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Rather than an empty signifier, Elvis functions as an intensely “full” and multi-faceted symbol. The essay shows that Elvis’s mythology articulates diverse, often contradictory formations across race, gender, class, and cultural hierarchy, allowing his figure to appear in unexpected public 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does Elvis remain culturally “everywhere” after his death?","Question",{"text":108,"@type":109},"The essay argues that Elvis’s second life is enabled by how myths about him dovetail with major strands of contemporary US cultural mythology, letting his image appear across many media and public debates.","Answer",{"name":111,"@type":106,"acceptedAnswer":112},"How does the article characterize Elvis as a cultural symbol?",{"text":113,"@type":109},"Elvis is presented not as an empty signifier but as a “full” signifier, already bound to a broad range of cultural mythologies and resistant to being treated as blank.",{"name":115,"@type":106,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How are Elvis’s myths connected to race, gender, and class?",{"text":117,"@type":109},"The article argues that Elvis’s myths have long been articulated in significant and often contradictory ways to broader mythological formations involving race, gender, and class, enabling competing images to 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\nrace,Cultural Studies,8:3,457-483,DOI:10.1080/09502389400490321  \nTo link to this article:https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389400490321  \nPublished online:22Aug 2006.  \nsubmit your articletothis journal  \nL山lArticle views:225  \nView related articles C  \nGILBERT B.RODMAN  \n# A HERO TO MOST?:ELVIS,MYTH,AND THE POLITICS OFRACE\n\nPeople spun tales,others listened spellbound.There was agrowing respect for the vivid rumor,the most chilling tale.We were no closer to believing or disbelieving a given storythan we had been earlier.But there was a greater appreci-ation now.We began to marvel at our own ability tomanufacture awe.(DeLillo,1985:153)  \nor a dead man,Elvis Presley is awfully noisy.  \nF  \nHis body may have failed him in 1977,but today his spirit,hisimage,and his myths do more than live on:they flourish,theythrive,they multiply.As the musical duo of Mojo Nixon and Skid  \nRoper(1987)has observed,‘Elvis is everywhere’,sneaking out of songs,movies,television shows,advertisements,newspapers,magazines,comicstrips,comicbooks,greeting cards,T-shirts,poems,plays,novels,children'sbooks,academic journals,university courses,art exhibits,home computersoftware,political campaigns,postage stamps,and innumerable othercorners of the cultural terrain in ways that defy common-sense notions ofhow dead stars are supposed to behave.Elvis's current ubiquity isparticularly noteworthy,not just because he ‘refus[es]to go away'(Marcus,1990b:117),but because he keeps showing up in places where he seeminglydoesn't belong.  \nWhat I want to argue in this essay is that Elvis's unusual second life is,toa large extent,made possible by the ways in which the myths surroundinghis life and his career dovetail so easily with most of the major strands ofcultural mythology in contemporary US society (though space forces me tolimit my discussion here to the links between Elvis's image and myths ofrace).Pick a crucial site of cultural struggle in the US since World War II,and you will find that if Elvis isn't already a seemingly natural player inthat struggle,then he and his myths can be-and often are -readilyarticulated to the specific mythological formation in question in a natural-seeming way.  \nThis is not to say that Elvis is simply an empty signifier than can meanabsolutely anything at all.On the contrary,what I want to argue here is thatElvis is an incredibly full signifier,one that is already intimately bound upwith an entire range of important cultural mythologies.While there is a  \ncertain Rorschach-like quality to Elvis andhis myths,¹Elvis is not(and neverhas been)a completely blank slate on to which fans and critics can simplywrite their own stories.As Linda Ray Pratt puts it,'those who have arguedthat people projected onto Elvis anything they liked because his image wasessentially vacuous are mistaken;if anything,the image is too rich insuggestion to be acknowledged fully or directly'(1979:43).This emphasison the multi-faceted nature of Elvis's mythology-that it is a multiplicity ofmyths,rather than a single myth writ large-is important,not only because'no one myth is large enough to contain Elvis'(Marsh,1982/92:xiii),butbecause this very plurality is itself a vital part of Elvis's mythology:  \nAs myth,Elvis is different things for different people,though for most ofhis fans,there seemed to be a ready tolerance for and acceptance of others,especially other Elvisites,regardless of background or origin.In fact,themore diverse the background,the more it verified the universal validity ofElvis and what they thought he stood for and made them stand for.(Brock,1979:121)  \nTo treat the mythological formation centered on Elvis as a singular myth,nomatter how large or all-encompassing that myth is made out to be,is thus tooversimplify the phenomenon at hand,offering too elementary an answer toa highly compl","cbCaiegaApzTA9Hs","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiegaApzTA9Hs","pdf",1956795,28,"English","# A HERO TO MOST?\n## Elvis’s ubiquity and mythic second life\n## Elvis as a full signifier rather than a blank slate\n## Contradictory myth formations: race, gender, class\n## Elvis as an all-purpose cultural icon","[{\"question\":\"Why does Elvis remain culturally “everywhere” after his death?\",\"answer\":\"The essay argues that Elvis’s second life is enabled by how myths about him dovetail with major strands of contemporary US cultural mythology, letting his image appear across many media and public debates.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the article characterize Elvis as a cultural symbol?\",\"answer\":\"Elvis is presented not as an empty signifier but as a “full” signifier, already bound to a broad range of cultural mythologies and resistant to being treated as blank.\"},{\"question\":\"How are Elvis’s myths connected to race, gender, and class?\",\"answer\":\"The article argues that Elvis’s myths have long been articulated in significant and often contradictory ways to broader mythological formations involving race, gender, and class, enabling competing images to coexist.\"}]","A HERO TO MOST? - Elvis, Myth, and the Politics of Race | PDF",10]