Suchergebnisse

An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches 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 midcentury 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. Supplemental images of interest related to this title: George and Lomas; Connie Minerva; Cat On Hot Tin; and Beulah and Oriole

In their new groundbreaking study reviewed in this special issue, The Trans
Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution
(2018), sociologist Ann Travers details the experiences of transgender
children in the US and Canada, some as young as four years of age, who
participated in research interviews over a five-year period. Establishing a
unique picture of what it means to grow up as a trans child, Travers offers
numerous examples of daily life and challenges for children like, for example,
Martine and Esme, both of whom sought to determine their own gender at
an early age: Martine and her family recount how at the age of seven she
responded to her upcoming appointment at a gender clinic by asking if the
doctor would have "the machine where you walk in as a boy and walk out
as a girl," while Esme's story begins in preschool and leads to the care of a
"trans-affirmative doctor" (168) from the age of six and the promise of hormone
blockers and estrogen at the onset of puberty. Although Travers's work
is devoted to and advocates for trans children as a whole, its implications
for our understanding of and research into girls and girlhood cannot be
understated. What does it mean to "walk out" of that machine in the doctor's
office "as a girl?" What happens when you displace the seemingly monumental
onset of puberty from its previous biological imperatives and reproductive
futures? How might feminist work on girlhoods, which has sought
to challenge sexual and gender binaries for so long, approach an encounter
with what Travers calls "binary-conforming" or "binary-identifying" (169)
trans girls or with the transgender boys in their study who, at first, respond
to the conforming pressures of adolescence very similarly to cisgender girls
who will not ultimately transition away from a female identity?

In 1960, a relatively new 'syndrome' began appearing with growing frequency in psychiatric hospitals and in doctors' offices. Eventually termed 'delicate self-cutting', this new model for typical self-mutilative behavior was developed in conjunction with a description of the 'typical' self-mutilator: young (adolescent to just post-adolescent), female, and almost always attractive. This article contends that, despite recent efforts to change the nature of research on self-mutilation, the myth of a typical mutilator, developed from a particular historical bias, continues to work in popular and medical discourses on the subject. I will begin with a detailed discussion of the medical discourse in an effort to ask how the myth was made. Noting that the female body, here, is singled out as pathological at a time when, specifically in the USA, the emergent Women's Movement was beginning to contest certain gender lines, I would like to examine how the medical discourse and material bodies interrelate and interact with each other and with the cultural narratives around them. Finally, I end with examples from the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, as well as other recent popular and medical accounts, to illustrate not only the perpetuation of the myth of the 'typical' self-mutilator but also the inability or refusal to recognize the biased nature of the medical discourse in the instance on self-mutilation.

"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"--