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This study relates the experiences of controversial actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken to the culture of the Civil War period which significantly affected her life achievements. The book explores the roots of the cult of celebrity that emerged from the crucible of war, while discussing Menken's racial and ethnic claims and her performance in relationship to gender and sexuality. It focuses on the contemporary use of social categories to explain patterns in America's past and considers why such categories remain important.
This book was first published in 2003. Performing Menken uses the
life experiences of controversial actress and poet Adah Isaacs
Menken to examine the culture of the Civil War period. Menken
managed to portray herself as both respectable and daring, claiming
for herself various (differing) racial and ethnic identities.
Playing male roles on stage, she became the reigning femme fatale.
Yet she was also known as an intellectual, publishing poetry and
essays. She shared friendships with the greatest writers of her
time, including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Alexandre Dumas,
pere. Performing Menken also looks at what Menken's choices reveal
about her period. It explores the roots of the cult of celebrity
that emerged from the crucible of war. While discussing Menken's
racial and ethnic claims and her performance of gender and
sexuality, Performing Menken focuses on contemporary use of social
categories to explain patterns in America's past and considers why
such categories appear to remain important.
A lot of women remember having had tomboy girlhoods. Some recall it
as a time of gender-bending freedom and rowdy pleasures. Others
feel the word is used to limit girls by suggesting such behavior is
atypical. In American Tomboys, Renée M. Sentilles explores how the
concept of the tomboy developed in the turbulent years after the
Civil War, and she argues that the tomboy grew into an accepted and
even vital transitional figure. In this period, cultural critics,
writers, and educators came to imagine that white middle-class
tomboys could transform themselves into the vigorous mothers of
America's burgeoning empire. In addition to the familiar heroines
of literature, Sentilles delves into a wealth of newly uncovered
primary sources that manifest tomboys' lived experience, and she
asks critical questions about gender, family, race, and nation.
Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, American Tomboys
explores the cultural history of girls who, for a time, whistled,
got into scrapes, and struggled against convention.
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