Capitalized Body Parts: Race, Sexuality, and Commodification in Harry Crews's Car (1972)

Document Type

Article

Authors

Alex Pittman, Barnard CollegeFollow

Abstract

This article explores racial and sexual discourses that mediate the experience of post-Fordist commodification. It does so by focusing on tropes of corporeal dismantling and reassembly that appear throughout Harry Crews’s 1972 novel Car. After considering the political, conceptual, and historical ambiguities of the novel’s representation of capital as a seduction of and assault on white masculine embodiment, the article concludes with a meditation on what cultural analysis might stand to gain from accounts of fetishism that locate this concept at the intersections of race, sexuality, and commerce.

Recommended Citation

Pittman, Alex (2018) "Capitalized Body Parts: Race, Sexuality, and Commodification in Harry Crews's Car (1972)," Criticism: Vol. 60: Iss. 3, Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol60/iss3/5