Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Series Q) [Paperback]

Kathryn Bond Stockton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 2006 | Series: Series Q

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame, has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?

Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame is an exciting, pointed, splendidly written, culturally important book.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

About the Author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (July 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822337967
• ISBN-13: 978-0822337966
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Stuff, December 29, 2007

By 

Fitzgerald Fan (Troy, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Series Q) (Paperback)

What I love about Stockton's work is that it represents the cross section of theory, literature and art. The one thing that discourages me (often) with the study of literature is the horribly drab study of theory--one that seems to exclude the beauty of it all. However, here it is approached with a fresh eye and a fresh aspect.
Stockton looks at photography, cinema, literature etc. and does so in a way that will make you think differently about black queer studies. The influence from Kosofsky Sedgwick is obvious and complimentary.
I think it's easier for reviewers to hate this work simply because it dares to "think outside the box"...thank God!
Stockton's book is among the best (of the limited) black queer studies projects.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book I've read this year, July 16, 2008

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Craig Helms - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Series Q) (Paperback)

As with Kathryn Stockton's first book, God Between Their Lips, this book is highly articulate, intelligent, insightful, engaging, and thought-provoking. I highly recommend buying this book.

5 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Crazy babbling on senseless jibberish crapulation, November 12, 2007

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steVando (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Series Q) (Paperback)

The tis of what ever not is when not at the end of the silent contempt enforceable of which is to blame not tender at what, not but chatter con to what it truly is. If you understood this last sentence then this book is for you. But if you are normal like the rest of us then it is nothing more than meaningless gibberish and the ENTIRE book is full of it. I never seen anyone take a bunch of words and put them together in such meaningless fashion as this author did on this book. I thought it was on blacks, or maybe on gay bottoms, or maybe on the shame of homosexuality (if there is such thing), but NO. Just some crazy talk on nothing. I encourage you to please buy this book and see what I am talking about. A waste of paper, of space on my shelves (where there ARE good books), and a waste of my 22 dollars... I want not only a refund but for the author to pay me a million dollars for having to go thru all those pages of senseless free association. I did like the cover. Lesson learned: don't buy the book by its cover!