Classical Hollywood Cinema Sexuality and the Politics of the Face

<p><em>Classical Hollywood Cinema Sexuality and the Politics of the Face</em> examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood – Greta Garbo Gloria Swanson Elizabeth Taylor – and the gay male fetishization of those faces.<br> Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness” is 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. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. <em>Classical Holly Cinema Sexuality and the Politics of the Face </em>explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of <em>Ninotchka Sunset Boulevard </em>and <em>Suddenly Last Summer </em>in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes for instance an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject several major films by Hitchcock <em>Citizen Kane</em> 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. <br> This is an important study for students of queer theory film theory and history and gender and sexuality studies. </p>