Nostalgia’s Appeal
Has a Formula
A Look at What Makes
Retro Cool Today for Alternative Lifestyles
John
J. “Jack” Crowley
HUMAN-240 F2WW
Professor Harlan
Schottenstein
Oct. 29, 2014
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nostalgia comes and goes, yet stays
interestingly relevant in a new time. It’s all about looking back, perhaps
through rose-colored glasses. Critics scoff at the conveniently forgetful
aspects of selectively looking at the past. But it works. In gay culture,
nostalgia in music recounts the pre-AIDs era and the later repression of open
sexual culture.
“Remember when” changes with musical, theatrical or fashion whim,
historical revisionist rewrites of unpopular facts. Arguably, dusting off
glory-day ideas sells new products. Or
paying tribute to a sexual freedom once less endangered.
That’s the crux of formula analysis detailed in, “Between Light and
Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia.” In this article, though,
transgender music and gay culture join the look-back fun. It also uses “trans” amid sexual-surgical
changes to retroactively revisit transgender politics in a more-enlightened and
less-conservative time.
Elitist rejection of nostalgia in the transgender community overlooks a
simple fact. Whether a person is gay, straight, bisexual or transgender still
means nostalgia still is a time of change or transition, argues author Nishant
Shishani (1226)
Shishani
concludes that nostalgia formulas make just as much marketing and business as
good-guy triumphs or love-seeking girl finds the right man. She cites in her analyses a sweeping negative
generalization of indiscriminate thirst for all things “retro.” It’s populist
and consmumerism mixed together to generate product interest, especially in
fashion. While that may appeal more to women, or so some may presume, nostalgia
can even repeatedly reconstitute things such as World War II. (Fury, the current Brad Pitt tank-crewman
movie, is formula male nostalgia.)
Nostalgia also plays a role in the music culture of drag queens and
queer bands, even as they display purposeful filth, portray genital mutilations
and appear on mainstream shows like (David) Letterman. One even had a song on
the cult movie, V for Vendetta.
Shishani revisits the often-criticized use of nostalgia as a convenient
way of dividing high versus low classes. Middle-class people might like retro
comic books, while the upper crust consumer prefers original paintings that
reference retroactively “good” times. The latter takes big money. The comic
book fan can subsist from one collectible to another. Both like things gone by; one pays more.
Nostalgia is not the fashion of history, but rather its scraps. The post
Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell world has dulled the transgender or gay world’s political
teeth amid neo-liberal concerns about “privacy” among consenting adults.
(Shishani, 1228)
Conclusion
Nostalgia offers a chance for society – and people of alternative sexual
preferences – to return to the days of the past. When they can – at least in
their political and cultural lives – return “the intimacies of exile in the
past.” When it was OK to revel in their “otherness.” Shishani eschews the
class-divisional shunning of nostalgia, both as a formula and as a fact. The
author asserts that remembering the privacy of the past is important. It is a
continuum. Politically and sexually, it permits transgender, gay and other
couples to honor a more-private past, recognize the continuities of the
politically correct presence, and work toward “a more-radically democratic
future.” (Shishani, 1228).
I always thought nostalgia was about remembering old times, glory days
and neat pieces of history. About comic books, romance and good versus evil.
This analysis, however, takes a different view of nostalgia. It’s one I’d never
appreciated because I don’t live in the world that is explored. Yet nostalgia
is a formula for alternative-life partners too.
Looking back is a continuity of their own unique circle of life.
Shishani’s writing added a dimension of nostalgia in a political sense
in the context of those often shunned in traditional political, sexual and
cultural circles. To those with alternative lifestyles, there is a nostalgia
for the days when there was less disease, fewer well-meaning but misguided
societal inquiries and more interpersonal and cultural privacy.
References:
“Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of
Nostalgia, (Shahani, N.)
ISSN: 0022-3840, DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12085, Wiley
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