The Queer Studies Research Workshop presents Director of the Visual Studies PhD Program Jonathan D. Katz, “The Gray Flannel Suit and the Fright Wig: Warhol, Queerness and the Birth of Pop.”

Katz’s new work on the prehistory of Pop underscores the powerful connections among Pop, Queerness, and the discursive prominence of a new category of American identity in the late 50s and early 60s. Using a range of period texts, Katz argues that Pop is both fully queer and fully American, the one category so easily slipping into the other that it’s possible to argue that, paradoxically, at the close of the most homophobic decade in American history, queerness has become the most emblematic American identity category.