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> <p>1 The Face is Politics, 2 <em>Ninotchka</em>, 3 <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>, 4 <em>Suddenly, Last Summer</em></p>