Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters
Subtitle: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: January 6, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 233
ISBN-13: 9780312236359
Subjects: Gay Studies; Social Science / Lesbian Studies; Homosexuality; Social Science; Gender Studies; Gay men; Gay men in literature; Identity; Relations with heterosexual wo; Relations with heterosexual women; Women in literature; Sociology
First sentence: The riots that took place outside the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village in June and July 1969 have become understood as the key moment in the emergence of contemporary gay politics.
Description: "Why is so much gay male culture obsessed with women? Why do men who desire other men spend so much time and energy adoring women, bonding with women? Why is it that women seem to develop special relationships with gay men? Why is it so fabulous to be a screaming queen?

In this book Stephen Maddison offers answers to these questions by looking in detail at a range of cultural texts from Tennessee Williams's classic play A Streetcar Named Desire and Forster's 'gay' novel Maurice through Pulp Fiction, queer lifestyle magazines, Roseanne, slash fan fiction and Jarman's Edward II, to Almodovar's camp classic Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Along the way he looks at the kinds of iconic divas, dames, bitches, studs and bad boys who have formed the gender archetypes that shape gay culture. Theoretically sophisticated, yet passionate, accessible and opinionated, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters takes issue with many of the sacred cows of contemporary gay politics, and offers a number of new concepts in lesbian and gay theory.

Taking its historical cue from turn-of-the-century notions of inversion, the book uses feminist and queer work on gender to argue that third sex models of homosexuality continue to inform gay culture in the U.S. and Britain. Maddison offers a radical new reading of Eve Sedgwick's work on homosocial male bonds, and develops new terms for understanding the cultural importance of relationships between gay men and women."--BOOK JACKET.