Andy Warhol's Blow Job

by Grundmann, Roy

• ISBN13: 9781566399722
• ISBN10: 1566399726
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Summary

In this ground-breaking and provocative book, Roy Grundmann contends that Andy Warhol's notorious 1964 underground film,Blow Job, serves as rich allegory as well as suggestive metaphor for post-war American society's relation to homosexuality. Arguing thatBlow Jobepitomizes the highly complex position of gay invisibility and visibility, Grundmann uses the film to explore the mechanisms that constructed pre-Stonewall white gay male identity in popular culture, high art, science, and ethnography. Grundmann draws on discourses of art history, film theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to situate Warhol's work at the nexus of Pop art, portrait painting, avant-garde film, and mainstream cinema. His close textual analysis of the film probes into its ambiguities and the ways in which viewers respond to what is and what is not on screen. Presenting rarely reproduced Warhol art and previously unpublished Ed Wallowitch photographs along with now iconic publicity shots of James Dean, Grundmann establishesBlow Jobas a consummate example of Warhol's highly insightful engagement with a broad range of representational codes of gender and sexuality. Author note: Roy Grundmannis Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Boston University and a contributing editor ofCineaste.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(18)
Myths from the Underground	19	(31)
Shadows and Myths	50	(31)
White Gay Male Identity Between Passing and Posing	81	(19)
Gay Masculinity Between (De) Construction and Demontage	100	(32)
Andy Warhol, James Dean, and White Gay Men	132	(32)
Darkness as Metaphor	164	(27)
Notes	191	(32)
Index	223