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The Lion and the Unicorn 25.1 (2001) 164-168



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Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares:
Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture


Richard Burt. Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Those readers opening this book hoping for a study of the influence of the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare on contemporary culture are in for a surprise. The subtitle to Richard Burt's new book of cultural criticism is [End Page 164] both an invitation and a warning: the word "kiddie" suggests both a focus of interest to readers of this journal as well as an attitude toward childhood and adolescence that is condescending and, in some respects, reductive. Certainly, the juxtaposition of "queer" and "kiddie" is intended to be provocative, "unspeakable," as it were; while Burt's book is not without its merits, insights, and pleasures, it delivers somewhat less than it promises.

In the preface to the book, Burt clarifies what he means by "kiddie" culture: "a youth culture that paradoxically defines intelligence as dumbing down, and for which matters of speed, the new, the cool, the trivial, the inane, the belated, and the obsolete are crucial" (xiii). He goes on to classify his project as part of an aesthetic of "loser criticism," and as an attempt to demonstrate the disappearance of an "academic unconscious." As a fan of popular culture and of fandom itself, his goal is less to valorize "recycled trash" (xv) per se, but to call into question that branch of American popular criticism that over-theorizes (and hence, speaks that which to Burt must remain "unspeaxxxable") the popular, the fan-driven, the infantiziled, adolescent "replays" of canonical Shakespearean texts.

My quarrel is less with Burt's project (though I must finally conclude that he works rather too hard and in strained and often tortuous language, presumably both to show his scorn for garden-variety late-twentieth-century postmodernism and simultaneously to demonstrate his fluency in it) than with his rather wholesale characterization of youth culture under this heading and of his attribution of such varied phenomena as the pornographizing (to coin an awkward neologism) of Shakespeare in x-rated videos and films to the dominance of a youth-driven "dumbing" of Shakespeare, and, similarly in his treatment of that most incongruous of performances, action-films, such as Schwarzenegger's The Last Action Hero. There is an odd blend of prurience and puritanism in his stance: he poses as the slumming academic, yet takes care to make sure that we understand his pleasure derives in great part from his acknowledgment that he is slumming. And, much like the neo-Victorian I suspect lurks behind his own "cool" pomo "shades," he attributes the sources of the slum more to its inhabitants than to those in power who have created such zones: the adults who have constructed a particularly convenient "text" of adolescence. I'm not trying to argue for an equally false oppositely idealized view of the adolescent as earnest scholar of Shakespeare (and youth culture has always been, in a sense, an adult's eerily nostalgic construction), but surely there is something closer to the ways "actual" adolescents experience knowledge and culture than the [End Page 165] vacuous, if charming Cher played by Alicia Silverstone in Amy Heckerling's Clueless, itself a dumbed-down version of Austen's Emma. Burt seems to suggest that adolescents themselves cannot distinguish between Cher and their own real, inner intellectual lives. My own students, themselves not long out of high school, were quick to be able to distinguish between what genuinely spoke to them about Baz Lurhmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the adult media-machine's attempts to colonize their potential responses to it, and to recognize that there could be no complete disentanglement of the two from each other.

Having said all that, there is much that is insightful and useful in Burt's excursions into the interface between Shakespeare and various modes of contemporary popular "uses" of Shakespeare. Burt recognizes that the typical "civilizing...

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