Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer"

Series Q

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame , has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp? Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved ) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.

Genres: Queer, LGBT, Theory, Queer Studies, Nonfiction, Race, Gender and Sexuality

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2006

About the author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is the author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer,” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies), and Making Out (finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir), among other books.

Reviews

[Johnny Jones]

Trying to return to the intellectual mind-fucks i experienced at NYU-PerformanceStudies where I was initially introduced to this text. Bond weaves the likes of Barthes, Toni Morrison and Robert Mapplethorpe. Morrison shows up in nearly every chapter, all under the lens of black queer studies. Engaging.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stockton's book offers a unique reading of various texts, images, and films through "queer" and "black" lens. Her readings hinge on "switchpoints" within the texts. This is a quick, easy read that I would recommend to people interested in literary theory, cultural studies, and critical race studies.

[Ramzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so amazing that I am currently experiencing a complete alteration of my intellectual life - no seriously, it's that good. Read it, immediately (especially the Intro, Chapters 2-4).

[Emily]

I have studied under Kathryn who is incredible, I look forward to getting my hands on this as well as her book due out in '09

[Larry-bob Roberts]

On the syllabus of Tisch Cinema Studies Queer Cinema.