Fearless Vulgarity
eBook - ePub

Fearless Vulgarity

Jacqueline Susann's Queer Comedy and Camp Authorship

  1. 304 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Fearless Vulgarity

Jacqueline Susann's Queer Comedy and Camp Authorship

About this book

The enduring queer feminist engagement with Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann's camp comedy legacy.

Catalyzed by her notoriously "dirty, " fabulously successful bestseller Valley of the Dolls, the "Jackie Susann Sixties" brimmed with camp comedy that now permeates contemporary celebrations of the author, from Pee-wee's Playhouse to RuPaul's Drag Race and Lee Daniels's Star. First christened "camp" by Gloria Steinem in an excoriating review of Valley of the Dolls and compounded by the publishing juggernauts The Love Machine (1969), Once Is Not Enough (1973), and Dolores (1976), the comedy of Jackie Susann illuminated conflicting positions about gender, sexuality, and aesthetic value. Through a writing formula that Ken Feil calls sleazy realism, Susann veers from gossip to confession and devises comedies of bad manners spun from real celebrities whose occasionally queer and always outré antics clashed with their "official" personas, the popular genres they were famous for, and the narrow, normative constructions of identity and reality shaped by the culture industry. Susann's promotional appearances led to another comedy of bad manners, this one populated with critics alternately horrified and delighted by an upstart woman vulgarian barging into the male literary firmament, and which continues to inspire fascination for the author, her novels, and their legendarily bad film adaptations.

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Yes, you can access Fearless Vulgarity by Ken Feil in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Media Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. Sleazy Realism and the Single Girl: Valley of the Dolls, the Roman à Clef, and the Comedy of Bad Manners
  9. 2. The Roman à Closet: Queer Irony, Closet Plotlines, and The Love Machine
  10. 3. Wit Is Not Enough: Comedic Gossip, Camping Susann, and Women’s Authorship
  11. 4. Dykes, Gays, and Dolls: From the Queer Cult Following to the Gay Susann Revival
  12. 5. The Laugh Machine: Telling the Jacqueline Susann Story
  13. Conclusion: Sleazy Summaries and Camp Positions: Lee Daniels, Carrie Fisher, and the Legacy of the Susann Sensibility
  14. Notes
  15. References
  16. Index