American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic [Hardcover]

S. Paige Baty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 1995

Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddess--a character that tells the story of America itself. American Monroe explores the ways we remember Marilyn--from playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies, and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground.
Finding in Marilyn a "representative character" of our time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow "the mediatrix" from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition.
American Monroe is an innovative, scintillating look at the making and remaking of popular icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how, through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Baty's postmodern rendering of Monroe's ghostly presence in American culture suggests the ways that not only beauty but individuals themselves are commodified as they circulate through the mass media. . . . Baty evocatively analyzes the different modes by which the mass media remembers figures like Monroe."--"In These Times

From the Inside Flap

"A highly original work that is extremely important to the study of both culture and politics. Demonstrating how the cultural icon of Marilyn Monroe provides the "body politic" in American mass-mediated society, Baty not only offers a provocative reading of the iconographic, biographic, cartographic and hagiographic modes in which "Marilyn" has been written by others, but also gives us a novel theorization of how popular culture translates, transforms, and embodies the political sphere."--Vivian Sobchack, author of The Address of the Eye

"Reborn on coffee cups, T-shirts, and film footage, in conspiracy theory, biography, and necrophilia, the remembered fragments of Marilyn Monroe--so Paige Baty shows--make up cult objects of our imagined community. American Monroe is endlessly revelatory not only about the meanings of Marilyn but also about the nature of the common culture of the United States."--Mike Rogin, author of Ronald Reagan: The Movie

"In this original, imaginative, and innovative book, Paige Baty asks and answers important questions about U.S. political culture by examining many mass-mediated memories of Marilyn Monroe. Baty uses our continuing national obsession with Monroe's life and death as a means of exploring the ways in which 'languages of belonging' dominate our mass-mediated political landscape. She explores how iconic representations, personal biographies, conspiracy theories, and anxieties about death shape the symbolic economy of American politics into what she calls the 'post-mortem condition.' This important inquiry about collective memory, mass media, and political culture starts with the life and the mass-mediated memory of one celebrity, but it builds into a fascinating and persuasive general discussion about the nature of knowledge and the social production of the individual self in a world where mass-mediated images and icons form the core of our collective consciousness."--George Lipsitz, author of Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place

"If U.S. culture cannot forget Marilyn Monroe, readers of American Monroe will not be able to forget Professor Baty's elegant and provocative arguments. Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe are both representative figures in U.S. cultural politics. While his death is repetitively denied, Elvis's living clones endlessly populate hotel conventions and tabloids. But it is Marilyn's dissected body and haunting story of suicide that proliferate in the undead spaces of U.S. mass-mediated culture. In American Monroe, Baty writes a haunting kind of political theory. Her project probes the profusion of meanings associated with a cultural figure who is at the heart of contemporary crises in representation. American Monroe is a book about cultural memory as political practice; it is a work to remember."--Donna Haraway, author of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 197 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (August 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520088050
• ISBN-13: 978-0520088054
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,423,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Approach to Monroe, May 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (Paperback)

S. Paige Baty's American Monroe is one of the most riveting academic books on popular culture I have ever read. The author does an excellent job of explaining how the star has functioned as an icon of popular memory over the past three and a half decades, exploring her image from cultural, historical, and political angles.

She explains that the "real" story began once Monroe died, in so much as her corpse provided the ground for recent history (Hollywood, Presidential politics, feminism) to be written. If you're looking for an ordinary biography of Marilyn, or a typical rendering of her place in history, don't look here. But if you'd like to gain a critical or philosophical perspective on the star, buy this book! Now!

Of particular interest is Baty's take on mass media, virtual communities bound by the internet, and a re-thinking of the way American citizens cast our vote in the democratic process.