| Abstract: | Popular history is the stuff of connection, belonging and citizenship. It offers us imagined community (Anderson 1983), and more precisely, a shared historical imaginary (Dawson 1994; Elsaesser 2000). Through new and old media, imagined communities stretch beyond national borders and provide us with both opportunities for understanding ourselves, for mirroring and critical reflection, as well as for creative interventions. As expressed in for instance film, books, journals and websites, popular history seems increasingly popular in the North European context. In this paper I will tentatively approach a select range of popular versions of historical queens, like Queen Christina of Sweden and Marie Antoinette of France. Both are in the historical imaginary connected with excessive life styles, with arbitrary and wasteful ways that came to abrupt ends (abdication and decapitation). But their distinct and well-known personas have also provided a source of pleasure as they have echoed powerfully throughout contemporary popular culture as well as within a feminist imaginary of alternatives. In magnified proportions these queens, in two different ways of doing their gender, open up a space for consumerist, ruthless, exaggerated and anything but natural versions of femininity. In this paper I will explore the appeal of such performances today in relation to issues of cultural citizenship and subject positioning, history in public and the morals of excessive femininity. |
Ph.D., Lic. Theses
