Nostalgia Theories:
Whatever Makes us Miss “the Old Days”
John
J. “Jack” Crowley
HUMAN-240 F2WW
Professor Harlan
Schottenstein
Nov. 4, 2014
Many theories relate to popular culture as it touches and concerns the
GLBT community. The most-interesting
finding in my analysis was that theories of nostalgia are the same regardless
of the community or subset of culture you study.
I also will think of alternative lifestyles differently because the
theories of popular culture apply to them as much as they do “straight” people.
The theories of nostalgia require a selective memory of inconvenient details
of the past. For traditional America, it can be politically appealing to
remember someone like Ronald Reagan, even though he required foreign-affairs
briefings to be limited to 90 words. No one wants to remember George W. Bush as
a fabricator of weapons of Mass Destruction to start the second Iraq War.
Everyone likes John F. Kennedy, though he put the first advisers into Vietnam
and cheated on his wife.
In my selected topic about nostalgia among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals and
Transsexuals, that community harkens back to a time of more privacy. GLBT
groups would just as soon go back to the days when they were largely left to
their private affairs and interpersonal preferences. They really don’t care about Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell. And they wish again for the pre-AIDs era and less public interest in them.
“Remember when” is a popular quasi-fantasy for people of all walks of
lives and sexual persuasion to engage in. It was also true regarding my chosen topic,
“Between Light and Nowhere:” The Queer Politics of Nostalgia..” As odd as the more-liberal world seems to be,
the GLBT community misses the less-understanding time. Author Nishant Shishani
(1226) concedes that nostalgia still is a blend of marketing, whether it’s for
GLBT as well as others in America. It
even extends to Shishani’s coverage of the music culture of drag queens and kinky
queer bands.
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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