Society for Cinema & Media Studies Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in Todd Haynes's "Velvet Goldmine" Author(s): Chad Bennett Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter, 2010), pp. 17-39 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619769 . Accessed: 10/10/2014 00:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Flaming the Fans: Shame and the Aesthetics of Queer Fandom in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine by Chad Bennett Abstract: VelvetGoldmine offersa trenchantqueer theorizationof shame in relation to fandom's affectivereading practices. Through the film'srepresentation and formal enactment of such reading practices, we can see the formative role fandom's shame fueled pleasures play in the queer film aesthetic Haynes's oeuvre exemplifies. I was at theHammersmith Odeon when [David] Bowie killed off Ziggy ... men were [Stardust] in '73. A lot of throwing off their underwear and showing theircocks all over theplace. A lot of fluidwas flyingabout. One girlwas actually sucking someone off at the same time as tryingto listen to was on. was so what going I thought it extraordinary because nobody me a had any inhibitions. I remember that around nobody gave shit really was was about doing these things because it rumoured that maybe this the lasttime Bowie would perform.Maybe thiswas the last timeZiggy would to in on be here. And everyone's got get this because otherwise you're just a took their clothes off. And was CO square. So everyone just wanking nothing. There was a guy next to me in time to one track and I COr-? wanking thought: X h My God! What does he do when he's alone? Then I suddenly realized that c all the I'd were were things been doing perfectly OK. Because here people < doing itwith each other and sharing it. Julie,David Bowie fan1 CO I'd . like to see himself from a fan's of view and under X [Bowie] point o stand how intense a fan's can be. It CD just devotions may be embarrassing, but O _ it's very real. Sheila, David Bowie fan2 is _ Fandom embarrassing. Embarrassing for us, for the objects of fan devo to x tion, and, perhaps above all, for fans?like Julie, the fan whose account of David Bowie's final as an t appearance Ziggy Stardust renders already in concert more famous decidedly infamous. (No other eyes at the show, not > 1 Fan identifiedas "Julie," as quoted in Fred Vermoreland JudyVermorel's Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans _ (London:Comet Books, 1985), 182-183. _c 2 Ibid.,71. XI o o Chad Bennett is a PhD Csl candidatein English Literatureat CornellUniversity, where thisessay won theBiddy Martin Prize ? in a on Queer Studies.He is currentlywriting dissertation gossip and twentieth-centuryAmerican poetry. www.cmstudies.org 49 | No. 2 [Winter 201017 This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010 even the unblinking eyes of D. A. Pennebaker's four movie cameras, seem to have glimpsed the presumably hard tomiss display of "cocks all over the place.")3 Julie's a fantasy, decade on, turns inside out all of the things a fanmight do with her de sires when alone in her a Bowie LP on the bedroom, turntable and surrounded by album news carefully arranged sleeves, clippings, and pinups.4 Fan activities, often and marked and into private by isolation, secrecy, shame, here morph something and OK." even as to an un public, communal, "perfectly But she labors produce ashamed fan narrative and identity,Julie stages her fandom in complicated relation and further to?engendered by engendering?the range of emotions grouped under are the heading of shame: her words flushwith shame fora fellow fan's impressively rhythmic,public masturbation ("My God! What does he do when he's alone?"); for her more autoeroticism own, private ("all the things I'd been doing"); and for her inability, at the time and in retrospect, to shed the embarrassment and shame the erotics of like those around her to saturating fandom, seemed have done ("nobody had but to in on any inhibitions," "everyone's got get this because otherwise you're a just square.") InMichael Warner's polemic on the ethics of sexual shame,The Troublewith Normal, he recounts the ancient Athenian philosopher Diogenes' dramatic response towhat he saw as the of sexual shame: in the hypocrisy masturbating marketplace.5 But, like the fantasyof Bowie fanswanking in thepop marketplace in order to affirmfandom's as shame-inducing eroticism "OK," this response and its pretense of shamelessness seems almost "An ethical to absurdly willful. response the problem of shame should not us to that shame doesn't writes "a require pretend exist," Warner, sensing certain hollowness to these views of as anodyne sexuality simply benign and pleasant."6 In deed, there isvery littlethat strikesthe reader as simplybenign or pleasant or perfectly in accounts OK the oral and written of pop fandom collected, like Julie's, in Fred and Judy Vermorel's absorbing 1985 study Starlust: The Secret Lives of Fans. Rather, these . scenes "embarrassing, but very real" productions of fans' sexualities feature of fluid identifications and transgressive desires whose staging ranges from the disarm to numerous ingly banal the stunningly elaborate. The erotic tales of Bowie fandom, are so especially, deeply interwoven with many of the narrative threads that often run through stories of queer lives and desires?including the thread Eve Kosofsky on as in Sedgwick, in her work affect, has recognized tracing shame's constitutive part If term as can to queer identity. the "queer," Sedgwick proposes, be taken refer pri sense some reason to marily to "those whose of identity is for tuned most durably the note . structures of shame developing from this originary affect their particular of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle," then perhaps there is something queer status as?as about fandom in general, given its shamed Henry Jenkins argues?"a 3 See ZiggyStardust and theSpiders fromMars (D. A. Pennebaker, 1973). 4 Julie: "I had this thingwhere I'd stickmyself inmy roomand switchoff the lightsand burn incenseand play Bowie recordson thisold recordplayer my brothergave me. And I'd startto masturbate." Vermorel,Starlust, 100. 5 Michael Warner, The Troublewith Normal: Sex, Politics, and theEthics of Queer Life (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUni versityPress, 1999), 2. 6 Ibid. 18 This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:24:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 49 Cinema Journal | No. 2 j Winter 2010 one scandalous category in contemporary culture, alternately the target of ridicule and anxiety, of dread and desire."7 at structure to The Bowie fans represented in Starlust, least, their fandom in relation over shame and the shame-related affects that hover around their erotically charged, lapping fan activities?including viewing, reading, listening,writing, fantasizing, role construct in terms playing, and archiving. As these fans their queer narratives both of star and against the array of official marketing materials surrounding the pop Bowie, are to if not the concomitant with they able redeploy, shed, shame their "scandalous," as taken are culturally marginal position?for Sedgwick notes, "the forms by shame" . "available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, toufiguration too for work As but perhaps all potent the of purgation and deontological closure."8 Warner more bluntlyputs it,"it is futileto deny the ordinarypower of sexual shame."9 seen an more We have how just such attempted denial?or, accurately, the failure of thisdenial?propels Julie's fan narrative,which hinges on the question of how to rid oneself of shame. But if thisaffect cannot easily be gotten rid of, thenperhaps the fan identifiedin Starlust as Sheila poses a more productive question: not how to do without . shame, but ratherhow to do thingswith it. "I'd like [Bowie] to see himself froma a. can fan's point of view and understand just how intense fan's devotions be," she says. "It may be embarrassing, but it's very real." Sheila's wish that Bowie "see himself from a fan's point of view"?her desire that the object of her fandom simultaneously occupy a that position and the spectatorial position of the fan, site of "intense" affect?mirrors own her "embarrassing" vision of herself from Bowie's point of view. Her wish further come to suggests the ways fans often identify and communicate with stars, the ways they better "understand" and shape stars and themselves through queer affects like shame, use sees as making of what Sedgwick its "transformational energy," its "experimental, creative, performative force."10 Embarrassment, here, both interrupts identification and at once tenuous suggests its potential intensity; it emphasizes and shores up the identity a as of the fan, making self that merely may "be" also appear something "very real." I take as my point of departureJudy's and Sheila's accounts of pop fandom,marked extreme to by embarrassment and shame and generated in response the gender accounts bending styles and ambiguous sexuality of Bowie's personae, because these a set and link together of issues?fandom, shame, performance, queer identity?that motivate the discussion that follows.