Caravaggio's rednecks

GLQ

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 217-236

  Herring, Scott ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646672359     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-12-2-217     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Michael Meads, quoted In Wayne Northeross. "Good 01' Boys," Instinct, March 2003, 95.
2. Anonymous, "SO HOT!!!" November 19, 2003, www.datalounge.com/ datalounge/forums/index.html (accessed January 23, 2005). Subsequent anonymous quotations about Eastaboga and Alabama Souvenirs stem from the same DataLounge Web site and the same "SO HOT!!!" posting.
3. For links between "white trash" bodies and pornography, see Constance Penley. "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn," in While Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89-112.
4. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 36.
5. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54.
6. By spectatorship I reference W. J. T. Mitchell in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): "The look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure" (16).
7. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 37-44. The archive on queer sexualities and nation-state regions such as the U.S. South is expanding at an exponential rate.
8. See John Howard, Men Like That (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
9. Howard, ed., Carryin On in the Lesbian and Gay South (New York: New York University Press, 1997);
10. Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton, eds., De-centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations beyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2000);
11. James T. Sears. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001);
12. Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);
13. and Robert J. Corber, "Queer Regionalism," American Literary History 11 (1999): 391-402.
14. With their critical focus on sexual history and identification, Meads's images join vibrant debates about queer historiography that have been advanced by Martha M. Umphrey on "queered history" ("The Trouble with Harry Thaw," in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi [Oxford: Blackwell, 2003], 28);
15. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998);
16. Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001);
17. Elizabeth Freeman on "temporal incongruity" and the anachronisms of the feminist U.S. body in "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations," New Literary History 31 (2000): 727;
18. Halberstam on the "anachronism" of the transgender visual body in In a Queer Time and Place, 15;
19. and Nayan Shah, "Sexuality, Identity, and the Uses of History," in Q&A: Queer in Asian America, ed. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Horn (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 141-56.
20. Vince Aletti, "Photo: Michael Meads," Village Voice, December 11-17, 2002, 79.
21. Michael Meads, "quick update," e-mail message to author, April 13, 2005.
22. Given the violence waged against Alabama lesbians and gays as I write, such a reading is not unfounded. See Bob Moser, "Unsweet Homo Alabama," Out.com, www.out.com (accessed April 18, 2005).
23. Michael Meads, "forgot to mention," e-mail message to author, April 16, 2005.
24. See also David Shuttleton, "The Queer Politics of Gay Pastoral," in Phillips, Watt, and Shuttleton, De-centring Sexualities, for more on the "elitist and emancipatory, aesthetic and polemical, misogynist and separatist" politics of "the gay pastoral" (129).
25. "Sweet Homo Alabama," Attitude 1, no. 122 (2004): 31.
26. Michael Meads, "Allen," 2005, www.michaelmeads.com/allenbio.htm (accessed February 10, 2005).
27. Howard, Men Like That, 306.
28. Howard, Men Like That, Ibid., 19.
29. Howard, Men Like That, Ibid., 43.
30. Northcross, "Good 01' Boys," 95.
31. Andrew Robinson, "Men in Their Natural State," Gay City News, July 8-14, 2004, www.gaycitynews.com (accessed January 31, 2005).
32. This space should also call to mind the recalcitrant modes of aesthetic experience that John Paul Ricco courts in The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
33. Michael Meads, "last email with two questions: I promise," e-mail message to author. February 10, 2005.
34. Michael Meads, quoted in Brad Johnston, "The Boys: Growing Up with Michael Meads," Blue, November 2003, 42.
35. Wayne Northcross, "Rural Rhapsody," Gay City News, February 21-27, 2003, www.gaycitynews.com (accessed February 21, 2005). In "Good 01' Boys," Northcross also notes that "to outsiders it may seem that these boys don't play by the rules of sexual identity. Straight? Gay? Bi? Meads' experience and pictures massage these definitions" (95). I agree, but I emphasize that the images' erotic charge disturbs rather than simply invites "outsider" spectatorship.
36. "Michael Meads," New Yorker, December 16, 2002, 20.
37. Meads, "forgot to mention" (April 16, 2005).
38. Michael Meads, "In the Studio," Alabama Souvenirs, 2005, www.michaelmeads.com/studiobio.htm (accessed January 12, 2005).
39. Elliot Lane, "Southern Men: The Work of Michael Meads," OUTspoken! March 2004. www.oulminds.com/outspoken/outspoken_column.cfm?cid=488 (accessed February 16, 2005).
40. Johnston, "The Boys," 42.
41. Howard, Men Like That, 304.
42. Meads, "last email with two questions: I promise."
43. Michael Meads, telephone interview by author, October 4, 2004.
44. First exhibited in 1995, the film was directed by Beeban Kidron, released by Universal Pictures, produced by Amblin Entertainment, and written by Douglas Carter Beane.
45. My description of Meads's disidentifications should also bring to mind José Esteban Muñoz's description of the performance artist Vaginal Davis's "counterpublic terrorism" (Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 100).
46. By dominant imprint I refer to José Esteban Muñoz's succinct definition: "A blue-print of gay male desire and desirability that is unmarked and thus universally white" ("The Future in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia," in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002], 401).
47. Northcross, "Rural Rhapsody" (accessed April 18, 2005).
48. Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets, 51.
49. Muñoz, Disidentifications, x. Meads's twisted use of the Confederate flag may also connect to the redeployment of the Union Jack by "gay skins" in the United Kingdom. For more on this volatile and violent appropriation, see Murray Healey, Gay-Skins: Glass, Masculinity, and Queer Appropriation (London: Cassell, 1996), 115-19, 172-97.