Suffering Sappho! : lesbian camp in American popular culture /
An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman crashes through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era's most celebrated drag revue...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New Brunswick, New Jersey :
Rutgers University Press,
[2024].
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| Summary: | An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman crashes through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era's most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promised consensus and appeasing conformity. They could also be cruel, painful and disciplinary jokes. It turns out that an obsession with managing gender and female sexuality after the war would hardly contain them. On the contrary, it spread their campy manifestations throughout mainstream culture. Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! traces a larger-than-life lesbian menace across mid-century media forms to propose five prototypical queer icons-the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon and the rebel. On the pages of comics and sensational pulp fiction and the dramas of television and drive-in movies, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire. |
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| Physical Description: | vii, 233 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781978828261 1978828268 9781978828254 197882825X |