Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image - Hardcover

Doss, Erika

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700609482 ISBN 13: 9780700609482

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 1999

Synopsis

It doesn't matter how you remember him—rockabilly rebel, all-American boy, B-movie idol, patriotic G.I., or Las Vegas superstar. Elvis Presley is the most enduring image in American popular culture. This book explains why.

Other authors have explored Elvis's life and music, but Erika Doss now examines his multifaceted image as the key to understanding the adulation that has survived his death. She has talked with fans and joined their clubs, studied their creations and made pilgrimages to Graceland, all to explore what these images mean to those who gaze upon them, make them, and collect them.

In researching Elvis Culture, Doss discovered that the visual image of Elvis endures because it was so carefully constructed from the start. Sifting through the visual glut of Elvisiana, she looks at how fans collect, arrange, and display Elvis paraphernalia, make Elvis artwork, and participate in the annual August rituals of Elvis Week. By engaging in these acts, she explains, they continually reinvent Elvis to mesh with their own personal and social preferences and to keep his memory alive.

Doss examines Elvis in specific contexts: as a religious icon honored in household shrines, as a focus of sexual fantasy for women and men (both straight and gay), as an inspiration for countless impersonators, and as an emblem of whiteness held in disdain by many blacks—despite his having crossed racial lines with his music. She also looks at how Elvis has become a sanitized, legally protected image controlled by Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which bans the sale of black velvet paintings and licenses his likeness around the world.

As engrossing as it is informative, Elvis Culture strikingly demonstrates the power of pictures in our visual culture and reveals much about American attitudes toward religion, sex, race, and celebrity—as well as about the construction of American identity in the late twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Erika Doss is director of the American Studies program and professor of fine arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities.

From the Back Cover

"A fascinating account of the re-creation of Elvis, before and after his death, into a multifaceted icon for his thousands of adoring fans. Doss has delved deep into the meaning of Elvis and come up with fresh new insights into American dreams and desires. A great read!"--Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound

"As fine a study of fandom as any I've seen, Elvis Culture offers a lively account of why and how Elvis is still everywhere-as patron saint and as passion, workingman and wigger, commodity and goof. A thoroughly knowledgeable and deeply sympathetic book."--Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

"One of the best books on Elvis that I've ever read. A stellar piece of cultural criticism, Elvis Culture is not only a very smart book, it's an exceptionally readable one as well: a difficult feat that Doss pulls off with style and wit."--Gilbert B. Rodman, author of Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend

"Doss's memorable book never succumbs to either slavish admiration or slapdash censure. It adds to our understanding of how the love we bear our cultural icons is as complex and life enhancing as those icons themselves."--David Sanjek, Director, BMI Archives, and coauthor of American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century

"Doss reveals with remarkable clarity the complexities and contradictions of fandom and the strategies through which a wide variety of Americans use the stuff of commercial mass culture to make their lives meaningful. A significant and persuasively argued book."--Barry Shank, author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas

"Doss offers rich insights into the culture and logic of fandom. Asking how fans use the image of Elvis in their own lives, she unearths the contradictory meanings about sex, race, class, and religion that Elvis has come to embody after death."--Lynn Spigel, author of Make Room for TV

Reviews

If Elvis is dead, why does his image still permeate American culture, from postage stamps to Vegas stage shows? In her intelligent cultural analysis of one of this century's most revered, reviled and reviewed fan phenomena, Doss (Director of the University of Colorado at Boulder American Studies program) examines Elvis's enduring posthumous presence, among his unprecedented legions of fans as well as in the larger society that often looks askance at their fervent devotion. Exploring Elvis's multifaceted appeal, Doss argues convincingly that he crossed more than just musical boundaries, embodying the heady dangers of sexual ambiguity, racial transgression and even tackiness. Today, Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. owns and guards Elvis's "official" image, policing illicit and improper usage: the group outlawed black velvet paintings in 1995 and obtained a cease-and-desist order to prevent artist and devotee Joni Mabe from making buttons featuring "Elvis's Hair." Doss evinces an anthropologist's detailed interest in the permutations of Elvis culture, from the MacLeod family's cheerful GracelandToo, a two-story tribute to Elvis paraphernalia, to Kiki Apostolakos's shrine to her spiritual relationship with the KingAbut the author is intrigued by more than just the artifacts and rituals. Her most striking insight is that Elvis's embodiment of contradictions allows aficionados and acolytes to engage in the ongoing process of creating Elvis's image, whatever Elvis Inc. may have to say. Doss's work is equally enjoyable for its considered analysis of fandom as for its vast catalogue of ways that fans honor their hero. The King may be dead, but his image is alive and well.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Twenty years after his death, Elvis Presley is still an American icon and shows no signs of flagging. Over a dozen new books about the King were published in 1998, and 60,000 fans show up at Graceland during Elvis week. Doss (Spirit Poles & Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities, Smithsonian, 1995) reveals the forces behind this obsession with the singer/actor whose image graces everything from stamps to car deodorizers. Through interviews with fans worldwide, Doss answers the question, Why Elvis? and examines the contradictory images of Elvis as idealized, rags-to-riches saint and transgendered erotic idol. Concluding that the phenomenon is a result both of the giant corporation that controls Elviss legacy and the fans who remake it to suit their own fantasies, Doss creates a very readable discussion of the origins and purposes of the popular image in society. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.Kelli N. Perkins, Herrick P.L., Holland,
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0700609482
• ISBN 13: 9780700609482
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304