Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image

Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999)
By Erika Doss

Synopsis: This book asks: Why is Elvis everywhere, why does he remain so popular, and what makes an American icon? To determine this, the book aims "to explore and analyze the meaning of Elvis Presley's image - his face and his body - in contemporary American culture" (25). Doss looks at various aspects of Elvis' image and fandom from quasi-religious shrines to his sexual power (as androgynous and erotic), to his racialization and "whiteness," to questions of ownership over his image. Argues that because we live in a predominantly visual culture, pictures and their materiality hold a tremendous amount of power, a power many have failed to analyze. Elvis has remained such a powerful icon because of his images' "unrestricted ambiguity and instability, its diversity and illegibility - and because Americans have never stopped arguing about what Elvis means and what he represents" (252-53). This multiplicity of meaning is essential to maintaining interest and vitality/relevance. Elvis Presley Enterprises is thus foolish for trying to control and sanitize Elvis' image. This desire for aesthetic control speaks to class bias. The discussion of Elvis' body and sexuality is one of the most interesting in the book, and states that his body/sexuality represents "the desire for integration and fullness in lives circumscribed by separation, dissolution, and alienation" (148). [This last line is a buzz-line favorite of the modernity people - but is this feeling of alienation just a part of the human condition, rather than a particular symptom of modernity? And if this "dislocation" has been going on since the rise of urbanization in the 1820s, shouldn't we have come up with coping mechanisms by now? This is all starting to feel a bit adolescent.]

Interacts With:

Kitsch,
Any book on Janet's list that discusses flexibility of meaning and the importance of multivocality; things seem to gain importance and value in exact proportion that their meaning is contestable and fluid.