Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies current issue

Introduction: The Good, the Bad, and the Fabulous; or, The Diva Issue Strikes Back

Doty, A. — 2008-05-15

Lena Horne's Impersona

Vogel, S. — 2008-05-15

This essay examines Lena Horne's reputation in the first half of her career as a reserved, refined, and affectively distant diva. Approaching her performance of aloofness—communicated and enacted both on film and in live cabaret shows—as an acute response to the interracial intimacy produced by performances across the color line, I argue that Horne's withholding exploited the conventions of the cabaret to resist the circumscribed roles available to black women performers on the Jim Crow stage. In autobiographical accounts of her early nightclub performances, she embraces what I term an "unperforming of the self" through the cultivation of an impersonal intimacy that deferred a fixed subjectivity and frustrated the racial expectations of her audiences. She developed this impersona through three interlocking tactics: a disarticulation of self and song; a reversal of the psychic positions of audience and performer; and, following Bertolt Brecht, what we can think of as "third-person singing." Horne's aloofness illuminates a historically vexed connection between public intimacy and hostility to suggest that as much as intimacy could be a resource for individual and collective transformation, it was also often the precondition for varieties of hostility, alienation, violation, and surveillance. I conclude with Horne's self-revision of these aloof performances as she articulated a new relationship with her audiences during the civil rights movement and after.

Cinderella Man: Russell Crowe as Il Diva

DeAngelis, M. — 2008-05-15

With Russell Crowe character attributes that might code the star as a narcissistic diva are recontextualized, constructing an authentic figure whose occasional acting out enhances his masculinity rather than feminizing him. This article contrasts the notion of the performer as an authentic "work in progress" with the superficial "finished product" that is the diva. Through a process of the melodramatic emergence of character, Crowe becomes a star who is always "finding himself," avoiding the narcissism of a to-be-revered divalike object of worship. His emergence is traceable to the recurrent loner figure of his pre-Hollywood film roles, where he is presented as vulnerable and accessible to audience identification because he is incomplete and always developing. Crowe's work in L.A. Confidential sustains his star emergence by negotiating violent temperament and vulnerable authenticity within the narrative itself. With the extracinematic publicity and critical texts appearing after this film, the actor's by then well-publicized aggressive tendencies are reworked as signs of the a actor's authenticity as he follows a path of supposed self-discovery. Crowe's recent film roles have ameliorated the excessive display of his solipsistic offscreen persona. Converting excess into a form of labor that authenticates and remasculinizes the star, these roles recast the negative divaseque attributes of the actor's offscreen star persona by constructing the actor as a passionate leader whose social responsibilities obligate him to behave as he does. As a result, Crowe's pathological acting out now signals a greater authenticity, as well as his dedication to improving the quality of his work and his life.

Devouring the Diva: Martyrdom as Feminist Backlash in The Rose

Bradshaw, M. — 2008-05-15

"Devouring the Diva" explores the drives that push us to pursue, consume, and destroy the diva, arguing for a reading of the diva as a figure of feminine gendering and as a stand-in for the fetishized mother whom we ambivalently adore, mourn, and hate. Through an analysis of the 1979 film The Rose (dir. Mark Rydell, US), and in particular, through its spectacular reimagining of Janis Joplin's death, Bradshaw explores our cultural attachment to narratives of the diva's abjection and shame. By framing Joplin, that quintessential symbol of both 1960s rock-and-roll culture and 1960s feminist rebelliousness, through the diva narrative, with its formulaic destruction of the ambitious woman, The Rose gets to reimagine her as appropriately castrated and feminine, and as appropriately punished for her strength, her ambition, and her gender. But the film takes this aggression to another level, punishing not just one woman but, through her, all women for the excesses of a decade in which women demanded political, sexual, and artistic autonomy as their just due.

The Interpellations of Interpolation; or, The Disintegrating Female Musical Body

Rogers, B. — 2008-05-15

This essay interrogates the popular ideology of integration in American musical theater, arguing that the "integration" of Oklahoma! was less the integration of music and narrative and more a related (and almost equally uneasy) attempt to minimize the eruptive force of female musical bodies. This integration seems to be invested with limiting the potential positions from which spectators can approach the musical performance—most crucially, in preventing identification with singers' bodies. In this way, the integration of Oklahoma! participates in the tradition of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a poetic concept that also "integrates" music through the taming of female musical bodies. Though Bertolt Brecht's sophisticated critique of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk adumbrates a useful direction for understanding the generic disintegration of the musical, Brecht, too, ultimately resists the feminine associations of the disintegrating power of music. However, despite the integrating impulses of journalistic criticism and aesthetic theory—which continue even today—the ideology of integration lost some of its allure during the 1970s, when a number of older stars began to star in revivals. These shows foreground the aesthetic features—musical bodies—central to every musical, and in doing so they demand that we resist the misleading and indeed stiflingly unmusical mantra of integration.

Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification

Perez, H. — 2008-05-15

Building on feminist and queer scholarship on the relationship of film spectatorship to subjectivity, this essay conjectures subaltern spectatorships of the two US film adaptations of Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life as a means of tracing the impossibly entangled discourses of race and sexuality, as well as of formulating "queer of color" as a kind of critical modality. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin functions, according to Sigmund Freud, as a cultural artifact prized in the form of an idealized beating fantasy by the Victorian (white) child, Imitation of Life stages for black and queer of color spectators originary traumas, in particular the formative (and compounded) experiences of racial and sexual shame. This essay seeks to reconcile the dissonant emotions evoked by Imitation of Life by reading the overidentifications of subaltern spectators with the figure of the tragic mulatto as instances of queer pleasure, both self-shattering and subject forming. In so doing, the essay pays tribute to that tragic mulatto as a spectacular mulata and diva. The spectacular mulata diva summons queer subjectivities; furthermore, she betrays larger national and colonial secrets, locating the racially hybrid genealogies of the classic diva and the universalized subject of psychoanalysis, heretofore presumably white (European).

APPRECIATIONS

2008-05-15

Vincent Price and Me: Imagining the Queer Male Diva

Benshoff, H. M. — 2008-05-15

Vaginal Davis's Gospel Truths

Siegel, M. — 2008-05-15

Love Letter to Jane

Wlodarz, J. — 2008-05-15

The Dandy Diva

Fontenot, A. — 2008-05-15

Love and Fit

Henderson, L. — 2008-05-15

"More Than One Way to Love": On Kiki and Herb (but Mostly Kiki)

Hilderbrand, L. — 2008-05-15

"The Stallion Who Became a Gelding Who Became a Mayor": Georgie Girl

Limbrick, P. — 2008-05-15

Ruby Red and Emerald Green: The Queer Demon Diva of My Dreams

Palmer, L. — 2008-05-15