Sad Guys at the Wise Owl Club: Hipsters, White Nostalgia, & Neoliberal Optimism
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Sad Guys at the Wise Owl Club: Hipsters, White Nostalgia, & Neoliberal Optimism by D. Gilson B.S. in Professional Writing, December 2007, Missouri State University M.A. in English, May 2010, Missouri State University M.F.A. in Creative Writing, May 2012, Chatham University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2016 Dissertation directed by Robert McRuer Professor of English The Columbian College of the Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that D. Gilson has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of May 26, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Sad Guys at the Wise Owl Club: Hipsters, White Nostalgia, & Neoliberal Optimism D. Gilson Dissertation Research Committee Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Gayle Wald, Professor of English and American Studies, Committee Member Antonio López, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2016 by D. Gilson All rights reserved iii Acknowledgements My first semester of graduate school, I wanted to write a paper on the film Weekend, a sleepy little indie flick about two mumbling gay guys. Robert McRuer not only let me do that, he also led me to theorizing hipster aesthetics beyond that film, urging me to ask not only what hipsters are, but also what they might represent in the contemporary moment. At every turn of this project, Robert has urged me to think more critically and more generatively about the figure, about the boys like me angstily roaming the United States and beyond. I have spent many hours in his office or at his kitchen table or answering texts from him like, What about José Muñoz? What about Audre Lourde? What does neoliberalism actually mean here? Why are you being so mean to hipsters? This project not only exists, but if it succeeds, it succeeds because of Robert’s friendship and mentorship during the years I spent writing (and beyond). He is a generous scholar, writer, and human, and we can all learn from his example. This project would also not exist without the generosity of my dissertation committee members. Gayle Wald is one of the most insightful cultural critics I have encountered, and her insight into cross-racial aesthetics has been invaluable to my thinking here. Tony López has constantly encouraged me to think about form, about my dual identities as a scholar and essayist, teaching me that both can flourish side-by-side. Ayanna Thompson has been the ultimate model of simultaneously successful scholar, pedagogue, and mentor, and I can iv only hope to emulate her as I begin my career. And before he agreed to be a reader of this project, Mark Greif’s scholarship and editorial work showed me that the hipster is a figure we can — and should — take seriously in contemporary cultural studies, and that theoretical work can be at once polemic and playful. The camaraderie and enthusiasm of many George Washington University English faculty has proven invaluable to me, both professionally and personally; thank you especially Jennifer Chang, Jeffrey Cohen, Holly Dugan, Daniel DeWispelare, Jonathan Hsy, and Lisa Page. The English Department Operations Manager, Connie Kibler, has also become a dear friend whose laughter keeps many of us sane. I feel lucky, too, to have amazing colleagues and friends. Maia Gil’Adi and Justin Mann have written alongside me and shown me how to be a better scholar; their patience has been key to any of this getting done. Conversations with Molly Lewis, Haylie Swenson, K. Tyler Christensen, Sam Yates, Shannon Wooden, Drew Daniel, Patrick Henry, Michael Horka, Todd Ramlow, and Rachel Obenchain have sparked ideas found throughout this project. My parents, Duane and Beverly Gilson, have been utterly supportive of me pursuing this scholarly life, even as their health faltered during the writing of this dissertation. My roommates during these years, Tanya Camp and Michael Eichler, have listened to me whine and shown me the importance of a balanced life. Finally, my queer brother Will Stockton has read and re-read and poked and proded this project, v encouraging me always, and showing an ethics of care for my cultural criticism to be both thorough and honest; when I wanted to quit, he simply wouldn’t let me. vi Abstract of Dissertation Sad Guys at the Wise Owl Club: Hipsters, White Nostalgia, & Neoliberal Optimism Enfolding critical analysis with personal narrative in Sad Guys at the Wise Owl Club: Hipsters, White Nostalgia, & Neoliberal Optimism, I dwell upon the contemporary hipster, thinking about him as the materialized angst of Left- leaning, white millennials during neoliberalism’s totalization in the United States. This angst arises, I argue, from a simultaneous anxiety white power may be seriously jeopardized following the economic crisis of 2008, and anxiety that white male privilege exists in the first place; in short, these are men who want to both deconstruct the detrimental dogmas of neoliberal politics, but who also might benefit most from neoliberalism’s flourishing. The guarantee of such privilege and upward mobility is a marker of white male identity of which the hipster, in large part, seeks to disavow himself. I read this disavowal as configured through simultaneous specters of white nostalgia and the capacious consumption of racially other, feminine, and queer aesthetics; this vast consumption usually leads to a disdain of the hipster, but, I posit, might ultimately lead us instead to an optimistic rendering of hipsters as a strategic segment of contemporary progressive politics. In this study I first attend to ways in which the white hipster of the mid- twentieth-century draws from African American cultural forms, turning then to how today, the twenty-first-century white hipster draws upon not only the racialized other, the child, the feminine, and the queer, but also a white masculine imagined past, in his quest for authenticity, a quest that gives us both pause for critique and, I offer, optimism of potentiality. Through close readings of poetry, music, food, film, and pornography, I seek to uncover the motivations behind the hipster’s cultural consumption. Though the majority of humanities scholarship on neoliberalism and neoliberal figures is pejorative, David Harvey offers briefly that we might instead think of the neoliberalism as a utopian project vii to redistribute wealth more equitably. Building upon this under-theorized, but seemingly critical idea, I argue the hipster’s body reclaims neoliberalism as a project of utopian praxis; or rather, the hipster slouches coolly towards utopia while aligning himself aesthetically with marginalized people. viii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. iv Abstract ................................................................................................................ vii Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Frank O’Hara is Black ................................................................... 28 Chapter Two: Nevermind if You’re Black or White: .............................................. 63 Chapter Three: The Best Little Slaughterhouse in Portland ................................ 97 Chapter Four: Sad to be (Fucking) Here ............................................................ 125 Chapter Five: Stopping by Wes Anderson’s Island on a Stormy Night .............. 153 Coda: Fucking Towards Utopia .......................................................................... 185 Works Cited ....................................................................................................... 191 ix How to Hipster: A Primer 1. Get a haircut. Inevitably any story about hipsters, and this meditation is certainly but one, is a story about cool, or attempts at cool, be they failure or success. So I set out here as the bumbling essayist trying on the self-determined label of hipster (hip- ster, noun [slang]: progressive-ish white boy of the twenty-first century trying very hard to be cool. Formally, the corporealization of a particular contemporary, and particularly neoliberal, white angst). When I moved to Washington, DC, for graduate school in August of 2012, I was on a mission, like any self-respecting, hip homosexual, to find the cool place to get a cool haircut. I first sought out a cool coffeeshop — all the blogs raved about Peregrine Espresso, whose very name is a rare word meaning, aptly enough, “foreign, alien,” or “roving, wandering, migratory,” the migratory consumption of that which is exotic or foreign being one prominent aspect of what, I argue, makes up the contemporary hipster. When I arrived to Peregrine’s 14th Street Northwest storefront, it was clear the place was, indeed, quite hip, if not also a millennial cliché: young professionals clad in thick glasses sat before their MacBooks sipping single origin cold brew iced coffee, coffee that had seeped in small batches for no less than 72 hours before being deemed consumable. Jesus H. Christ. And yet, these are my brethren. For many of Peregrine’s customers, the counter serves as a fun house mirror, reflecting back some version of oneself. The barista and I could have been members of any number of indie pop acts (Fleet Foxes,