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Suffering Sappho! : lesbian camp in American popular culture / Barbara Jane Brickman.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Brickman, Barbara Jane, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Lesbians in popular culture.
- Camp (Style) in popular culture.
- Popular culture--United States--History.
- Popular culture.
- United States.
- Genre:
- History
- Physical Description:
- vii, 233 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2024]
- 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"-- Provided by publisher.
- Contents:
- The big "lesbian" show in postwar American culture, a history
- Voyage to Camp Lesbos: pulp fiction and the shameless lesbian "sicko"
- A strange desire that never dies: monstrous lesbian camp at the movies
- Spinsters, career gals, and butch comedy in 1950s television
- Amazon princesses and sorority queers, or the Golden Age(s) of comic lesbians
- Sexual outlaw: disidentification, race, and the postwar lesbian rebel.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.
- ISBN:
- 9781978828261
- 1978828268
- 9781978828254
- 197882825X
- OCLC:
- 1373827286
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