Feminist Praxis (RLE Feminist Theory) by Liz Stanley

Author:Liz Stanley [Stanley, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415754149
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Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Will the real Elvis Presley… ?

The two accounts of Elvis, as butch god and as teddy bear, are so dissimilar that one could be forgiven for thinking that they describe two different people. But of course they are describing the same person from two quite different perspectives, and neither can be said to be the ‘true’ or ‘real’ picture of what Elvis ‘meant* in terms of popular culture. Some people will have experienced Elvis as I did, to some he will have been a butch god (see, for example, Welburn 1982 for another woman's ‘Elvis’), and to others he will have meant very little or nothing at all. Yet archivists do not present such a relativist view. On the contrary – for the overwhelming feature of their accounts is their similarity, their complete accord that Elvis was first and last about rampant male sexuality. But once we accept that some people did not experience him in this way, as I didn't, it becomes interesting to ponder the question of how such a one-sided view came into being, why it gained the currency that it did, and why it has remained largely unquestioned for so long.

I have already suggested that most writers about Elvis, then and now, are men; and it remains true that women have written very little about him (interestingly, those who do invariably focus on ‘Elvis the person’ rather than ‘Elvis the cultural hero’, like Yancy (1977) and Beaulieu Presley (1985)). The first component in this artful construction of Elvis is therefore the simple and familiar one to feminists: that of men interpreting and encoding knowledge, in their own interests and after their own image, and then calling this an objective account of the world as it truly is.

The second component is the careful selection of particular bits of Elvis's career to support their theories. Elvis had a show-business career spanning more than twenty years, and yet these writers invariably focus on only the first couple of years as the significant part of it. This period is seen as representing the elemental Elvis, the sexual hero who is subsequently ‘castrated’ by the American army/commercial exploitation/his manager/his mother (take your pick), leaving just a eunuch/teddy bear/pap for adolescent female teenage consumption. This is what they mean when they talk about Elvis's appeal having first been to men and why they feel so betrayed by all the rest – the ‘real’ Elvis, their Elvis, got taken away from them.

Elvis's rise to fame was inextricably linked with the moral panic surrounding the behaviour of women and girls at his live performances. They screamed and cried and lost control in large numbers and must have presented a quite stupendous spectacle in their own right, just as with the female response to the Beades later. The media found it disturbing on one level, but they also loved it and fuelled and fostered it. Since this kind of mass crowd expression of power from women and girls was supposedly both unprecedented and unthinkable (in

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