European journal of American studies, Vol 11, no 3 | 2017

As a key discursive nodal point of abnormal personhood, the homosexual has been featured in anextensive stream of Hollywood movies from the early 1940s onwards. More specifically, since theend of the 1960s, a series of mainstream U.S. films have come out about queer fraudsters.Impostors assume an inauthentic identity or character, pretending to be someone else than they“really” are. They pass as members of a certain class or high-status professions as part of theircriminal means for material gain and upward mobility. If they are, simultaneously, queer, thismeans that they operate from a closet (Sedgwick) that masks both illegitimate identity and queersexuality, the latter predominantly conceptualized as abnormal sexuality for long, anddiscursively assigned successfully to a specific kind of person, the modern homosexual(Foucault).Through their role-playing in everyday and even intimate relationships, fraudsters violate themoral guideline of authenticity prevailing in Western modernity, i.e. that of being true to one’sown, unique self (Taylor 28), the realisation of a core self unhindered by societal forces (Kernisand Goldman 294). Authenticity is individualist and democratic in its setup, insofar as itprioritizes the autonomous individual over a conventional society, and posits an ultimateequality of all persons regardless of (ascribed or achieved) social status. Authenticity is easy toidentify as an integral part of the founding national ethos of the US, the American Dream(Adams, cf. Hochschild), according to which success, prosperity, and happiness is achievable toevery American through honest effort and hard work, made possible by an essentially egalitarianpolitical, social, and economic system on which the US is supposedly founded. However, whilethe ideology of the Dream includes the valorization of the unique individual, the simultaneouscentrality of achievement and upward mobility points towards an ethical tension between itsindividualism and materialism, between equality (of opportunity) as a principle and inequality asan outcome. The figure of the impostor embodies much of this tension between the ideal of thetrue self and that of success and upward mobility.I assume that the relevant stream of queer impostor films signifies a remarkable amount oflibidinal investment on the part of U.S. culture in negotiating the relationship betweenhomosexuality, class, authenticity, and as such, normative personhood in general. As extremelyconcentrated discursive matter on said concepts, such movies offer essential insight into thefluctuations of the moral imagery of (globalizing) US culture: What has homosexuality got to dowith inauthenticity, illegitimate class/status identity, and criminality? How has the Homosexualbeen constructed as antithetical to the American national ethos, and later on perhaps, absolvedof such charges? How and to what extent can the ideals of a non-hierarchical individualauthenticity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the striving for conventional success andmaterial comfort necessarily hierarchical in their outcome, be reconciled in the concept of theAmerican Dream that wears the taglines of “equality” and “democracy”? Through exploringSomething for Everyone (1970), Deathtrap (1982), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), The Talented Mr.Ripley (1999), and I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) as moral visions on normative personhood, sexuality, and class, my aim is to disentangle some of the inner tensions of, and negotiationsaround, individual authenticity as essential to the American Dream.The American Dream of Authentic Personhood: Homosexuality, Class, and the Nor... European journal of American studies, Vol 11, no 3 | 201720