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.
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