Taking a Left at the ‘Right Use of Sex’:Myra Breckinridge
Catherine Dumas
ENG 498
Presentation outline on “Taking a Left at the ‘Right Use of Sex’[1]:Myra Breckinridge“
Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge is a revolutionary novel that was overlooked by the literary or academic institutions at the time of its publication in 1968. Through my research I have found that a large majority of critics viewed this novel as pornography or Camp. These labels are degraded forms of taxonomy that target certain works of art, in order to de-value their content. As a result the ouevre is not taken seriously either aesthetically, critically, or politically. In fact, Vidal is actually satirizing pornography and camp in the novel, the very mechanisms that dismiss his work. Brilliant.
It is my intention to move beyond these two categorizations which I find reductive and disregard Vidal’s discourse on the connections between sex, power and politics that are the critical underpinnings of his ground-breaking novel, Myra Breckinridge.
Secondary Sources:
- Susan M. Easton Problem of Pornography : Regulation and the Right to Free Speech.
- Susan Sontag “Notes on Camp”
- Kathryn Jergovich, graduate student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She did a research assignment for Professor John Unsworth for a class entitled “20th-Century American Bestsellers”. (Spring 2006) Fortunately for me her topic was Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.
- Robert F. Kiernan, Gore Vidal
- Donald E. Pease “America and the Vidal Chronicles”
- James Tatum “The Romanitas of Gore Vidal”
- Michel Foucault History of Sexuality
As well as some passages from of Gore Vidal’s essay’s: “Sex and the Law” (1965), “Sex Is Politics” (1975).
[1] The American Social Hygiene Association cautioned worried citizens that through “the right use of sex” they could build solid families and a united nation (Neuman 12).
