Elvis culture : fans, faith, & image

Abstract

It doesn't matter how you remember him - rockabilly rebel, all-American boy, B-movie idol, patriotic GI or Las Vegas superstar. Presley is the most enduring image in American popular culture. This book aims to explain why. Other authors have explored Elvis's life and music, but this book examines his multifaceted image as the key to understanding the adulation that has survived his death. The author 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, she discovered that the visual image of endures because it was so carefully constructed from the start. She looks at how fans collect, arrange and display paraphernalia, make artwork, and participate in the annual August rituals of Week. By engaging in these acts, she explains, they continually reinvent to mesh with their own personal and social preferences and to keep his memory alive. The study examines in specific contexts: as a religious icon honoured 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. It also looks at how has become a sanitized, legally protected image controlled by Presley Enterpises, Inc, which bans the sale of black velvet paintings and licences his likeness around the world.

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