American Monroe The Making of a Body Politic [Paperback]

Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddessa character that tells the story of America itself.American Monroeexplores the ways we remember Marilynfrom playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies, and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground.

Finding in Marilyn a representative character of our time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow the mediatrix from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition.

American Monroeis an innovative, scintillating look at the making and remaking of popular icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how, through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.

S. Paige Batyis Assistant Professor of Politics and Women's Studies at Williams College.

A highly original work that is extremely important to the study of both culture and politics. Demonstrating how the cultural icon of Marilyn Monroe provides the body politic in American mass-mediated society, Baty not only offers a provocative reading of the iconographic, biographic, cartographic and hagiographic modes in which Marilyn has been written by others, but also gives us a novel theorization of how popular culture translates, transforms, and embodies the political sphere. Vivian SobchalSÔ