80
Popular Culture Review
John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in
the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). John E. O’Connor,
“A Reaffirmation o f American Ideals: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939),” in O’Connor,
American History/American Film, pp. 98-119.
A lice Kessler-Harris. Out to Work: A History o f Wage-Earning Women in the United
States (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1982); William Chafe. The American
Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (N ew York:
Oxford University Press, 1972).
The Plainsman.
Several authors have analyzed the sexual implications o f Calamity Jane’s relationship
with Katie Brown. Eric Savoy, ‘“ That A in’t All She A in’t’: Doris Day and Queer
Performativity” in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 151-182. Savoy offers a
sophisticated analysis o f homosexual representation in this film. He suggests that
gendered “performativity” and sexual identity are not the same thing, and speculates
about ^\1lat gay and lesbian audiences o f the 1950s saw in the film. See also Mandy
Merck, “Travesty on the Old Frontier,” in Move Over Misconceptions: Doris Day
Reappraised, ed. Jane Clarke and Diana Simmonds (London: British Film Institute,
1980). These authors reassess D ay’s onscreen persona and suggest that her tomboy image
^ p ea led to persons o f nontraditional sexual orientation.
Interestin^y, a number o f reviewers picked up the supposition that Martha Canary was
a lesbian, and comment in reviews that Doris Day “plays a heterosexual version o f the
real-life lesbian co w g irl. . . ” Kara Fox, “O f Two ‘Beautiful Minds,”’ http://www.wash
blade.eom/national/02011a.htm. Another reviewer says Day “stars as eveiy tomboy’s
h e r o . . . the real-life lesbian cowboy Calamity Jane”) http://www.planetout.com/kiosk/
popcomq/db/getfilm.html? 1558.
^ M olly Haskell, Holding My Own in No M an’s Land: Women and Men and Film and
Feminists (N ew York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Haskell offers a more
complicated interpretation o f D ay’s mainstream films in the chapter “Icon o f the Fifties:
Doris Day.” From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment o f Women in the Movies, second
edition (Chicago & London, The University o f Chicago Press, 1987).
A few critics find her performance troubling. Filmographer Jon Tuska calls D ay’s
portrayal o f Calamity Jane absurd. The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to
the Western (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985). James Harvey calls D ay’s
performance “frenetic and charmless.” Movie Love in the Fifties (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2001), p. 47.
The Celluloid Closet, dir. Rob Epstein, based on the book The Celluloid Closet by Vito
Russo, 1995.
Eric Savoy, “That A in’t A ll She A in’t,” in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and
Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp.
151-182.
28
Club Verboten 1977 DCC Compact Classics, CD boxed set.
Biskind, Seeing, p. 255.
Biskind, Seeing, p. 255.
Interestingly, Keel played a very different kind o f character in Seven Brides fo r Seven
Brothers in 1954. He and his six wild brothers had to be dom