Guy Davidson

Categorically Famous

Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The first sustained study of the relations between literary celebrity and queer sexuality, Categorically Famous looks at the careers of three celebrity writers-James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal-in relation to the gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1960s. While none of these writers "came out" in our current sense, all contributed, through their public images and their writing, to a greater openness toward homosexuality that was an important precondition of liberation. Their fame was crucial, for instance, to the growing conception of homosexuals as an oppressed minority rather than as individuals with a psychological problem. Challenging scholarly orthodoxies, Guy Davidson urges us to rethink the usual opposition to liberation and to gay and lesbian visibility within queer studies as well as standard definitions of celebrity. The conventional ban on openly discussing the homosexuality of public figures meant that media reporting at the time did not focus on his protagonists' private lives. At the same time, the careers of these "semi-visible" gay celebrities should be understood as a crucial halfway point between the era of the open secret and the present-day post-liberation era in which queer people, celebrities very much included, are enjoined to come out.

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Produktdetails

• Post 45
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Juni 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 160mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 532g
• ISBN-13: 9781503602359
• ISBN-10: 1503602354
• Artikelnr.: 53538668

Autorenporträt

Guy Davidson is Associate Professor of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
While recognizing the historical contingency of sexual identity categories,
the Introduction argues against the standard queer theoretical view that
these categories operate as forms of social coercion. It is proposed that
an examination of the 1960s careers of three celebrity writers-James
Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal-puts in doubt the reflexive
valorization of instability, indeterminacy, and opacity that has come to
dominate queer studies. Though each of these writers had complicated
relations to sexual liberation generally and homosexual liberation
specifically, their work contributed importantly to the increasing
publicization of gay life that characterized the 1960s and that was an
important precondition of gay and lesbian liberation. Close attention to
their careers necessitates a rethinking of queer theory's critique of gay
and lesbian openness.
1James Baldwin and Celebrity Shame
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that Baldwin transmuted the matter of
homosexuality-defined as shameful by American culture-into literary
success. Drawing on recent scholarship on the theoretical and political
implications of shame, and examining a wide range of Baldwin's writings,
the chapter suggests that shame was at the heart of both Baldwin's
celebrity performance and his representation of homosexuality and that
consideration of the operation of this affect helps in understanding
Baldwin's complicated relation to gay identity and the liberatory politics
that formed around it. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of
Baldwin's 1954 essay on André Gide, "The Male Prison," which, it is
suggested, presents an image of queer solidarity that anticipates the sense
of community that was crucial for gay liberation and that is also played
out in audience relations with Baldwin-despite his own overt opposition to
gay identity and his distance from the gay subculture.
2Baldwin and the Celebrity Novel
chapter abstract
This chapter continues the investigation of relations between Baldwin's
celebrity embodiment of queerness and the formation of a recognizably
contemporary form of politicized gay identity, homing in on Another Country
(1962) and addressing in a less sustained fashion Tell Me How Long the
Train's Been Gone (1968). The chapter proposes that the novels are an apt
focus for Baldwin's considerations of celebrity and sexuality in the public
sphere because the novel is a mode in which the relations between public
and private are in particularly charged tension. The two novels are viewed
as "celebrity novels," not only because they feature celebrity or
proto-celebrity protagonists but also because they are extensions of
Baldwin's celebrity persona, in which what he insisted is the private
matter of homosexuality is paradoxically bodied forth.
3Susan Sontag's Impersonal Stardom
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses Susan Sontag's 1960s work and media image in
relation to the discourse of stardom. Referring to her photographed image,
her essays of the 1960s, and her novel The Benefactor (1963), the chapter
works with and against film-star studies to develop an account of Sontag's
queer iconicity. The chapter argues that Sontag's star effect solicits
eroticized audience attention in the very act of seeming to repel it
through her vaunted "impersonality." The effect is produced by the overlap
between the general operations of star construction and the impersonal
aloofness of her prose. Through the queer allure of her image and her
groundbreaking 1960s essays, Sontag helped promote unorthodox sexual
identities and attitudes, even as she avoided association with lesbianism.
4From Camp to Counterculture
chapter abstract
This chapter argues against long-standing queer arguments that Sontag saw
camp and the gay subculture as apolitical and that her views were
homophobically tinged. Concentrating on her famous essay "Notes on 'Camp'"
(1964), other key Sontag essays from the 1960s, and their contemporaneous
reception, the chapter argues that Sontag contradictorily elaborates a view
of gay subcultural expression as apolitical and aestheticized and discloses
an investment in sexuality itself-and arguably queer sexuality above all-as
a form of freedom. Picking up on the liberatory hints within "Camp" and
other essays, the chapter considers how Sontag as a celebrity intellectual
helped disseminate ideas about the sexual revolution and consequently set
the coordinates of what came to be known as the "counterculture."
5The Moment of Myra Breckinridge
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses how Gore Vidal's satirical best-selling novel Myra
Breckinridge (1968) helped usher in gay liberation, even while manifesting
aspects of antiliberationist critique. It argues that the novel's
ambivalent perspective toward the emergent gay-liberation discourse is
inextricably related to the category of celebrity with which Vidal also had
a complicated relationship. While Vidal reveled in his fame, he was also
critical of celebrity culture, and Myra Breckinridge is one of his most
trenchant and extended critiques, even as it is animated by his own fannish
relation to 1940s Hollywood and its stars. Yet Myra became a media event,
and the eponymous narrator-heroine, like Vidal, became a kind of celebrity,
albeit a virtual one. The chapter argues that Myra the novel and Myra the
virtual celebrity enabled Vidal both to acknowledge his investment in
same-sexuality and deflect his connection to gay identity.
6Gore Vidal's Sexuality in the Public Sphere
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on a heated moment in a live TV debate of 1968, in
which the right-wing pundit William Buckley called Gore Vidal a "queer." I
argue that this moment is a staging post in both the development of open
media talk about the homosexuality of celebrities and in the unfolding of
gay liberation. The moment was widely described by contemporaneous
commentators as "embarrassing," and this chapter argues that thinking about
the social and political implications of embarrassment is helpful in
understanding how 1960s American culture positioned homosexuality and how
queer theory responds to the overt representation of gay identity. The
chapter argues that queer theory, because of its "knowingness" about
sexuality, is unable to adequately register the revelatory, political force
of openness demonstrated by Buckley's embarrassing outburst.
Afterword: Visibility, Revisited; or, Delete the Closet?
chapter abstract
The Afterword focuses on the relations between celebrity and queer sexual
liberation in contemporary culture to demonstrate the continuities and
changes in the publicization of queerness since the 1960s. It argues that
the hypervisibility of culture-industry celebrities has become an important
arena for the exercise of sexual visibility. While the dispensation of the
open secret that pertained during the pre-gay liberation period has largely
been displaced by the injunction to decloset oneself, the seemingly
hard-to-shake logic of sexual identity persists, despite ubiquitous
arguments that the hetero/homo binary has lost its hegemonic power to
organize people's relations to their sexualities. Arguing against the queer
theoretical position that visibility is a ruse of power, the Afterword
contends that the persistence and popularity of acts of celebrity
coming-out indicates the ongoing urgency and vibrancy of the project of
sexual liberation.