Claire Sisco King

It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony

Offering a critical interrogation of white masculinity within David Finchers Fight Club (1999), this essay uncovers a key strategy through which hegemonic systems persist, positing the abject body as a trope for understanding the life of hegemonic ideological formations. Adopting the “interspace” of abjection allows hegemonic masculinity to become everything and nothing at the same time and is a “dangerous” strategy that must be denied at all costs. Insofar as hegemony requires its abjection to remain invisible, this essay names hegemonic masculinity “abject” in order to offer critical prophylaxis against white masculinitys attempts to reproduce its cultural privilege.

Un-Queering Horror: Hellbent and the Policing of the “Gay Slasher”

Paul Etheredge-Ouztss 2004 film Hellbent identifies itself as the first “all gay slasher film” and has, subsequently, been identified as a queer film. While many scholars consider the horror genre to have decidedly queer potential, this essay argues that, despite being a “gay film,” Hellbent refuses the oppositional and political implications of queerness. Reading both the film text itself and a number of promotional “extra-texts,” this essay identifies a strategy of rhetorical ambivalence that simultaneously asserts and disavows queer practices and pleasures.

The Man Inside: Trauma, Gender, and the Nation in The Brave One

This essay argues that The Brave One (Neil Jordan, 2007) treats 9/11 and its aftermath, including Americas controversial wars and culture of surveillance, as cultural traumas and, in response, attempts to manage disruptions to American master narratives, particularly in relation to gender. A vigilante film that features a cinematically anomalous female vigilante, Jordans film positions its hero-villain (Jodie Foster) as a post-traumatic subject whose “female masculinity” and brand of vindictive justice function both to assuage anxieties about American emasculation on September 11th and to atone for the “sins” of a warring nation. By coding its vigilante as disturbed and melancholic, The Brave One figures America as a battered woman who must become a man and, thus, offers a framework for understanding, and even justifying, Americas post-9/11 performance of vigilante justice.

American Queerer: Norman Rockwell and the Art of Queer Feminist Critique

ABSTRACT Despite, or perhaps because of, the continued popularity of his work with U.S. audiences and the active circulation of his art in both material and digital forms, public memory regarding Norman Rockwell remains a site of contestation. For example, while some critics frame Rockwell’s work as reinforcing normative expectations regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality, others interpret Rockwell as a powerful advocate for social justice, particularly with respect to race. Analyzing the epideictic functions of an intertextual assemblage of Rockwell’s images, this article contributes to the ongoing debates about the ideological implications of his art. Specifically, this article argues that many of his paintings offer valuable resources for queer feminist criticism.

On a violence unseen: The womanly object and sacrificed man

The consideration of the relation between rhetoric and violence calls for attention to the object of woman. At first blush, we do not mean biological women, although female bodies do matter and have been made to suffer as objects of violence because of what they are imagined to signify. For the moment we mean the object-as-woman, or more crudely, the womanly object, which we argue is part of a pervasive rhetorical mechanism of violence in our shared (popular) culture. We begin with a startling, introductory example that demonstrates a theoretical quandary rather quickly. In the summer of 2010, the Internet celebrity gossip magazine Radar Online publicized a series of telephone and answering machine recordings made by Russian pianist Oksana Grigorieva. The recordings feature a number of astonishingly angry, hateful rants by Hollywood actor, director, and producer Mel Gibson about the dissolution of their romantic relationship and an emerging dispute over the custody of their daughter Lucia. Gibson repeatedly insults Grigorieva as a ‘‘whore’’ and ‘‘cunt,’’ telling her in a panting rage that she looks ‘‘like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n gers, it will be your fault.’’ At one point he threatens, ‘‘I am going to come and burn the fucking house down . . . but you will blow me first.’’ Gibson has become infamous for his enraged, hateful outbursts against women, Jews, the elderly, people of color, and the LGBTQ community (basically, anyone cast as Other to his white maleness), and many commentators and cultural critics have underscored the affinities between the verbal violence of Gibson’s personal life and his obsessive celluloid fantasies, most notably his numerous anti-Semitic remarks

Running on screen while black: Representations of black presidential candidates in U.S. film and television

ABSTRACT This essay asks what popular representations of fictional black presidential candidates reveal about the social and symbolic conditions that made their presidencies imaginable in the first place. We find that black presidents on screen are only rarely there as the result of democratic elections. Furthermore, when they are, their candidacies are represented in ways that rely heavily on racialized stereotypes of both the black candidate and presumptively white voters. Although these patterns are iterated within popular fictional narratives, we conclude that they could have implications for how actual black candidates are encouraged to perform in campaigns within an allegedly postracial society.

Hitching wagons to stars: celebrity, metonymy, hegemony, and the case of Will Smith

ABSTRACT Representations of celebrities operate as politically and culturally significant resources for the construction, regulation, and even contestation of hegemonic discourses about race and gender in the United States. Not simply meaningful or important to fans, star images may also provide resources to critics aiming to interrogate and intervene against potentially oppressive cultural norms. Forwarding an approach called metonymic criticism, this essay argues that the associative logic of metonymy plays a central role in both the articulation of celebrity personae and the operations of hegemonic discourse formations. The analysis develops by considering the case of a star whose public image has unique probative value for studying the intersecting discourses of race and gender in US culture: Will Smith.

A Single Man and a Tragic Woman

Depicting the fraught relationship between a gay man and his straight female best friend, Tom Fords A Single Man (2009) offers a complex, and often contradictory, depiction of its leading female character, Charley. At once glamorous and troubled, stunning and damaged, Charley reproduces a number of problematic stereotypes regarding women, in general, and fag hags, in particular. At the center of these problems is the films insinuation that Charley has a melancholic attachment to George, her gay male companion. At first glance, A Single Man reproduces Freudian constructs of melancholy as a pathological response to traumatic loss; this essay argues, however, that the films many ambivalences also offer opportunities for critical consideration of melancholy as a tactical response to heteronormativity.

Rogue Waves, Remakes, and Resurrections: Allegorical Displacement and Screen Memory in Poseidon

Poseidon, the 2006 remake of the Vietnam-era disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, functions rhetorically as a symptomatic response to the historical trauma(s) of 9/11, revising the narrative of its cinematic predecessor and producing a screen memory that marks the changed cultural and historical context that demanded its repetition in the first place. Operating in an allegorical register, Poseidon displaces traumatic memories of 9/11 and thus contributes to the repetition and rewriting of traumatic history in search of mastery over tragic loss.