Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame

Stockton Kathryn Bond Stockton

Description

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame, has often been a meeting place for the signs "black" and "queer" and for black and queer people-overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study-James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino-and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms "black" and "queer"; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized "skin" of some queers' clothes, the description of blacks as an "economic bottom," the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison's Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387985
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

B E AU T I F U L B O T T O M, B E AU T I F U L S H A ME

E D I T E D B Y M I C H È L E A I N A B A R A L E ,

J O N AT H A N G O L D B E R G , M I C H A E L M O O N ,

A N D E V E KO S O F S K Y S E D G W I C K

B E A U T I F U L B O T T O M , B E A U T I F U L S H A M E

Where‘‘Black’’Meets‘‘Queer’’

K A T H R Y N B O N D S T O C K T O N

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London



©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

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Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on

the last printed page of this book.

For Shelley and Jake

CONTENTS

ix

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











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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

N Shame: ‘‘Black’’ and• Embracing I N T R O D U C T I O ‘‘Queer’’ in Debasement

O N E Wounds, or When Queers Are Martyred• Cloth to Clothes: Debasements of a Fabricated Skin

T W O Values: Anal Economics in the History• Bottom of Black Neighborhoods

E • When Are Dirty Details and Scenes Compelling? T H R E Tucked in the Cuts of Interracial Anal Rape

F O • Erotic Corpse: Homosexual Miscegenation U R and the Decomposition of Attraction

F I V E • Prophylactics and Brains: Slavery in the Cybernetic Age of

C O N C L U S I O N

N O T E S

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

I N D E X

Dark Camp: Behind and Ahead

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am embarrassed by how many people have been asked to read this book —in all or in part. I owe so much to attentive comments and smart sug- gestions made by Henry Abelove, Charles Berger, Karen Brennan, Gillian Brown, Lynn Butler, Mary Carpenter, Robert Caserio, Barbara Christian, Beth Clement, Bill Cohen, Stuart Culver, Richard Dellamora, Jane Gar- rity, Brooke Hopkins, Karen Jacobs, Dorothee Kocks, Karen Lawrence, Kim Lau, Brian Locke, Pamela Matthews, Colleen McDannell, David McWhirter, Constance Merritt, Mary Ann O’Farrell, Jackie Osherow, Ste- phanie Pace, Peggy Pascoe, Matt Potolsky,Wilfred Samuels, Grant Sperry, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Nicole Stansbury, Henry Staten, Steve Tatum, Michael Thomas, and Claudia Wright. Becky Horn and Melanee Cherry have offered a superb combination of humor and intellectual companion- ship throughout the length of this book’s life. Martha Ertman has added her own charming wit and incisive suggestions (not to mention baked goods) in the crucial last stages of my deliberations. And Barry Weller, my most enduring interlocutor and unfailing advisor on these topics, has offered editorial wisdom at every turn in this process. As for institutional support, the University of Utah’s English Depart- ment (especially my chair, Stuart Culver), the College of Humanities (par- ticularly my dean, Robert Newman), and the Associate Vice President for Diversity, Karen Dace, have offered material and intellectual assis-