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

~ (Author), Michèle AinaBarale (Series Editor), Jonathan Goldberg (Series Editor)
Key Phrases: homosexual miscegenation, embracing shame, queer pulp, Pulp Fiction, Toni Morrison, Fight Club (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kathryn Bond Stockton refuses clumsy, outmoded distinctions between racial and sexual 'minorities.' Instead, in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame she boldly examines those many places in our culture where shame, debasement, humiliation, and abjection draw together the black and the queer. At the same time, she carefully details the ways in which these sites of negative emotion and affect have been utilized by American artists and intellectuals to produce work that is not only compelling but often stunningly beautiful. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame is the type of work for which so many of us have yearned."--Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Black Gay Man "Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame is an exciting, pointed, splendidly written, culturally important book."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (June 30, 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: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #389,136 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Difficult to Read, February 22, 2009

By	Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Stockton, Kathryn. "Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer", Duke University Press, 2006.

Extremely Difficult to Read

Amos Lassen

Where black and queer come together us the subject of Kathryn Stockton's study. She shows how the negativity of shame, humiliation, debasement, and abjection affects those who are black and queer. According to the author, it is shame is what brings the world of black and gay together and those marked as members of this group have suffered greatly. These feelings can be used for artistic efforts.
Using the areas of African American studies, queer theory, film theory, semiotics, gender studies, photography and psychoanalysis as a means to find answers, Stockton brings thinkers and theorists together to show that the terms of "gay" and "black" are not directly related but come together out of some kind of need.
This is a scholarly study and it is quite difficult to read and if one is not familiar with the language of discourse it is quite easy to become lost reading this. I found myself drowning in the language so I can surmise that this is not a
book for everyone.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Fitzgerald Fan (Royal Oak, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews

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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.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Craig Helms - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.