Introduction: There's Something About Mary

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Alexander Doty

I was trained by the Catholic Church to be a diva worshipper. In pre – Vatican II days, at least, the Cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary was what seemed to set Catholicism apart from other Christian religions. Though long estranged from the church, I still have many laminated playing card – sized images of Mary: in flow- ing blue and white robes, stepping on roses (or, even better, on a snake), with a halo of stars over her head. These cards also provide prayers you can offer up to the BVM — the shorthand “in-crowd” way of addressing her. Talk about fabulous. Of course, the BVM has certain nondiva qualities — her demure demeanor, the fact that her notoriety comes from maintaining her virgin- ity while being someone’s mother — but the pervasiveness of her iconic (some would say idolatrous) representations, coupled with her most famous “comeback” appearances at Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima, cemented her place as every Catholic’s prima donna, with nuns as the seconda donnas. It did not take much effort for me to transfer my adoration of the BVM to certain female stars whose striking images — and

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voices — likewise seemed to saturate my childhood beginning in the mid-1950s: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, Diahann Carroll, and even Shari Lewis — or should I say Shari Lewis as Lambchop? When I look back over this list of women, it strikes me that, as with the Blessed Virgin Mary (who somehow is revered for having had a child who was not her husband’s), their public images and careers often involved negotiations between convention and transgression — sweet, girlish Shari ventriloquizing the temperamental sock pup- pet Lambchop; Price and Sutherland gaining wealth and fame for brilliantly singing the parts of suffering victims; Taylor refusing to sleep with a man she was not married to and racking up eight husbands (and divorces); Garland maintaining her girl-next-door star persona while having a voice — and a life — that spectacularly exceeded this image. Divas won’t ever be the unalloyed gold standard for femi- nism. As Angela Dalle Vacche says about early twentieth-century Italian silent screen divas, they were “a mixture of the femme fatale of the previous century and the ‘new’ woman of modernity, of the enigmatic sphinx and the suffragette wearing pants.”1 But in their struggles and triumphs — whether seeking power in a form- fitting, tailored pin-striped suit and high heels; singing a girly song in a voice as big as all outdoors; playing a loudmouthed prosti- tute who exposes police corruption; producing a music video in which you have yourself writhing half-naked and in a dog collar; or springing out of your father’s head complete with sword and body armor — divas offer the world a compelling brass standard that has plenty to say to women, queer men, blacks, Latinos, and other marginalized groups about the costs and the rewards that can come when you decide both to live a conspicuous public life within white patriarchy and to try and live that life on your own terms. Under these conditions, “something’s got to give,” as the song goes, but the diva will make certain that, as often as pos- sible, it is tradition and convention that yield (or at least bend) to her. With predictable hypocrisy, dominant cultures and narratives are thrilled by the diva’s difference while frequently maligning or

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punishing her for not being a conforming good girl. Along the road to perdition, however, the diva makes herself a force to be reckoned with, so that even in defeat there is something gloriously iconoclastic about the “bitch.” Speaking of bitches, Elton John’s song “The Bitch Is Back” heralded his entrance into the male diva (or is it divo?) hall of fame. John arguably became contemporary pop music’s primo uomo when he was asked to be the first man to perform on the VH-1 Divas Live shows (1998 – 2004) in 1999. Allegedly exchanging heated words with each other right before the show, John and Tina Turner went on to perform a ferocious “The Bitch Is Back” duet. Later John dedicated a defiant version of “I’m Still Standing” to Turner. Indeed, it was largely through the auspices of the annual VH-1 Divas Live specials that the world at large learned that certain men might be spoken of, for good and for ill, in the same breath as Bette Davis, Maria Callas, Diana Ross, and Cruella de Vil. The fraught cultural space of the male diva/divo — with its potential for gender and sexuality instability for straight divos, as well as for odious “diva wanna-be” comparisons for gay or queer divos — has produced spectacles like Men Strike Back, the 2000 testosterone-fueled answer to the woman-focused VH-1 Divas Live specials. One commercial for the program pictured the divos as superheroes and the divas as villains, with one of the men shown hitting one of the women. Most recently, the sometimes thin line between homage and one-upmanship was played out when Rufus Wainwright performed the legendary Judy Garland Carnegie Hall concert — at Carnegie Hall, of course, and for two sold-out shows where Garland only had one. The poster for the Wainwright shows was a replica of Garland’s, including the placement of the phrase “World’s Greatest Entertainer” below the first “Rufus.” The general confusion about Wainwright’s motives is perhaps best summarized by Adam Feldman: “Is he carrying a torch for Garland, stealing her fire or merely suntanning in her reflected glory?”2 Notably, Garland’s diva daughter Liza Minnelli refused to have anything to do with the concerts, while the nondiva Garland daughter Lorna Luft joined Wainwright both nights to sing “After You’ve Gone.”

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A 2006 issue of Time Out: New York offered lessons under the title “How to Be a Male Diva” and proposed six types of divos a man could become: “power” (Napoléon, for example), “martyr” ( Jesus), “arty” (Arthur Rimbaud), “stealth” ( Jerry Garcia), “bitchy” (Oscar Wilde), and “brainy” (Sigmund Freud).3 Isn’t that typical? Men glom onto something and have to best women: not only will they be divas but they’ll make their divadom a many-splendored thing. Well, two can play that game. Just to use some of the figures represented in this issue: Elphaba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West (“power diva”), Courtney Love (“martyr”), Grace Jones (“arty”), Julie Andrews (“stealth”), Joan Van Ark (“bitchy”), Isa- belle Huppert (“brainy”). Also, let’s not forget that the trio Il Divo supported La Streisand during her last concert tour. But divas (and most divos) really aren’t about categories — they are about troubling and breaking out of their “proper” cul- turally assigned sex, gender, sexuality, class, national, ethnic, and racial spaces. This overarching thematic is what finally binds the diverse essays and shorter appreciations in both Camera Obscura diva issues. Not surprisingly, one issue just wasn’t enough to contain the tremendous outpouring of diva love — and scholarship — that greeted our call for papers. In classic prima donna fashion, we decided on an encore (issue 67) even before the curtain went up on issue 65. And what an issue it is. Besides examining how divas create “category trouble,” the essays and many of the appreciations in this issue are also connected by their interest in diva reception. Making a case for the progressive potential of “Baker’s mobile diasporic diva iconicity,” Jeanne Scheper considers how Josephine Baker’s image as both a sexualized black woman and a mother has been understood and deployed in ways that turn stereotype and convention on their heads. Also concerned with reception, Stacy Wolf examines the girl cult that has developed around the Broadway musical Wicked, its two main characters (G[a]linda and Elphaba), and the women who play them. Wolf finds that a certain queer power is generated in the intense bond between adolescent girl audiences and the divas onstage that encourages “the love between

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girl friends” as part of establishing strong female communities. Gay male interpretive communities are the focal point for Edward R. O’Neill’s exploration of the cultural work of camp, particularly in the form of larger-than-life mother and aunt figures like those associated with Angela (“I’m not a diva, but I play them”) Lansbury. Lansbury characters such as Auntie Mame and Mama Rose are “beloved and frightening female figures” whose camp reception by gay men exemplifies the pleasures of “circumscribed transgression” within “the cultural (and economic) logic of late ca(m)pitalism.” Finally, Nick Salvato explores the ambivalent position of many soap opera fans as they follow the careers of their favorite divas. Often caught somewhere between “irony and sincerity” in their reception practices, soap fans must deal with “the ways in which the soap opera diva hovers ‘on the bubble’ between empowerment and dele- gitimation” when, for instance, the talent of performers doesn’t live up to the demands of the prima donna characters they portray. Male divas get into the mix in this issue’s appreciations with Joshua Gamson’s cinematic fantasia on the life of Sylvester, who became a disco diva by turning his cross-dressing, androgy- nous, gay, working-class, black self into the very definition of fabu- lousness in the 1970s and 1980s. Another disco diva of the same period, Grace Jones, is the subject of Ramon Lobato’s “homage and hagiography” that sees Jones as “a pipe dream of postmoder- nity” whose decadent new-wave star persona challenges gender, sexuality, and race definitions, as well as power relations, with an “icy insouciance” that is ripe for rediscovery. Moving from disco to rock, Chuck Jackson charts the rise and fall of Courtney Love, who, as “contemporary culture’s most desperate sign,” seems to require that her fans cultivate a mixture of intense empathy and “poor taste” in order to fully appreciate her (self-)destructive celebrity trajectory. Largely eschewing the classic “tragic” reading of another singing diva, Ann Pellegrini’s appreciation makes a case for Judy Garland’s star image, with its codes of gender “in-betweenness,” being as important to the identity formation of lesbians and other wise queer women as she has been for many gay and queer men.

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Indeed, by evoking a complex combination of identification and desire in many of her female fans, Garland has become not only a dyke diva par excellence but a cultural figure with the power to help define and redefine her fans’ sense of themselves over a life- time. Like Garland, Julie Andrews is a pop diva who has attained enormous cultural cachet “as [an] archetypal queer progenitor” who seems to call out to lesbians, gay men, and other queer folks. Brett Farmer’s appreciation reveals not only how “Julie Andrews made [him] gay,” but how divas like Andrews can “provide queer subjects with emotional sustenance and tactical knowledge that are quite literally lifesaving.” Pivoting around her 2005 performance in a French- language version of the play 4.48 Psychosis at the Brooklyn Acad- emy of Music, Edward Baron Turk examines the highbrow diva status of that “postmodern Marlene Dietrich,” Isabelle Huppert, whose “cryptic” presence is “as coolly distant as it [is] burningly intimate,” and who challenges her film and theater audiences to be as focused and subtle in their reception of her as she is in her performance style. But highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow, all divas, at one point or another, seem to be judged by their hair. Contemplat- ing the coifs of divas real and imaginary — Hillary Rodham Clin- ton, Kathryn Janeway/Kate Mulgrew, and Olivia Benson/Mariska Hargitay — Julie Levin Russo discovers that if hair doesn’t exactly make the diva, the type of diva you become can be decided by the hair. Hair, it seems, remains a major fetish item for diva devotees, male and female, queer and straight. Of late, some fans and commentators have complained that being a diva has been reduced to things like hair, costume changes, hissy fits, and a good publicist — and that far too many undeserving people are being called divas. Many would date the devaluation of the term diva to those VH-1 Divas Live specials that mixed performers like Cher, Whitney Houston, and Chaka Khan with people like LeAnn Rimes, Brandy, and Faith Hill. Were the VH-1 folks guilty of the cynical economic exploitation of divinity, or were they (consciously or not) attempting to put forward kinder, gentler, even more democratic models of divadom? After all, these

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VH-1 specials were supposedly as much about raising money for worthy causes like Save the Music as they were about showcasing flashy, big-voiced performers. The VH-1 shows sparked fierce debates — live and online — about “what makes a diva most?” as well as about the cultural importance of divas. Out of all this discussion, and possibly as a way to stem the explosion of instant divas, a new concept arose: the “diva-in-training.” The diva-in-training is someone with dynamic talent and mercurial temperament who is at an early stage in her (or his) career, and who may — or may not — engage the public’s fascinated eyes and ears over the long haul. But there are so many more career choices for female, male, and trans divas-in-training these days outside of entertainment and the arts: adventure diva, political diva, fashion diva, sports diva (which includes the more specialized professional wrestling diva and the personal trainer diva), academic diva, chef or restaurateur diva, religious diva (very prominent among fundamentalists), corporate diva, even the oxymoronic domestic diva. Who would have thought that the diva would attain her greatest popularity and highest international profile in the twenty-first century? Almost everyone in the new mil- lennium, it seems, wants to be a diva.

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Notes

1. Angela Dalle Vacche, “Diva: Star of Muteness and Goddess of Pain,” in Passion and Defiance: Silent Divas of Italian Cinema, ed. Roberta Busnelli (Milan: Edizioni Olivares, 2000), 21.

2. Adam Feldman, “Judy Blooms,” Time Out: New York, 8 – 14 July 2006, 18.

3. Matt Vincent, “How to Be a Male Diva (‘the Divo’),” Time Out: New York, 8 – 14 July 2006, 22.

Alexander Doty is a professor in the English department at Lehigh University and an advisory editor for Camera Obscura. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993) and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (2000), and he has coedited Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. He is currently working on film melodrama and on the monstrous and the medieval in film and literature.

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