogiendo en luto (fucking in grief), which asks the difficult questions: What happens when Eros and Thanatos go to bed together? How can the erotic help to shape grief, and vice versa? By linking Eros to Thanatos, Chavela makes the grief she experienced throughout her life transformative, intimate, expansive, introspective, chaotic, and at certain privileged moments erotic, orgasmic, and sensual. The essay samples lyrics and performances of some of Chavela’s songs, film cameos, and an obituary written about her by Pedro Almodóvar. Together, these queer performative interventions re-signify the grief of migration, addiction, heartbreak, and death, while forging an affective and fleshy relationship with listeners and spectators. As a queer and grieving listener/spectator/fan of Chavela’s, I also weave my own grief into the essay, reflecting on what Chavela meant to my healing process and further underscoring her unique affective contributions to contemporary queer subjectivities and soundscapes.

Of divas and diaries: Externalizing the internal in Trevor

This article examines the Oscar-winning film Trevor, paying particular attention to how the filmmakers depict the public/external and private/internal aspects of the title character’s identity as he comes to terms with being gay and navigates the coming-out process. The backbone of the film’s narrative is a series of diary entries voiced aloud by Trevor, granting the viewer access to his private thoughts. The film’s soundtrack, consisting mostly of songs by Diana Ross, further externalizes Trevor’s private feelings while linking him to queer culture through his worship of a gay icon. Through a discussion of these elements, this article argues that Trevor uses its narrative structure along with various visual and sonic techniques to illuminate the public and private aspects of coming out in a productive and empowering way.

Queering the Mainstream: Anna Melikian’s About Love (2015)

ABSTRACT About Love (2015), Anna Melikian’s fourth film, is her first attempt at mainstream cinema. Mimicking the form of an almanac film, it comprises five apparently discrete but intimately interconnected short films, or novellas, all set in Moscow. Their most obvious link is the film’s central thread: a lecture about love at the Strelka Institute, attended by the protagonists of some of the novellas and delivered by one of them: an expert on the topic, played by Renata Litvinova. None of the novellas directly addresses non-heteronormative sexualities, through focussing on same-sex relationships. However, the centrality of Litvinova – arguably Russian cinema’s most prominent queer icon – introduces an unignorable note of the queer. On closer viewing, moreover, it becomes clear both that the film does depict queer identities, subjectivities and relationships and that it is queer in other ways. Drawing on various queer and feminist theoretical approaches, this article therefore argues that About Love depicts post-2013 Moscow as a place that can accommodate and celebrate queerness, demonstrating that Melikian’s representation of love challenges the ostensible narrative assumptions of heterosexual normativity and offers, as a queer counterpoint to the mainstream, a range of compelling non-normative representations of love and the self.

Big Bang Theory

By presenting the supposedly “nostalgic” and “traditional” genre operetta as a genderfuck spectacle, without opera singers and with queer icons and dancers instead, “gay Jewish kangaroo” Barrie Kosky has revolutionized popular musical theatre in Berlin and brought operetta back to its pre-1933 roots.

The Future Is Furby

The Future Is Furby

Global TV Horror

Global TV Horror

From Shy Tomboy to Queer Icon: Kristen Stewart and Embodying/Overcoming Anxiety in Contemporary Hollywood

From Shy Tomboy to Queer Icon: Kristen Stewart and Embodying/Overcoming Anxiety in Contemporary Hollywood

Translating gender indeterminacy: the queering of gender identities in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre

ABSTRACT Qiu Miaojin, a lesbian icon in 1990s Taiwan, left behind the quasi-memoir novel Last Words from Montmartre in 1995 that features her unique hermaphroditism ideology. Through the first-person narrative, Qiu obfuscates binary gender categories, and subverts rigid gender norms and cisgenderism. A key value of this epistolary novel is her playful manipulation of fluid sexualities via pronominal markers to break free of the shackles of gender dysphoria. Since the 1990s, research attention has been given to the emerging gender/queer-related issues in translated literatures. However, issues pertaining to the de-gendering of homoeroticism and discursive intersexuality in literary translation remain underexplored. This article explores how Qiu’s queer politics in this novel have been reproduced in Heinrich’s 2014 English translation. Based on the “gender performativity” theory, findings indicate that Qiu’s queer ideology and de-gendered language have been accurately rendered for the Anglophone readership.

A Gender Journey

A Gender Journey

Fashioning a “Male Actress”

This research documents the fashioning of Charles Pierce, a prominent female impersonator in the mid-to-late twentieth century. During his career of over forty years, Pierce delivered acclaimed comedic impressions of gay icons such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. This paper contextualizes and interprets the development of Pierce’s cross-dressing from tuxedo and a few woman’s fashion accessories (to avoid arrest) to full drag. Pierce’s career as self-styled “male actress” coincided with the gay liberation movement. Much has been written about drag, less about female impersonators, and no known research examining their costumes. This article thus provides a rare analysis of the material culture of female impersonation through Pierce’s costumes and accessories at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California plus the Charles Pierce papers at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Library for the Performing Arts.

Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment

Review Article| June 01 2021 Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. By Davis, Carol Bunch. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2015. x, 210 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. By Crawford, Margo Natalie. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2017. xi, 264 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $28.00; e-book, $19.95.Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. By Fenderson, Jonathan. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2019. xiv, 255 pp. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.95.Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture. By Gates, Racquel J.Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2018. 248 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; e-book available. K. Merinda Simmons K. Merinda Simmons K. Merinda Simmons is professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama. Her books include Race and New Modernisms (coauthored with James A. Crank, 2019), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (coedited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., 2015), Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (2014), and Race and Displacement (coedited with Maha Marouan, 2013). She is working on a monograph tentatively entitled “Sourcing Slave Religion: Theorizing Experience in the Archive.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (2): 307–327. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003610 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation K. Merinda Simmons; Giving Postblackness the Silent Treatment. American Literature 1 June 2021; 93 (2): 307–327. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003610 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Janelle Monáe has demonstrated herself to be a lot of things. The talented actress, queer icon, and social activist has also brought Afrofuturism to popular music by way of android alter ego Cindi Mayweather, who Monáe has suggested represents societal fear and resonance with otherness. Her single from The Electric Lady, “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2013), with Erykah Badu, bears an acronym for structurally marginalized communities: “queer,” “untouchables,” “emigrants,” “excommunicated,” “negroid”—all “others” represented by the android trope. The song’s video begins with an announcer on a screen at the Living Museum (where black1 figures are frozen in active poses) suggesting, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel” (Monáe 2013). Sitting at a desk at the center of these rebels is Monáe, who reanimates along with the rest of the exhibited bodies as she starts singing. As time travelers, they... Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Issue Section: Review Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Will Rogers’ 1920s (1976), An American Family (1973) and The War Room (1993): A Cowboy’s Guide to the Pristine Sunshine and Wars in the Name of Peace

The study compares the responses of an artist, a common man and an American president to the times by analyzing the content of three documentary films: Will Rogers’ 1920s: A Cowboy’s Guide to the Times, An American Family (1973) and The War Room (1993) from the twentieth century. Will Rogers’1920s gives an insight into the simple life of a jongleur and a troubadour, cowboy cum actor, Will Rogers who was famous for topical humor in 1920s and whose life size sculpture occupies space in the American White House to keep an eye on the deeds of the greatest world leaders. An American Family, the world’s first ever reality show, documents real life events of seven members of a common American family and provide a contrast to the perfect Hollywood family portrait in 12 episodes. The War Room focuses on the president Clinton’s political agenda during his 1992 election campaign. The authors reviewed literature on the said documentaries and history of documentary film, American institutions and movements by Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, Jeffrey Ruoff, Peter C. Rollins, Peter Ian Crawford, Klin Richard, Chris Hegedus, Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles. The study finds that Will Rogers learned to share his inherent happiness with the American audience by mollifying and disciplining many of their anxieties in the context of industrialization and the world war in 1920s. An American family is disturbing yet hilarious and presents a real portrait of the American family against 70s “culturally polyglot confluence backdrops” (Ellis and McLane 254). Pat Loud divorces her husband on air and their son Lance Loud becomes the first gay icon of the ‘gay decade,’ as several feminist, gay/lesbian, and civil rights, antiwar, ecology, and environmental protection movements takeover America. An American Family shows the mundane truth of everyday life in its social context. Its controlled realism reflects the filmmaker’s social conscience for audience’s identification and political action. The War Room celebrates the ideology of war during the president Clinton’s election campaign.

Celebrating Bowery: Radical costume parties as queer heterotopia in Brisbane

This visual essay explores the creative practice of The Stitchery Collective, which uses costume as a strategy in their participatory works. Inspired by performance artist, queer icon and costume lover Leigh Bowery, The Stitchery Collective has created The Bowery Party, a series of events encouraging radical dress up. These immersive occasions emphasize the significance of costume as enabling joy, community and extravagant social performance. The essay discusses the importance of Bowery as a figure in designing the party in terms of the nature of participant responses, as his legacy provides a subversive approach to costuming the self. The analysis focuses on strategies for and the importance of making and holding space, both physical and virtual, for alternate visions of the body – an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. The costumes created by the attending public are challenging, often both to wear and to social, gender and body norms. This essay offers a brief example of the costumes created by participants in direct response to Bowery as a radical, slippery and chaotic aesthetic target.

Sticky: The Vazaleen Posters

Vazaleen was a monthly serial queer party in Toronto founded by artist and promoter Will Munro (1975-2010) in 2000. Munro commissioned Toronto-based artist Michael Comeau (1975-) to create many silkscreen poster advertisements for these parties. His designs include an array of typographic treatments, references to popular culture and queer icons, and vibrant colour schemes. This article discusses these posters in relationship to Michel Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia, Roland Barthes’ semiotic analysis of advertising, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing on camp.

Of Rainbow Unicorns. The Role of Bonding Queer Icons in Contemporary LGBTIQ+ Re-Positionings

Nel corso degli ultimi anni, le icone queer hanno svolto una funzione duplice e conflittuale: dissimulare prudentemente la realta con lo scopo di rappresentarla esplicitamente. Questo gioco ambiguo, con i suoi limiti geografici e dovute riflessioni contestuali, ha fornito alla comunita LGBTIQ+ spazi di riappropriazione e abrogazione di alcuni imperativi egemonici maschili. Tuttavia, tale approccio ha portato a un posizionamento idiosincratico in cui tale pratica politica puo semplicemente rappresentare un’altra posizione marginale, essendo essa affermatasi sempre e comunque in rapporto all’egemonico. Questo saggio, analizzando la proliferazione dei cosiddetti oggetti iconici queer, presenta il concetto emergente di ‘bonding icons’ e la loro iscrizione all’interno di un sistema di affiliazione come promotori attivi della comunita queer e della nuova agenda politica. I discorsi ri-semiotizzati che ne risultano sembrano ricostruire l’alterita queer in vari modi, reiterandola in un ‘altro’ significato simile e correlabile la cui iconicita e in grado di fornire forme di rassicurazione e validazione ed evocando discorsivamente un allineamento empatico universale.

‘Tintin, gender and desire’

ABSTRACT Gender representation in Les Aventures de Tintin (The Adventures of Tintin) (1929–1986) is problematic and, thus far, inadequately theorised. Firstly, despite the contemporaneous rise of second-wave feminism, Hergé’s women occupy almost exclusively domestic or quotidian roles and are commonly ‘backgrounded’ or even absent for entire adventures. Secondly, departures from this, when they do appear, such as self-made operatic diva Madame Bianca Castafiore, are represented in unflattering terms or as objects of profound ambivalence. So much so, this article argues, as to render the motif axiomatic rather than accidental. However, Tintin himself has been read as strongly feminised, especially in relation to Haddock, and one could even argue that he is of virtually indeterminate gender. Related to this is the issue of desire. Despite the Adventures being ostensibly aimed at children, using psychoanalytic criticism a number of commentators have teased out evidence of both a sublimated Oedipal family drama and occluded sexual subtexts. Via discussion of requisitions of Tintin as a gay icon and critical arguments surrounding both hetero- and homoerotic subtexts, I conclude that the hero’s queering – in the broadest sense of the term – is vital to a critical understanding of Tintin and perhaps even Tintin’s cultural rehabilitation.

Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America by Guy Davidson

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...

The Book of Daniel by Aaron Smith

Reviewed by: The Book of Daniel by Aaron Smith Savannah Sipple (bio) Aaron Smith. The Book of Daniel. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 108 pages. Softcover. $17.00. Aaron Smith. The Book of Daniel. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 108 pages. Softcover. $17.00. To some readers, Aaron Smith's newest poetry collection The Book of Daniel might read like an homage to pop culture, poetry, and gay icons, but these poems ache with lust, anger, desire, grief, and sex, and they offer no apologies for not being able to reconcile the ways those things coexist. Smith writes about our culture's fascination with celebrity by weaving together names familiar in both pop culture and the literary world. In the poem "Celebrity," he says: [End Page 119] Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.Thomas James died in 1974 and was bornin Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wroteLetters to a Stranger before he killed himself.I've written three books few people readand wanted to kill myself. [and later] ….I wentto the building in SoHo where Heath Ledger died.Flowers on the sidewalk, body bag dragged outunder camera flash. I tried to explain to engineersI worked for why his death was a big deal, but they werehomophobic and incapable of nonlinear thinking. Literary and cultural icons carry the same significance for Smith, and this poem sets the tone for the entire collection. First, it captures the way we often try to make personal connections with those we idolize. We could be them: Todd Haynes took a blade to Barbie'sface to make it look like Karen Carpenter lost weight.Basquiat and Winehouse were 27, too. If the elevator triesto bring you down. If pills plus alcohol plus fame, thenthe answer must be River Phoenix. Go crazy. The rest of the collection holds nothing back in the way it tackles complexities of being gay, having a deeply religious upbringing, and fighting to simply exist. It's hard to choose whether Smith's honesty is the sharpest in regard to grief or desire. The title poem of the collection "The Book of Daniel" is not, in fact, a retelling of the Biblical [End Page 120] lion's den, but is a litany of desire about Daniel Craig. It uses the modus operandi of a serial killer to capture his obsession: I fell in love with Daniel Craigwhen he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love—before he was Bond-hot and too famous. I fantasize howI could kidnap the guy from the gym whose nipplesslip out of his Red Sox tank top. He acts like it's okayto love his body. I could use chloroform or a gunto take him. I'm not sure what to do after that,but I eat hard candy in bed and imagine it. We associate serial killers with violence because if we associate them with desire, then don't we all have the potential to cross that line? And where does the line begin: with a scrapbook, a journal, a lock of hair? Does it start with a stare at the gym, a sweet in the mouth? In all of this winding of desire and obsession and violence, Smith drops a subtle line in "He acts like it's okay / to love his body," and there the duality deepens. Which does the speaker desire more: the guy from the gym or his confidence? Do we want to be celebrities, or do we want to be with them? We hold multitudes of beings within ourselves and this is what makes our relationships complex and sometimes painful, particularly for queer folks whose parents tell us to "get AIDS and die," as noted in Smith's "The Dancing Lesbian." It feels like the mother-son relationship has moved past this painful moment, but it captures the ways in which contrasting emotions can exist at once. Because of this, it seems fitting that interspersed with desire, The Book of Daniel also captures the grief of a parent's cancer diagnosis; the presence of one emotion...

Evitas queer en las calles de Buenos Aires

Eva Perón (1919-1952), política argentina reconocida a nivel internacional, se ha convertido en un ícono queer. Desde tal resignificación, diversxs artistas han producido obras que tienen a Evita como su protagonista, históricamente relegados al underground cultural. Sin embargo, a lo largo de 2019, centenario del natalicio de Evita, diversas performances colectivas tuvieron lugar en las calles de Buenos Aires; en las cuales, militantes peronistas, feministas y de las disidencias sexuales le rindieron homenaje y manifestaron su apoyo a la fórmula peronista que competirá en las próximas elecciones presidenciales. Por tanto, el objetivo del presente artículo es explorar el devenir social y artístico en el que las performances queer sobre Eva comenzaron a abandonar lentamente la marginalidad cultural hasta aparecer en el centro porteño, a plena luz del día.

James Franco and the queer art of failure

ABSTRACTFor 20 years, James Franco has carved out a celebrity reputation distinguished by its mercurial character. Does he aspire to full-fledged stardom or some new variant of character-actor status? Is he a mainstream figure or a cult fixture, a cultural aspirant or a connoisseur and purveyor of sleaze aesthetics, a bro-ish guy’s guy, a la his dude-in-waiting Seth Rogen, or a queer icon in the making? Evidence for any or all of these alternatives circulates indiscriminately through his hectic, over-stuffed résumé. Throughout Franco’s wildly prolific career – 17 credits in 2017 alone, with another 10 already announced for 2018 – he has also flirted with queerness. Though identifying as essentially straight, he said in a widely circulated interview, ‘I’m gay in my work.’ This essay examines the distinctive aesthetic that Franco’s career articulates. I argue that Franco’s work, in refusing stable definition and challenging traditional notions of artistic quality, expresses a fascination with failure that takes on explicitly queer ramifications in its principle of over-production, subverting ordinary norms of success and linking a kind of artistic promiscuity to his own performances of masculinity.