The new issue of Genders is out, and it's a doozy. While the Heavenly Creatures essay is disappointing (Are we ever going to get past Freud? Ever? I know that as misogynist Victorian coke addicts go he was totes the groundbreaking genius, but it's 2005. Could we at least do, like, Lacan?) Kathryn Kane's To Wong Foo exegesis is right on, wielding Zizekian social control theory like a sashimi knife to dice up racial and sexual minstrelsy. Especially awesome is her point that in order for a mainstream film like TWF to have drag queen characters and still be commercially viable (i.e., non-threatening, i.e., heterosexual) its narrative must necessarily elide those characters' sexual desires, reducing sexual preference to gender performance. Patrick Swayze in a dress is fine, so long as he doesn't start kissing any boys.
And speaking of kissing boys, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capote just sounds like Sarah Vowell. So, um, there. Part of me is like, dammit, Hollywood, quit fucking around with my revolutionary queer misfit icons. I know it's terribly convenient for you to clean up all of their struggle and complexity and anger and ugliness by casting Salma Hayek or Nicole Kidman and being done with it, but isn't there a Farrelly bros. project you could be greenlighting somewhere? And another part thinks, hold up, if some lonely, geektastic queer kid in Wichita gets turned on to Capote, or Frida, or Woolf by renting a video from the Blockbuster next to the Dairy Queen and starts writing or painting or even comes out because of it, then maybe, maybe it is worth it.
Still, though--anybody touches Renee Vivien and I'ma lose it.
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