Cher: White Trash Icon?
In Gael Sweeney’s “The King of White Trash Culture” she details what a white trash culture looks like. Aesthetically she defines itself as over the top and excessive. She states that “white trash is not afraid to define itself by display […] white trash has heroes and is not afraid to iconize them. White trash knows what it likes and it likes big, bright, and excessive” (250). These definitions fit Cher’s aesthetics to a T as she has been known to prefer the biggest and brightest hair and clothing possible. However, Sweeney rejects this notion that a camp icon could be a white trash icon. She states that camp and white trash are separated by white trash’s naturalness and camp’s emphasis on excess. She believes that camp is irony while white trash embodies a genuine bad taste. She illustrates this by stating that camp and white trash will buy the same portrait of Elvis and hang it in their living rooms. However, she believes camp displays the portrait to incite outcry from dominant tastes while White Trash hangs it for its pure aesthetic quality, employing their genuinely bad taste. However, Cher destroys this notion. Cher is undeniably a camp icon, more and more with every passing year as I have argued. However, she has also embraced white trash culture that I believe has been confused for camp. Sontag’s camp and Sweeney’s white trash both value a lack of self-awareness that Cher embodies, and the audience may associate her with either aesthetic depending on their perspectives. While I could delve into Cher’s history of embracing leopard print, wig changes, and pseudo-native American roots that Sweeney identifies as being typical of white trash culture; I will focus on Cher’s relationship to Elvis.
In Cher’ episode of VH1’s Beyond the Music Cher discusses attending an Elvis concert with her Southern mother Georgia as a preteen. The two describe jumping on their seats together and screaming along with the thousands of other girls and young women having “public orgasms” in Elvis’s name. This unified performance of elation defies the notion that Cher’s childhood occurring in the West Coast separated her from her mother’s Southern White Trash experiences. Instead, they defy the terror many parents felt around their daughters’ exposure to Elvis, and ally themselves with the White Trash embrace of Elvis as an icon.
While Cher widely became interpreted as a camp icon by the late 20th century, in 1995 Cher released a cover of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis”. The song celebrates Elvis and Memphis. In the video, Cher dresses in male drag as Elvis. Unlike Sweeney’s assumption, Cher does not parody him, she embodies him to celebrate him as an icon and hero.
Additionally, Cher performed the song in male drag in 1995 on BBC’s Top of the Pops and VH1’s Divas in Las Vegas in 2002. Each time, her impersonation is more tribute than comedy. By doing so, she embraces White Trash as Sweeney characterizes it in “The King of White Trash Culture”. However, she embodies Sontag’s guidelines for camp as well. Cher in turn, straddles the two worlds in a way that few others can or have (with the exception of Dolly Parton) and begs the question: Is Cher white trash or is she camp as originally presumed? Maybe its all in the perception. As camp aesthetics are appropriated into mainstream culture, and white trash aesthetics paraded for “reality” driven humor, our culture prioritizes one as more interesting and valuable than another. I am definitely not arguing that being poor and white is harder than being gay, but I am suggesting that mainstream media has embraced the fetishizing narrative that is cool to be gay. Perhaps we were never given the chance to see Cher as a white trash icon.
This page has paths:
- Cher and Millenials Adina Babaian
- Introduction Adina Babaian
