The Starr Report Disrobed

by Fedwa Malti-Douglas

Overview

"What is this strange book" asks Fedwa Malti-Douglas, "that can bring the American presidency to its knees?" In this probing study of Kenneth W. Starr's influential and historic work, she reveals how The Starr Report exposed the cultural tendencies, desires, and taboos of Americans while it disrobed the most powerful man in the world.

Unveiling the political and ideological implications of the report's relentless pursuit of corporeal and prurient detail, Malti-Douglas underscores the document's ground-breaking nature—both for its legal and cultural content. What does the report imply about American values when it repeatedly points to the dates on which trysts occurred? Why does gender seem so unstable in the report? And how do such varied objects as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon or a Hugo Boss tie or Vox, a novel about phone sex, fit into the legal discourse of the report? Fraught with assumptions about gender and sexuality, the report reflects a strategy to use Clinton's "body natural" to undermine his "body politic."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231119337
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/02/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Fedwa Malti-Douglas is The Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, where she is also professor of gender studies and comparative literature. She has published numerous scholarly books, as well as a satirical novel, Hisland: Adventures in Ac-Ac-ademe.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note
Introduction
1. The Mighty Morphin Report
2. Organization as Obsession
3. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: The Geographies of Lust
4. The Great Facilitator: Or, How to "Currie" Favor
5. Are We Having Fun Yet?
6. Fall Into the Gap: Or, The Starr Report Introduces Popeye to Bill Clinton
7. How Is a Sexual Encounter a Sexual Encounter?
8. "I Love the Narrative!"
9. My Body, My Gender
10. An American Postmodern
Conclusion: The President's Two Bodies and the Politics of Masquerade
Index

What People are Saying About This

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A masterful dissection of a politically and culturally crucial document.

Editorial Reviews

A masterful dissection of a politically and culturally crucial document.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Writing with wit, verve, and sharp perception, Fedwa Malti-Douglas provides fresh ways of understanding the Starr Report in relation to lasting issues of gender relations, narrative technique, and attitudes toward the body. Her deft cultural and textual analysis will give her readers lasting insight as well as immediate pleasure.

Patricia Meyer Spacks

I read The Starr Report with horrified fascination. With force and brio, the brilliant Fedwa Malti-Douglas tells us why. Stripped bare, the body of The Starr Report is very, disturbingly American.

Catharine R. Stimpson