July-August 2010
IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, at least two dozen books about Warhol’s life, career, and work have been produced. Is there anything new to say? Tony Scherman and David Dalton’s Pop is an entirely new take on Warhol and his world.
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IN THIS TWO-PART COLLECTION of nine essays, editor David A. B. Murray successfully illuminates what one contributor, Don Kulick, refers to as “the history of homophobic values,” exposing how the universality of homophobia manifests and disseminates itself in heterosexist systems and becomes institutionalized. Each contributor offers a unique take on how anti-gay rhetoric and images of hegemonic privilege develop through a myriad of political, economic, and linguistic instrumentalities.
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WITH THIS BOOK, Michael P. Bibler proposes to show that several works of 20th-century American fiction set on what he calls the Southern “meta-plantation” use same-sex relationships to undermine “the vertical system of paternalistic and patriarchal hierarchies that constitutes the core social structure of every individual plantation.”
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What makes The Summer We Fell Apart a beautiful novel is its stellar characters-and the shimmering scenes it evokes to draw you into their lives as a participant. You find yourself really caring about the four Haas siblings, now that you understand how they became the dysfunctional adults that they are today, and you hope they’ll make it as they struggle through their lives.
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ASSUMPTIONS about what gay life and culture were like before Stonewall—that it was an era of all-consuming repression, secrecy, and shame—might lead one to conclude that depictions of gay people in film and literature were non-existent or, if they did surface, heavily coded. Many film historians have examined the movies of this period, but the history of gay literature, which arguably provides perhaps an even richer history, has not been explored as thoroughly. Of course, one must be willing to allow for a more expansive and inclusive definition of what constitutes “literature.”
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LEO BERSANI begins this collection of essays with a concise list of his three major interests: sexuality, psychoanalysis, and æsthetics. To readers not familiar with Bersani’s work, this list suggests that the book will be more traditionally academic—and dull—than it turns out to be. A better sense of what Bersani is about is found in the second of two interviews that conclude the collection.
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AT THE END of this tantalizing, informative, erudite and resourceful book, English and Women & Gender Studies academic Elisa Glick quotes one of her illustrious predecessors, Rhonda Garelick, on the figure of the dandy: “Critics writing about dandies or their texts fall easily into dandyist style, and succumb to its charms.”
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THE DISCOURSE on homosexuality is a major part of current American culture, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Thus, it is all the more noteworthy that a recent production of As You Like It that ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year, directed by Sam Mendes and cast with a bi-national troupe of American and British actors, seems to go out of its way to suppress the homosexual dynamics that are inherent in Shakespeare’s play. An eerie sense of homophobia comes across as this production unfolds.
MoreWHAT’S WITH THE “GOOD” in the subtitle of your book? people ask me. Couldn’t you get the “best” writing? or (tongue in cheek) is it writing by “good lesbians”? The subtitle of Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing echoes that of an earlier anthology published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing (2004). Editor Raphael Kadushin explained in his introduction that he used “good” because he was tired of every other damn collection’s claim to be the “best” writing—which is logically impossible, after all. I admired his reasoning but avoided repeating his explanation in my own introduction—hence, the questions. Meanwhile, I’d like to address the other questions that the four-word subtitle has raised.
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