Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image

by Erika Doss

It doesn't matter how you remember him—rockabilly rebel, all-American boy, B-movie idol, patriotic G.I., or Las Vegas superstar. Elvis Presley is the most enduring image in American popular culture. This book explains why.

Other authors have explored Elvis's life and music, but Erika Doss now examines his multifaceted image as the key to understanding the adulation that has survived his death. She has talked with fans and joined their clubs, studied their creations and made pilgrimages to Graceland, all to explore what these images mean to those who gaze upon them, make them, and collect them.

In researching Elvis Culture, Doss discovered that the visual image of Elvis endures because it was so carefully constructed from the start. Sifting through the visual glut of Elvisiana, she looks at how fans collect, arrange, and display Elvis paraphernalia, make Elvis artwork, and participate in the annual August rituals of Elvis Week. By engaging in these acts, she explains, they continually reinvent Elvis to mesh with their own personal and social preferences and to keep his memory alive.

Doss examines Elvis in specific contexts: as a religious icon honored in household shrines, as a focus of sexual fantasy for women and men (both straight and gay), as an inspiration for countless impersonators, and as an emblem of whiteness held in disdain by many blacks—despite his having crossed racial lines with his music. She also looks at how Elvis has become a sanitized, legally protected image controlled by Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which bans the sale of black velvet paintings and licenses his likeness around the world.

As engrossing as it is informative, Elvis Culture strikingly demonstrates the power of pictures in our visual culture and reveals much about American attitudes toward religion, sex, race, and celebrity—as well as about the construction of American identity in the late twentieth century.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Erika Doss is chair of the Department of American Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities.

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO GOOD XX

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who likes reading about material culture, I really enjoyed this work on such a classic aspect of Americana. It's a good read even though I really didn't care much about Elvis himself, before or after. But it was interesting all the way through.

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

pheeeeeeeeeeeeeenomenal

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doss believes that the power and ubiquity of Elvis Presley’s image provides insight into the cultural values of contemporary American culture. By looking at the consumers, “protectors,” and owners of Elvis’s image, we can understand how he has been appropriated by different social groups and interpreted to mean conflicting and mutually exclusive ideas of American values. The success of his image is predicated on this malleability, as is American identity, leading Doss to criticize those who would seek to control and limit Elvis’s image in the name of profit.

Various ideas of Elvis, including his image as a saint, sexual icon, and symbol of white purity, all conflict and elucidate gender, race, and identity issues in the United States and, due to Elvis’s global popularity, possibly even around the world. Americans construct their own identities through their understanding of Elvis—in essence, what they see in him says more about themselves.

Elvis Inc., by seeking to “clean up” and sterilize Elvis’s image in order to maximize profit potential, is possibly neutering Elvis of exactly what made him so popular in the first place. Interestingly, Doss proves that during Elvis’s lifetime, his period of least influence was during his years of attempted self-sterilization in the 1960s before the comeback special. When Presley was challenging notions of sexual identity in the 1950s and 1970s, he was at his peak influence. By “uncomplicating” Elvis, Elvis Inc. risks undermining the exact elements that connected Elvis with audiences during his lifetime.

Doss has shown that popular culture icons serve well as a lens into American identity—by understanding how fans see such icons as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, or Madonna, we can understand how Americans idealize their values. Elvis being imaged alternately as masculine and feminine, sexual and saintly, rebel and model citizen, shows that Americans have a complex and conflicting view of American cultural values and American identity.