Following up on an earlier post (Quién es mas queer: Spongebob v. Buggs), an anonymous Boing Boing reader writes:
"Well, couldn't find the article by McEachern, but the first hit [on Google Scholar Search] is a paper by Sam Abel, The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in the American Animated Cartoon. Unfortunately, it's a paid subscription journal site, and it doesn't have an abstract. Here's the first paragraph:
The great majority of animated cartoons produced by the commercial Hollywood film studios, from Disney's Steamboat Willie in 1928 through the shift to television cartoons in the 1960s, have a decidedly straight sensibility. Mickey Mouse is straight; Popeye is straight; Woody Woodpecker is straight. This fact is hardly surprising; these films are intended to have a wide appeal for a popular audience, and so play into that audience's social expectations. A select few of these studio cartoons, however, abandon the straight world view for the wilder realm of camp. The camp mode in cartoons appears consistently only in the short features of the Warner Brothers studio, and even here almost exclusively in the work of director Chuck Jones. Yet over time, these are the cartoons that have held the public imagination, just as much as (if not more than) the full-length works of Disney. They are the ones known intimately by cartoon cognoscenti, often memorized line-for-line and take-for-take, recited in unison by gleeful aficionados. Jones, more than any other single figure, is lauded as the master of the cartoon directorial art.
Our anonymous contributor continues: "Here's a question, though: who came first? Bugs Bunny, or Uncle Milty? I'd actually guess that drag was a well-established humor meme from vaudeville."
Link to paper.
Also: BB pal Jonno points us to a film called Was Bugs Bunny Gay? that ran on the GLBT film festival circuit a few years ago. Here is the only web reference we found, but if any sleuthers out there can find a copy, do let us know.
Reader Adri adds:
Continuing with the cross-dressing aspect of bugs bunny.. the library of congress has a subject just for this topic "Gender identity–cross dressing". And has a few vaudeville plays online which involve the topic. And better yet if you search their main site and enter "cross dressing," it brings up a couple hundred cross dressing artifacts in the LoC online collection. I guess J Edgar Hoover wasn't the only librarian interested in the topic. ;-)
