Dominant Mothers, Queer Sons: Fearing/Desiring the Sexual Outlaw (and His Mother) in American Culture, 1944-1969

Dominant Mothers, Queer Sons:

Fearing/Desiring the Sexual Outlaw (and His Mother) in American Culture, 1944-1969

Roel van den Oever (e-mail)
Universiteit Maastricht
Centre for Gender and Diversity

In America’s Age of Anxiety, the nation’s fear of an internal uprising of communism spilled over into a dread of deviancy of any kind, be it racial (African-American), ethnic/religious (Jewish), or sexual (homosexual). I study four cultural texts that reconfigure this fear of deviancy into a “dominant mother/queer son”-pairing: the movies Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Psycho (1960), the play Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and the novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). By way of a psychoanalytically-inspired reading practice, I show that not only fear, but also desire governs (i) the relationship between mother and son in the text, as well as (ii) the interrelation between the text and society. I thus hope to tease out a repressed queerness through the cracks of the ideologically normative in Cold War American culture.