Marjorie B. Garber (born June 11, 1944) is a professor at Harvard University and the author of a wide variety of books, most notably ones about William Shakespeare and aspects of popular culture including sexuality.
She wrote Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, a ground breaking theoretical work on transvestitism's contribution to culture. Other works include Sex and Real Estate:Why We Love Houses, Academic Instincts, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Shakespeare After All, and Dog Love (which is not primarily about bestiality, except for one chapter titled "Sex and the Single Dog").
Her book Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004) was chosen one of Newsweek's ten best nonfiction books of the year, and was awarded the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from Phi Beta Kappa.
She was educated at Swarthmore College (B.A., 1966; L.H.D., 2004) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1969).
Media Spectacles is a collection of essays, written by different authors, each of which takes a cultural-critical stance on some event as portrayed by one or more of our media. Essay subjects include, to name just a few, the use of Shakespeare quotes as evidence for truth, the effect of Magic Johnson's HIV diagnosis on the public perception of the AIDS crisis, and Dan Quayle's choice to attack a TV character as an emblematic figure of moral decay.
Some of these essays are great (I always enjoy things that Garber has written), but some of the essays 'speak' at such a distance that their subject feels like it gets lost. A couple of the essays lost me entirely - at the end I knew what had been discussed, but now what the actual point of the essay had been.