“Rebel Rebel”: Bowie as Romantic “Type”

Abstract

Drawing from various phases in Bowie’s career and focusing in particular on periods marked by largely heteronormative modes of expression, “‘Rebel Rebel’: Bowie as Romantic ‘Type’” explores the ways in which Bowie’s performances of gender exemplify and amplify notions of “the Romantic” to offer insight into the Romantic figure as a problematically melancholic cultural type, even in its relatively conservative forms. This chapter draws from studies in Romanticism and celebrity culture, Romantic androgyny, and the figures Lord Byron and Percy Shelley to approach Bowie as a contemporary Romantic. Always a figure of disruption, “the Romantic,” like Bowie, fascinates and frustrates at every turn, opening what Ross Chambers once described as the “room for maneuver” through which much cultural work may be accomplished.