Mae Amid the Halls of Ivy

Here's an excerpt from Heather O'Donnell's academic article: "Signifying Sex"
American Quarterly - Volume 54, No. 3, September 2002, pp. 499-505 [Johns Hopkins Press]

Excerpt: . . . THE FEW BOOKS ABOUT MAE WEST THAT APPEARED AFTER HER DEATH IN 1980 were heavily illustrated, mass-market biographies of a fondly (if dimly) remembered star. The past five years, however, have seen an explosion of critical interest in West, not simply in her status as a camp-and-vamp Hollywood icon, but in her controversial work as a playwright and novelist, her experimentation with sexually and racially coded performance styles, and in the way that West — "the greatest female impersonator of all time," rumored to be a gay man or a black woman in disguise—continues to challenge popular assumptionsabout identity.1
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The 1990s saw four full-length critical studies devoted to West: Marybeth Hamilton's "When I'm Bad, I'm Better": Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (HarperCollins, 1995); Pamela Robertson's Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke, 1996); Ramona Curry's Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minnesota, 1996); and Emily Wortis Leider's Becoming Mae West (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997). Claudia Roth Pierpont celebrated West in the pages of The New Yorker, in an essay later collected in Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Vintage, 2000), and in 2000, Mae West returned to Broadway in Claudia Shear's Dirty Blonde, a tribute to her life and legacy.
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Now historian Jill Watts has published a new biography, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, which argues for West's significance as "a cultural agent that celebrates and perpetuates the African presence within American society"(318). Speculating that West's paternal grandfather was black, Watts reconsiders West's career in the context of the African American practice of signifying, embodied in the figure of the trickster, and of an African American womanist consciousness, represented in the female... .
- - excerpt from Heather O'Donnell's academic article: "Signifying Sex" - -
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