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Projections of passing : postwar anxieties and Hollywood films, 1947-1960 / N. Megan Kelley

Author
Kelley, N. Megan
Published
Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2016]
Physical Description
264 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

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Contents
Chapter one: Hollywood's passing contexts: The rise of psychoanalytic discourse, identity studies, and Cold War culture -- Chapter two: Passing as social strategy: The early postwar "message" pics -- Chapter three: Passing as identity crisis: The psychoanalytic turn in Hollywood -- Chapter four: "Hiding in plain sight": Political passing, communist fears, and Hollywood -- Chapter five: They walk among us: Science fiction films and aliens -- Chapter six: "Both body and meaning can do a cartwheel": Postwar Hollywood masculinities and passing anxieties -- Chapter seven: Hollywood's postwar feminine masquerades: masculine women, blonde goddesses, and passing for normal.
Summary
"A key concern in postwar America was "who's passing for whom?" Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history"--
Subject(s)
Genre(s)
ISBN
9781496806277 hardcover
1496806271 hardcover
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references, filmography and index.
Source of Acquisition
Purchased with funds from the Paterno Libraries Endowment; 2015.
View MARC record | catkey: 17742249