Homosexuality in Cold War America

Robert Corber is an associate professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997), In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (1993), and co-editor of Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (2003).

“Corber substantially rethinks the work of these 1950s writers and links them to recent poststructuralist interventions. Wonderfully nuanced, this marks an important contribution to the field of U. S. cultural studies.”-David Savran, Brown University “Homosexuality in Cold War America is an important contribution to our understanding of postwar U. S. culture and a welcome step toward historicizing questions of male subjectivity.”-Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University “Homosexuality in Cold War America is a book of much richness. In addition to an extended consideration of gay manhood in Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, there are two chapters on film noir. . . . There is also an excellent political-sociological reading of Willie Loman’s troubles in ‘Death of a Salesman.’”(Lambda Book Report) “Corber’s book allows for a more nuanced and historically rigorous critique of some of the popular literary texts of the period. . . . It is in his treatments of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin that the book is most provocative and delightful. . . . [This] vitally important book . . . helps us to think about our own moment in the context of the past which gave rise to us and to our words.” (American Literature) "Homosexuality in Cold War America investigates the cultural construction of gay male subjectivity in the midst of the postwar crisis in masculinity precipitated by the ascendance of a post-Fordist economy of consumption. . . . Recognizing gay men as subjects in history without acceding to an essentialist, minoritarian model of identity, Corber seeks to recenter the dynamic contradictions and instabilities within gay cultural politics and ‘to address the political needs and aspirations underlying identity politics. . . . [I]mportant analysis." (American Studies)