Strategies of Deviance - Studies in Gay Male Representation (Paperback)

"A major event in gay cultural theory...the feat of critical imagination is absolutely stunning in its scope and power. Jackson in effect manages to redefine an entire tradition of male same-sex eroticism from the ancient Greeks to the present day." - David M. Halperin Within a critical framework provided by feminist theory, semiotics, and materialist analyses of culture (Marxism, psychoanalysis, ethnographic critique) this work delineates the emergence of specifically identifiable gay male subjectivities as realized in texts and films by gay men. The analysis of subjectivity and its expression is thematized within two modes of representation: the narrative and the specular, and historically situated against the terrorism of possible scandal that enforced a secrecy and the post-Stonewall embracing of the scandal of gay sexuality and sexual identity. "Strategies of Deviance" also pays close attention to how race and ethnicity condition and overdetermine the politics of representation. Jackson examines Freud's "Leonardo", Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of W. H.", Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio", as well as gay porno films and the films of Pedro Almodovar. The contents include: Calling the Questions: Gay male Subjectivity and Agency; History and Its Desublimations; Imagining It Otherwise: Alternative Sexualities in Speculative Fiction; Graphic Specularity; and, Scandalous Narratives.