Mama's Boy

Roel van den Oever is an Assistant Professor in the department of English/American Studies, VU University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

• Momism and the Lavender Scare Oppositional Reading and The Grotto Narrative Closure and Suddenly Last Summer Character Engagement and Psycho Laughter/Ridicule and Portnoy's Complaint

"This book is a brilliant meditation on homophobia, misogyny, narrative, and their interrelations in cold-war American culture." - Henry Abelove, F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University "This highly readable book offers an excellent recapitulaton of an American nightmare. The McCarthy era institutionalised a harsh oppression of gay people. Social paranoia translated into cultural repression. Van den Oever shows in his amazing analyses of well-chosen novels and the Hitchcock-movie Psycho how sexual paranoia pervaded American culture until the sixties. His interpretations are original, compelling, and totally convincing. An amazing piece of work." - Maaike Meijer, professor of Gender Studies, Maastricht University