Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonding in Gay Culture

Why is so much gay male culture obsessed with women? Why do men who desire other men spend so much time and energy adoring women, bonding with women? Why is it that women seem to develop special relationships with gay men? Why is it so fabulous to be a screaming queen? In this innovative and provocative book Stephen Maddison offers answers to these questions by looking in detail at a range of cultural texts from Tennessee William’s classic play A Streetcar named Desire and Forster’s ‘gay’ novel Maurice through Pulp Fiction, queer lifestyle magazines, Roseanne, slash fan fiction, and jarman’s Edward II to Almodovar’s camp classic Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Along the way he looks at the kinds of iconic divas, dames, bitches, studs, and bad boys who have formed the gender archetypes that shape gay culture. Theoretically sophisticated, yet passionate, accessible and opinionated, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters takes issue with many of the sacred cows of contemporary gay politics, and offers a number of new concepts in lesbian and gay theory. Taking its historical cue from turn-of-the century notions of inversion, the book uses feminist and queer work on gender to argue that third sex models of homosexuality continue to inform gay culture in the US and Britain. Maddison offers a radical new reading of Eve Sedgwick’s work on homosocial male bonds, and develops new terms for understanding the cultural importance of relationships between gay men and women.

Stephen Maddison works in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He has also taught at Southhampton Institute and at Sussex University, where he completed his doctorate. He has publsihed academic work on gay identity and gender, Tennessee Williams, and autobiography and space. His first publication, a journalistic account of of gay men’s fascination with Barbra Streisand, appeared in Britain’s Gay Times in 1992. He lives in Brighton.

Description from back cover