Overview

In engaging, accessible prose, leading theater critic and cultural commentator David Savran explores the intersections between art and culture, offering smart, compelling interpretations of the economic and social contexts of theatrical texts and practices. Acknowledging theater's marginal status in U.S. culture, A Queer Sort of Materialism takes on ""the trouble-makers--the ghost, closeted homosexual, masochist, drag king, Third World laborer, even the white male as victim""--who figure more prominently in theater than in other cultural forms. In impeccably researched and argued essays that range in subject matter from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Paula Vogel, from Suddenly Last Summer to Iron John, Savran uncovers the ways that such troublemakers both challenge and reinforce orthodox social practices. The selections presented here are by turns entertaining, informative, sophisticated, and polemical, reflecting the author's dual citizenship as rigorous scholar and engaging theater critic. This book also provides a model for a kind of queer historical materialism that will prove useful to a wide range of disciplines, including theater and performance, gender and sexuality, queer/gay/lesbian/transgender studies, American studies, and popular culture. David Savran is Professor of Theater, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, and author of Cowboys, Communists, and Queers and Taking It Like a Man.

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9780472068364

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Reviews

This book draws together a delectable assortment of David Savran's scholarly and journalistic writings from the mid-1990s onwards-each revised and extended for the volume-together with a couple of original pieces. One of the many qualities of the book is that, in purposely writing for different groups of readers, the author has been led 'to examine the popular next to the elite, the sacred next to the profane, and the aesthetic next to the economic'...A Queer Sort of Materialism possibly represents an important paradigm shift in the field, constituting what Savran calls 'a historical-materialist project of radically contextualizing different forms of cultural production.' -John Deeney, New Theatre Quarterly

Author Information

David Savran is Professor of Theater, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. His other books include Cowboys, Communists, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture; and The Masculinity Studies Reader (with Rachel Adams).

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