I love Mariah Carey the way Mariah Carey loves Marilyn Monroe. Our love is born at the nexus of impossibility and identification. I wasn’t always sure what kind of love this was. It was not sexual or romantic, nor did I want to be like her. What I wanted, and still want, was proximity to the limitlessness of the world she had forged: I loved the key turning, the door creaking, the window flying open. I loved the secret place she made for me, for us.
Mariah sometimes describes her love for Marilyn as both an identification (curvy, feminine, “surprisingly” bookish, from a working-class background, brunette) and a fantasy (glamorous, elegant, sensual, powerful, a successful actress, a shiny thing, blonde) and sometimes both (Was she black? She never knew her dad, after all, and what about that triple-processed hair and the shape of her lips and ass?). In Dark Designs and Visual Culture, Michele Wallace observes this particular phenomenon:
It was always said among black women that Joan Crawford was black, and as I watch these films aga – in today, looking at Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, I keep thinking “she’s so beautiful, she looks black.” Such a statement makes no sense in current feminist film criticism. What I am trying to suggest is that there was a way in which these films were possessed by black female viewers. The process may have been about making problematic and expanding one’s racial identity instead of abandoning it . . . Disparate factions in the audience, not all equally well indoctrinated in the dominant discourse, may have their own way, now and then, with interpretation.
Source: fnewsmagazine.com
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You can read the entire article in the 1st issue of WVM International:
