Academic literature on the topic 'Queen Hortense'

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

El dossier que presentamos en este número tuvo su origen en dos coloquios dedicados a las indagaciones multidisciplinarias en las prácticas de investigación en artes y ciencias sociales. En uno nos centramos en el teatro, la performatividad y el abandono; el otro, lo dedicamos a las heterotopías. Más allá de los temas específicos, nos interesaba interrogar las prácticas de investigación en campos diversos y los diálogos que se podían establecer entre ellas. Buscábamos propiciar un ejercicio colectivo de reflexión a partir de múltiples experiencias y atisbar los lenguajes en uso, las técnicas de investigación, las estrategias analíticas, los modos de interrogación, las imaginaciones involucradas y los puntos donde las rutas conceptuales o prácticas divergían.El diálogo nos condujo a un desafío de límites entre campos formalmente separados, el cual generó tensiones, desfases y discordancias. Una de las más sobresalientes tiene que ver con la “división ocupacional entre el artista y el académico” (Jackson, 177-178): ¿cómo se inscriben las artes escénicas en el espacio formal, disciplinario y disciplinado de la vida académica? Porque nuestros sujetos/objetos de conocimiento, nuestras preguntas de investigación y nuestras “metodologías” parecían converger en estrategias de trabajo, lenguajes, formas de pensar, modos de aproximación e interrogación que, de manera colateral, nos conectan con los estudios del performance y, por consiguiente, nos enfrentan a una cuestión que rebasa con mucho las prácticas de investigación.Por eso propusimos este conjunto de reflexiones a una revista dedicada a las artes escénicas y la performatividad que, además, dedica buena parte de su espacio al mundo del performance. El performance pensado como acción/actuación/actualización, puesta en acto y escenificación de normas y órdenes, subversión y atravesamiento de límites; reproducción y diferencia que alude, al mismo tiempo, a la irrepetibilidad del acontecimiento y a su pertenencia a una estructura que le otorga significación dentro del marco contextual del aquí-y-ahora, es decir, al reconocimiento de que nuestras vidas están estructuradas de acuerdo con modos de conducta repetidos y socialmente sancionados. Todo lo cual sugiere una lucha por el control de una economía simbólica.Los trabajos reunidos aquí tienen en común ese punto de partida. No se puede pensar el performance como un género artístico o como el dominio estricto de una disciplina estética en sí misma, sino como una pluralidad de expresiones. De la misma forma, los referentes de nuestras contribuciones son diversos y heterogéneos: desde prácticas corporales cotidianas como los usos indumentarios hasta la extrema codificación del cuerpo en la danza o el deporte, pasando por experiencias autodenominadas como teatrales, escenificaciones paratópicas y rituales colectivos del duelo. Lo que permite la interlocución entre experiencias y ejercicios tan dispares es su anclaje en lo que Allan Kaprow ha denominado el “arte como vida”, es decir, el arte que mezcla los géneros o los evita: “el principal diálogo de los hacedores del arte como vida no se lleva a cabo con el arte, sino con todo lo demás”.Si bien la confusión de categorías ha ampliado la gama de lo que cuenta como práctica artística, lo que nos interesa de esta experiencia en tanto teatro, imagen y etnografía es una conversación interdisciplinaria que vulnera los límites entre modalidades y borra las fronteras entre los medios, los géneros o las tradiciones culturales. Porque la discusión nos conduce a la toma de conciencia de la “índole contingente, resbalosa y decididamente contextual de la formación de conocimiento” (Jackson, 10). Refrenda la idea de Feyerabend de que no existe una sola fuente del saber, ni una única manera legítima de transmitirlo. El desafío principal de nuestras prácticas epistemológicas consiste en mantenerse como marca de frontera entre campos del saber y desestabilizar la idea de que existe una forma única —estandarizada, universal, normativa— de producir conocimiento.En alguna medida, las perspectivas multidisciplinarias o transdisciplinarias contienen un elemento mítico que anuncia una mutua comprensión o la integración de los lenguajes y los modos de intervenir sobre ciertas realidades o fenómenos. Nuestra postura fue sospechar de ese horizonte, pero creer en el mito. Los coloquios fueron, en ese sentido, ejercicios rituales para mitologías en ciernes.Nuestro interés común surge de una experiencia singular, pero compartida, de extrañamiento. Por un lado, una de las colaboradoras (Hortensia Moreno) investigó durante largo tiempo prácticas corporales de boxeadoras y se adentró en un mundo repleto de imágenes, rituales, límites y creencias. Por otro, Rodrigo Parrini se encontró con una compañía de teatro en una ciudad de la frontera sur de México —lugar poco acostumbrado al arte de la capital— y comenzó una interrogación sobre las relaciones entre sus propias prácticas etnográficas y las prácticas teatrales que realizaba ese grupo de artistas. ¿Se puede interrogar al boxeo desde la semiótica y el feminismo?, ¿es factible ver en ese deporte un mundo particular y en las mujeres que lo practican sujetos singulares?; ¿podríamos pensar una etnografía que se realiza a través del teatro?, ¿o un teatro que rebasa la escena y se aproxima a los mundos de vida y a las teatralidades que ahí se producen? El extrañamiento del que hablamos surge de ese encuentro fortuito, pero también intencionado, con otros lenguajes y otras estéticas. Extrañarse es el principio de la interrogación, se lea esa actitud como inicio de algo o como un imperativo intelectual.En el teatro o en el boxeo se escuchan muchas voces. Son mundos llenos de sonidos, incluso en los intervalos de silencio que cobijan. Esas voces, que se desplazan con quien las ha escuchado ya no como un mundo sonoro sino como una interioridad bullente, abren diálogos, suscitan asociaciones, crean argumentos. Los artículos que hemos reunido en este número forman parte de ese espacio colmado de referencias e imágenes. En algún sentido, es tanto un mundo de voces como una interioridad parlante. Esa convergencia razonada de la que hablamos antes es también una subjetividad comprometida. Si bien podríamos abordar el arte como una institución o la etnografía como una metodología, preferimos ubicarnos en una posición de perturbación serena en la que los desencuentros produzcan sentidos que no hemos avizorado. Si bien ninguno de los textos que hemos reunido propone rupturas definitivas, todos, a su manera, registran desacomodos importantes: del cuerpo con el sentido, del arte con la conciencia, del deseo con el lenguaje, de la muerte con sus rituales.Al parecer, las formas de vida en el mundo actual experimentan una crisis profunda en lo que Paolo Virno llama sus sustratos de piedra. Crisis que Peter Sloterdijk denomina simplemente “modernidad”, pero que nosotros evitamos nombrar ante la urgencia de una descripción pormenorizada. ¿Son los elaborados rituales mortuorios que realizan los habitantes de una localidad de Guerrero suficientes para resolver colectivamente la desaparición sistemática de personas que ocurre en ese estado mexicano?, ¿cómo ritualizar la muerte de aquellas personas cuyo destino se desconoce y cuyos cuerpos no han sido encontrados? El texto de Anne Johnson se adentra en esas preguntas, mediante su propio involucramiento en las prácticas rituales y una inquietud política afligida por la violencia creciente. El abigarramiento de las imágenes y objetos que se utilizan para recordar a un muerto o para conmemorarlo se contrapone al vacío de la desaparición; la presencia atiborrada, a la ausencia angustiosa. En ese deslinde entre la fuerza socializante de los rituales y la dispersión de la violencia, la pregunta antropológica por el dolor se aproxima a las interrogaciones estéticas: “¿cómo es que, en nuestro contacto con las obras, con las imágenes, se encuentra ya proyectada una relación con el dolor?”, se pregunta Georges Didi-Huberman (48).De la misma forma, en otros escenarios, la pregunta autoetnográfica sobre la producción del género como efecto de los usos del vestir se responde solamente en la experiencia del propio cuerpo. Acá lo que está en juego ya no es solamente el espectáculo de la presentación de sí ante un público en un proscenio, sino sobre todo la preparación del espectáculo: el trabajo de vestuario, maquillaje, accesorios, peinado; y de manera concomitante, el ensayo de gestos, poses, manierismos, tonos de voz, actitudes, van produciendo un cuerpo que se reconoce a un tiempo como mismidad y alteridad. El trabajo de Alba Pons explora formas de acceso al saber que podríamos caracterizar como un aprendizaje “en el cuerpo”, como formas de re-conocimiento del saber que reside en el cuerpo y no rebasa la esfera de lo común y lo ordinario. Y a la vez, recupera la capacidad reflexiva de las personas en situaciones donde se re-escenifican hábitos, costumbres, rituales, modales o códigos de interacción que determinan prácticas sociales vividas como “naturales”, “normales” o “normativas”.De una forma distinta, y con otros materiales, Antoine Rodríguez interroga las prácticas de un artista y performer queer mexicano que elabora escenas de violencia y de deseo utilizando su cuerpo como escenario, objeto, cuadro o desecho. Las performances de Lechedevirgen Trimegisto son rituales privados que el artista exhibe como ejecuciones públicas que no alcanzan a consumarse. Por eso, en sus prácticas está en juego la capacidad de interpelación política de algunas formas de arte, pero también un modo de elaboración del lenguaje y los afectos transidos por la violencia. Tenemos la impresión que sus trabajos no son pasajes al acto que desplieguen la violencia, pero tampoco simbolizaciones que la desplacen; son más bien un juego en el filo de lo que surge como deseo y lo que perturba como violencia. ¿No es el estigma una marca visible pero también oculta? A Lechedevirgen lo estigmatizan su deseo, su fenotipo, sus prácticas artísticas, dice Rodríguez, y a la vez él transforma su cuerpo en un arma, en un manifiesto de intensidades eróticas y políticas que no propone un discurso cerrado o coherente, sino que saca chispas, incluso con su piel y sus órganos, y suscita nuevas opacidades y brillos inéditos que muestran la intimidad, pero también la ocultan.El testimonio que escribieron Patricio Villarreal y los integrantes de Teatro Ojo, a partir de un laboratorio que realizaron en unos de los coloquios que mencionamos antes, explora un síntoma que se manifestó de forma inesperada en la vida social de México. Didi-Huberman lee un síntoma como “la fisura en los signos, la pizca de sinsentido y de no saber de dónde un conocimiento puede extraer su momento decisivo” (24). Una de sus piezas —México mi amor. Nunca mires atrás abordaba el sismo que acaeció en la capital del país en septiembre de 1985 y que dejó profundas huellas y heridas en sus habitantes. Desde una azotea del Centro Cultural de España en México, ubicado a unos metros del Templo Mayor y la Catedral Metropolitana, el colectivo teatral fue trazando un mapa visual de los distintos puntos donde habían intervenido con sus piezas. Por las ventanas podíamos ver la ciudad y sus edificios emblemáticos. Pero, por otra parte, el edificio de ese centro cultural estaba construido sobre un calmecac, antigua escuela para nobles mexicas, cuyos rastros se habían convertido en un museo de sitio subterráneo. Desde arriba se podía observar el pasado cercano y el futuro de la ciudad; abajo un pasado remoto. Teatro Ojo jugó con las temporalidades heterogéneas que se traslapaban en ese edificio.Unos meses después del laboratorio, el mismo día que se conmemoraban los 32 años del sismo de 1985, otro fuerte terremoto sacudió la ciudad y sus alrededores, mató a varios cientos de personas y dañó miles de edificios. Una fisura social atravesó la urbe; un sinsentido organizado por una coincidencia funesta desordenó las explicaciones y las narrativas sobre los terremotos; emergió un no-saber del que los habitantes de la ciudad podían extraer un momento decisivo de destrucción y pregunta. En torno a ese síntoma, en el que se repite todo como si nunca hubiese sucedido o no dejara de ocurrir, Villarreal y Teatro Ojo elaboran un texto que intenta registrar otros temblores, como los proyectos sismográficos que Aby Warburg imaginó entre las guerras mundiales desde algún sanatorio de Europa o el temblor que afectaba a Derrida en sus últimos años de vida. Sacudidas de la historia, del cuerpo o de los subsuelos.

As part of his 1975 solo debut album, Água do céu-pássaro, Ney Matogrosso recorded a cover of "Barco negro," a Portuguese fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues and based on an earlier Brazilian song, "Mãe-preta," written by Caco Velho and Piratini and recorded by Os Tocantins in 1943. Matogrosso conflates the two versions, titling the track, "Mãe preta (Barco negro)." This article marks Matogrosso’s recording as an iteration of transgender voice and locates—in his performance and album artwork—queer, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian intersections that rework the mãe preta figure central to Brazil’s foundational narrative. Making use of Hortense Spiller’s theorization of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as "body-theft," I argue that Matogrosso’s referents and trans voice reembody the Luso-Afro-Brazilian black mother in ways that unsettle Lusotropicalism and haunt Portuguese nationalist tropes.

Are male porn stars full-fledged citizens? Recent political developments make this question more than rhetorical. The Bush Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has targeted the porn industry, beginning with its prosecution of Extreme Associates. More recently, the President requested an increase in the FBI’s 2005 budget for prosecuting obscenity, one of the few budget increases for the Bureau outside of its anti-terrorism program (Schmitt A1). To be sure, the concept of “citizen” is itself vexed. Citizenship, when obtained or granted, ostensibly legitimates a subject and opens up pathways to privilege: social, political, economic, etc. Yet all citizens do not seem to be created equal. “There is, in the operation of state-defined rules and in common practices an assumption of moral worth in which de facto as opposed to de jure rights of citizenship are defined as open to those who are deserving or who are capable of acting responsibly,” asserts feminist critic Linda McDowell. “The less deserving and the less responsible are defined as unworthy of or unfitted for the privileges of full citizenship” (150). Under this rubric, a citizen must measure up to a standard of “moral worth”—an individual is not a full-fledged citizen merely on the basis of birth or geographical placement. As McDowell concludes, “citizenship is not an inclusive but an exclusive concept” (150). Thus, in figuring out how male porn stars stand in regard to the question of citizenship, we must ask who determines “moral worth,” who distinguishes the less from the more deserving, and how people have come to agree on the “common practices” of citizenship. Many critics writing about citizenship, including McDowell, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Robyn Wiegman, Michael Moon, and Cathy Davidson (to name only a few) have located the nexus of “moral worth” in the body. In particular, the ability to make the body abstract, invisible, and non-identifiable has been the most desirable quality for a citizen to possess. White men seem ideally situated for such acts of “decorporealization,” and the white male body has been installed as the norm for citizenship. Conversely, women, people of color, and the ill and disabled, groups that are frequently defined by their very embodiment, find themselves more often subject to regulation. If the white male body is the standard, however, for “moral worth,” the white male porn star would seem to disrupt such calculations. Clearly, the profession demands that these men put their bodies very much in evidence, and the most famous porn stars, like John C. Holmes and Ron Jeremy, derive much of their popularity from their bodily excess. Jeremy’s struggle for “legitimacy,” and the tenuous position of men in the porn industry in general, demonstrate that even white males, when they cannot or will not aspire to abstraction and invisibility, will lose the privileges of citizenship. The right’s attack on pornography can thus be seen as yet another attempt to regulate and restrict citizenship, an effort that forces Jeremy and the industry that made him famous struggle for strategies of invisibility that will permit some mainstream acceptance. In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman points out that the idea of democratic citizenship rested on a distinct sense of the abstract and non-particular. The more “particular” an individual was, however, the less likely s/he could pass into the realm of citizen. “For those trapped by the discipline of the particular (women, slaves, the poor),” Wiegman writes, “the unmarked and universalized particularity of the white masculine prohibited their entrance into the abstraction of personhood that democratic equality supposedly entailed” (49). The norm of the “white masculine” caused others to signify “an incontrovertible difference” (49), so people who were visibly different (or perceived as visibly different) could be tyrannized over and regulated to ensure the purity of the norm. Like Wiegman, Lauren Berlant has written extensively about the ways in which the nation recognizes only one “official” body: “The white, male body is the relay to legitimation, but even more than that, the power to suppress that body, to cover its tracks and its traces, is the sign of real authority, according to constitutional fashion” (113). Berlant notes that “problem citizens”—most notably women of color—struggle with the problem of “surplus embodiment.” They cannot easily suppress their bodies, so they are subjected to the regulatory power of a law that defines them and consequently opens their bodies up to violation. To escape their “surplus embodiment,” those who can seek abstraction and invisibility because “sometimes a person doesn’t want to seek the dignity of an always-already-violated body, and wants to cast hers off, either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model” (114). The question of “surplus embodiment” certainly has resonance for male porn stars. Peter Lehman has argued that hardcore pornography relies on images of large penises as signifiers of strength and virility. “The genre cannot tolerate a small, unerect penis,” Lehman asserts, “because the sight of the organ must convey the symbolic weight of the phallus” (175). The “power” of male porn stars derives from their visibility, from “meat shots” and “money shots.” Far from being abstract, decorporealized “persons,” male porn stars are fully embodied. In fact, the more “surplus embodiment” they possess, the more famous they become. Yet the very display that makes white male porn stars famous also seemingly disqualifies them from the “legitimacy” afforded the white male body. In the industry itself, male stars are losing authority to the “box-cover girls” who sell the product. One’s “surplus embodiment” might be a necessity for working in the industry, but, as Susan Faludi notes, “by choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as porn actor Jonathan Morgan observed, on ‘the one muscle on our body we can’t flex’” (547). When that muscle doesn’t work, a male porn star doesn’t become an abstraction—he becomes “other,” a joke, swept aside and deemed useless. Documentary filmmaker Scott J. Gill recognizes the tenuousness of the “citizenship” of male porn stars in his treatment of Ron Jeremy, “America’s most famous porn star.” The film, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001), opens with a clear acknowledgment of Jeremy’s body, as one voiceover explains how his nickname, “the Hedgehog,” derives from the fact that Jeremy is “small, fat, and very hairy.” Then, Gill intercuts the comments of various Jeremy fans: “An idol to an entire generation,” one young man opines; “One of the greatest men this country has ever seen,” suggests another. This opening scene concludes with an image of Jeremy, smirking and dressed in a warm-up suit with a large dollar sign necklace, standing in front of an American flag (an image repeated at the end of the film). This opening few minutes posit the Hedgehog as super-citizen, embraced as few Americans are. “Everyone wants to be Ron Jeremy,” another young fan proclaims. “They want his life.” Gill also juxtaposes “constitutional” forms of legitimacy that seemingly celebrate Jeremy’s bodily excess with the resultant discrimination that body actually engenders. In one clip, Jeremy exposes himself to comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who then sardonically comments, “All men are created equal—what bullshit!” Later, Gill employs a clip of a film in which Jeremy is dressed like Ben Franklin while in a voiceover porn director/historian Bill Margold notes that the Freeman decision “gave a birth certificate to a bastard industry—it legitimized us.” The juxtaposition thus posits Jeremy as a “founding father” of sorts, the most recognizable participant in an industry now going mainstream. Gill, however, emphasizes the double-edged nature of Jeremy’s fame and the price of his display. Immediately after the plaudits of the opening sequence, Gill includes clips from various Jeremy talk show appearances in which he is denounced as “scum” and told “You should go to jail just for all the things that you’ve helped make worse in this country” and “You should be shot.” Gill also shows a clearly dazed Jeremy in close-up confessing, “I hate myself. I want to find a knife and slit my wrists.” Though Jeremy does not seem serious, this comment comes into better focus as the film unfolds. Jeremy’s efforts to go “legit,” to break into mainstream film and leave his porn life behind, keep going off the tracks. In the meantime, Jeremy must fulfill his obligations to his current profession, including getting a monthly HIV test. “There’ll be one good thing about eventually getting out of the porn business,” he confesses as Gill shows scenes of a clearly nervous Jeremy awaiting results in a clinic waiting room, “to be able to stop taking these things every fucking month.” Gill shows that the life so many others would love to have requires an abuse of the body that fans never see. Jeremy is seeking to cast off that life, “either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model.” Behind this “legend” is unseen pain and longing. Gill emphasizes the dichotomy between Jeremy (illegitimate) and “citizens” in his own designations. Adam Rifkin, director of Detroit Rock City, in which Jeremy has a small part, and Troy Duffy, another Jeremy pal, are referred to as “mainstream film directors.” When Jeremy returns to his home in Queens to visit his father, Arnold Hyatt is designated “physicist.” In fact, Jeremy’s father forbids his son from using the family name in his porn career. “I don’t want any confusion between myself and his line of work,” Hyatt confesses, “because I’m retired.” Denied his patronym, Jeremy is truly “illegitimate.” Despite his father’s understanding and support, Jeremy is on his own in the business he has chosen. Jeremy’s reputation also gets in the way of his mainstream dreams. “Sometimes all this fame can hurt you,” Jeremy himself notes. Rifkin admits that “People recognize Ron as a porn actor and immediately will ask me to remove him from the final cut.” Duffy concurs that Jeremy’s porn career has made him a pariah for some mainstream producers: “Stigma attached to him, and that’s all anybody’s ever gonna see.” Jeremy’s visibility, the “stigma” that people have “seen,” namely, his large penis and fat, hairy body, denies him the abstract personhood he needs to go “legitimate.” Thus, whether through the concerted efforts of the Justice Department or the informal, personal angst of a producer fearing a backlash against a film, Jeremy, as a representative of an immoral industry, finds himself subject to regulation. Indeed, as his “legitimate” filmography indicates, Jeremy has been cut out of more than half the films he has appeared in. The issue of “visibility” as the basis for regulation of hardcore pornography has its clearest articulation in Potter Stewart’s famous proclamation “I know it when I see it.” But as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong report in The Brethren, Stewart was not the only Justice who used visibility as a standard. Byron White’s personal definition was “no erect penises, no intercourse, no oral or anal sodomy” (193). William Brennan, too, had what his clerks called “the limp dick standard” (194). Erection, what Lehman has identified as the conveyance of the phallus, now became the point of departure for regulation, transferring, once again, the phallus to the “law.” When such governmental regulation failed First Amendment ratification, other forms of societal regulation kicked in. The porn industry has accommodated itself to this regulation, as Faludi observes, in its emphasis on “soft” versions of product for distribution to “legitimate” outlets like cable and hotels. “The version recut for TV would have to be entirely ‘soft,’” Faludi notes, “which meant, among other things, no erect penises and no semen” (547). The work of competent “woodsmen” like Jeremy now had to be made invisible to pass muster. Thus, even the penis could be conveyed to the viewer, a “fantasy penis,” as Katherine Frank has called it, that can be made to correlate to that viewer’s “fantasized identity” of himself (133-4). At the beginning of Porn Star, during the various homages paid to Jeremy, one fan draws a curious comparison: “There’s Elvis, and then there’s Ron.” Elvis’s early career had certainly been plagued by criticism related to his bodily excess. Musicologist Robert Fink has recently compared Presley’s July 2, 1956, recording of “Hound Dog” to music for strip tease, suggesting that Elvis used such subtle variations to challenge the law that was constantly impinging on his performances: “The Gray Lady was sensitive to the presence of quite traditional musical erotics—formal devices that cued the performer and audience to experience their bodies sexually—but not quite hep enough to accept a male performer recycling these musical signifiers of sex back to a female audience” (99). Eventually, though, Elvis stopped rebelling and sought respectability. Writing to President Nixon on December 21, 1970, Presley offered his services to help combat what he perceived to be a growing cultural insurgency. “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc., do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it, The Establishment,” Presley confided. “I call it America and I love it” (Carroll 266). In short, Elvis wanted to use his icon status to help reinstate law and order, in the process demonstrating his own patriotism, his value and worth as a citizen. At the end of Porn Star, Jeremy, too, craves legitimacy. Whereas Elvis appealed to Nixon, Jeremy concludes by appealing to Steven Spielberg. Elvis received a badge from Nixon designating him as “special assistant” for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Presumably Jeremy invests his legitimacy in a SAG card. Kenny Dollar, a Jeremy friend, unironically summarizes the final step the Hedgehog must take: “It’s time for Ron to go on and reach his full potential. Let him retire his dick.” That Jeremy must do the latter before having a chance for the former illustrates how “surplus embodiment” and “citizenship” remain inextricably entangled and mutually exclusive. References Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991: 110-140. Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Castronovo, Russ and Nelson, Dana D., eds. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999. Fink, Robert. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. Eds. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002: 60-109. Frank, Katherine. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gill, Scott J., dir. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. New Video Group, 2001. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Moon, Michael and Davidson, Cathy N., eds. Subjects and Citizens: From Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Schmitt, Richard B. “U. S. Plans to Escalate Porn Fight.” The Los Angeles Times 14 February 2004. A1. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Woodward, Bob and Armstrong, Scott. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. MLA Style Russell, David. "The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>. APA Style Russell, D. (2004 Oct 11). The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>

This paper, on the identities shown in one of the cameos in Empress Josephine’s pearl and cameo diadem, has first of all focused on the mythological characters, and thereafter raised the question if these are to be seen as an allegory for people from the time. The process of identi-fication has followed the three levels in Panofsky’s method for analysing art, where the first and second levels consist of already known material from the Bernadotte Library, Royal Palace in Stockholm and the jeweller house of Chaumet (former Nitot et Fils) in Paris.                      To decipher both the mythological individuals and the possible allegories, that is the third level, the iconology itself, the thoughts and methods of  Göran Hermerén on the rise and fall of allegories along with Leora Auslander’s solutions using visuals comparisons, when no written material is available, have provided the academic framework for the study.                                When comparing the cameo with pieces of art from the time, the subject fits the description of the Roman mythology’s love goddess Venus and her son Cupid, the lovechild fathered by Mars. Moving on to allegories, well-known material shows that Emperor Napoleon was keen to be portrayed as the god of war Mars and Empress Josephine as Venus.  A portrait of special interest to the study, a rather private painting by Parent from 1807, which is probably still unknown to most people, shows how Josephine is depicted with a recently deceased grandchild, a young boy how was also the nephew of Napoleon’s, a close relative to them both, and in the line of  succession to the throne, while Napoleon still was Emperor. This picture has an expression which is close to the one of Venus and Cupid, and it is also made to look like a cameo. These portraits were known at the time when Napoleon gave the diadem to Josephine in 1809.                                                       Among portraits from the Napoleonic era, there has earlier only been one known painting, even if in two examples, where the diadem is shown. It is a miniature of Empress Josephine, a work from her final period at Malmaison, 1814. However, another miniature picturing the daughter Hortense in the very same piece of jewellery, from 1812, has now become known. In both these examples, the depicted cameo has a hight measuring only millimetres, why a discussion on the execution and the rendering has to be done with restraint. But in the daughter´s portrait there is a certain attempt to show the outlines of the central cameo that differs from the later painting of the Empress. This may be an indication of how much more important it was for the daughter to relay the picture of her mother and the memory of her son, in 1812, than it was for Josephine in 1814, after the divorce, probably after the fall of Napoleon too, when she was no longer his Venus, and there was no longer a throne for any of her grandsons to inherit.         Therefore, in short, the chosen methods give the answer that the mythology depicted is a scene of Venus and her son Cupid, and the allegorical interpretation of Venus is the Empress herself. The child in shape of Cupid here, may well be read as one of her daughter’s sons, at the time a much longed-for heir to the throne of Napoleon I.

The main purpose of this study of a pearl and cameo diadem, given by Napoleon to his first wife Josephine in 1809, is to follow its representation in portraiture from Paris in 1812 to Stockholm in 2010, and explore how the iconography develops during these 200 years. From the earlier years, the diadem is found only in miniatures, then after coming to the new royal family in Sweden, the Bernadottes, it is given a role of an heirloom representing history and families in grand paintings, arriving to the present well-known wedding hairpiece, covered by modern media, where the diadem is more of a crown than the open, forehead-covering piece of fashion jewellery it was during the Napoleonic era in France. The portraits from 1812, 1814, 1836, 1837, 1877, 1976, 2000/2003 and 2010 also portray a development of the female role model of its time. Just like the hair piece attains an iconography which comprises not only the highest dress codes but also a possibility of status transformation for the people involved in ceremony, the role of the country’s First Lady is about to change into a higher, more egalitarian position of present days.