Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in classical Hollywood cinema- Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor - and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Hollywood's golden age is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of to-be-looked-at-ness," countered by a hermeneutics of "to-be-seen-through-ness." The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. In addition to the analysis of Suddenly Last Summer, Sunset Boulevard and Ninotchka, the book also presents the broader context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. This includes analyses of D.W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies"--