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Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics

"Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a promise: not sight, but on the verge of sight."                [p. 138]

In this brilliantly shrewd, hilarious collection of essays, cultural critic and acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum exposes all that provokes, intimidates, heartens, and arouses us in matters of style, celebrity, obscenity, and art.

Armed with a bold curiosity, a stinging wit, and a subversive sense of wordplay, Koestenbaum reflects on a dazzling array of subjects. Here are the outsized emotions inflamed by Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, and locker-room nudity ... vivid dreams of flirting with Bill Clinton and resurrecting Bette Davis from the dead ... the intangible joys of thrifting ... the true meaning of masculinity ... and the indelible sensation that two scoops of vanilla flesh, heaving incongruously in a 70-millimeter musical, made on a young boy of impressionable age.

From the rigors of a day spent with Melanie Griffith ("Melanie Time") to the healing powers of a gray Prada suit ("Diary of a Suit") to moving meditations on the importance of reading ("Why I Read"), this volume is an irresistible exploration of culture and identity in America. If celebrity is — as Koestenbaum suggests — an earthquake, then Cleavage is the aftershock.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 338
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780345434609
  • Genres
  • essays, queer
  • Release date
  • 2000