Sharon Marcus, author of The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019), talks with author, poet, and scholar Deborah Paredez about American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous (Norton 2024), hailed by Time as one of the 100 must-read books of the year.
Sharon Marcus (SM): We are here to talk about your recent book, American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous, which discusses Rita Moreno, Tina Turner, Venus and Serena Williams, and many others.
You theorize “divahood” as weaving together the individual and the collective, and your book similarly weaves together multiple genres.
Each chapter gives us portraits of singular divas, accounts of key diva performances, and memoir. The memoir parts of the book also braid together several strands: your life as a fan, what was going on in your life when you discovered particular divas, and memories of friends and family who shared your love of particular divas. For example, you talk about your mom in the chapter on Rita Moreno, your dad in the chapter on Tina Turner, and your friend Jaime in the chapter on Divine.
American Diva is also a history, because you situate yourself and your divas in key moments you and your family lived through: the Vietnam War, Reaganism, the neoliberalism of the Clinton years, the COVID pandemic. Toward the end, you combine the moment in which you are writing, New York City during the height of the COVID pandemic, with a 1974 concert that Labelle did at the Metropolitan Opera.
Deborah Paredez (DP): That describes a lot of what I was hoping to do in the book and part of the reason it took me a decade to finish it. I wanted to write something that wouldn’t just be an academic book or just a memoir. I am really interested, in a geeked-out craft way, in work that pushes against the limits of genre. I felt that to talk about divas I needed to exceed conventional confines of genre and voice. I learned a lot from memoir writers, from scholars, and from poets: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Lynn Melnick’s book on Dolly Parton.
SM: Is a diva different from a celebrity? I’m a scholar of celebrity, and I see some distinctive qualities to divas as you theorize them. Your analysis of divas emphasizes self-possession by people who are socially dispossessed—people who are seen as not owning their own bodies: women, people of color, queer people.
Divas also reject feminized behaviors like apology and self-deprecation and instead perform being unapologetically powerful—as your subtitle puts it, divas are extraordinary, unruly, fabulous.
Can you talk more about how you define the term diva, and what makes the diva a specific type of celebrity?
DP: Your work, Joseph Roach’s, and Joshua Gamson’s were reference points for me as I thought about divas. Celebrity and icon were the words that kept circling around the term diva. The overlaps are having a large fan base and having a persona that exceeds the person and is haunted by previous roles.
But a diva is not always a celebrity. That’s why I included a chapter about my Tía Lucia. She was a diva, partly because of her way of inhabiting an excessive femininity that exceeded the bounds of the gender role she was supposed to occupy. The diva’s hyper-femininity has something queer about it, something scary and delightful. And the diva always has a transcendent virtuosity—which not all celebrities do. Finally, divas are often associated with self-invention and reinvention, with the comeback.
SM: People often see celebrities as manufactured, produced by managers or producers, but when it comes to divas, there is less skepticism about their self-creation. There seems to be something inarguable about their self-possession—though often there is a career arc to this. People are more hostile to very young women being self-possessed and super-talented; over time, there’s some vintaging that happens.
DP: Yes, exactly.
SM: That would make divahood one of the rare cases where women acquire more authority as they age. That’s certainly not true for all female celebrities.
DP: Yes—divas are among the only instances of women whom the culture reveres at 50, at 70. I address this in the Celia Cruz chapter, where I talk about seeing her in concert when I was 24 and she was 69. She was going strong through the night; I was the one who needed to take a disco nap at the concert.
We weren’t going to see Celia Cruz in the ’90s as a vintage icon, we were going because she was still timely to us. That gets at the diva’s relationship to time: Because she endures, she can be simultaneously timely and timeless. She can show us the accretion of all her years of training and still be fresh and alive to us in the present.
SM: While I read the book, I tracked the verbs that you associate with the diva. If we group them into categories, your argument is that the diva (1) teaches us, (2) moves us, and (3) sustains us.
Can you say more about the pedagogical element of divahood? At one point you suggest that divas teach us how to style our lives in the service of adventure and pleasure. That’s something we don’t learn in school, and that we don’t necessarily learn from our families or the culture at large.
I was also interested in two other diva actions that came up a lot: the diva insists, and the diva refuses. You’re especially interested in how she refuses borders, how she refuses to be denied, and how she refuses the assaults made on her own person and on the groups to which she belongs.
DP: One reason that many people vilify the diva is that she is a woman who insists on having her needs met. The air conditioning is too cold, I’m going to say something about it, my voice will be affected by this. Or Grace Jones saying she needs to be provided with a specific number of oysters in her dressing room before a performance. The diva insists on an appetite that many might deem to be too much.
When it comes to refusal, divas refuse diminishment. I use the example of Grace Jones slapping an interviewer who was being rude to her: It was her way of refusing to be belittled. It goes back to the idea of self-possession. The diva insists, “I am a self that is worthy of being able to move through this world with some sense of freedom.” And since the world isn’t granting that, she has to insist on it.
For the many of us who have to move through the world in very constrained ways, the diva teaches us how to insist upon selves and needs that the world is never going to facilitate. Sometimes you have to be loud about it. Sometimes it just appears to others that you are loud when really all you are asking for is a fundamental human right denied you as a queer person, or a woman of color.
SM: I teach a required course at Columbia in which we read documents that articulate what rights are, alongside commentaries by people excluded from those rights. One conclusion we draw from those commentaries is that most people don’t actually have rights, only a contested ability to evoke a right to have rights. In other words, to actually exercise rights, many of us have to insist on them. It’s interesting to think of the diva as modeling that.
DP: And she models it in a way that is so grand and undeniable that we can’t help but pay attention to it—and learn from it.
SM: Your book focuses on divas of color. Do you see the diva as an intrinsically racialized category, or did you have a lot of examples to choose from, and decide to center examples of divas who are women of color?
DP: Virtuosity, glamour, and stardom have historically been racialized as white. Historically women of color were excluded from the earliest uses of the term diva, which was first used to designate the virtuosic soprano.
Then the term diva was applied, especially to Black women, as a term of derision—not to praise them as virtuosic, but to say that they were insisting upon their rights too loudly and too excessively. “She’s such a diva” meant to point out how haughty these women were precisely because they lacked genuine virtuosity.
I created a pantheon of women of color to acknowledge that history and respond to it. If we are going to talk about what it means to be a diva in America, women of color are representative.
SM: I also thought of your book as a fabulous spiritual autobiography. People tend to associate celebrity worship with the antithesis of spirituality: It’s commodified, it’s materialistic, it’s debased. But it seemed like divahood has a spiritual dimension for you.
DP: I am by training a performance scholar. In my youth, the closest I got to any transcendent experience was watching performance, or being part of a performance. I remember being in my first play, in fifth grade, and being onstage and feeling the thrill of inhabiting a role and being beyond yourself.
There is something to me that has always been transcendent about watching someone in real time be virtuosic. Herbert Blau says acting is watching the actors slowly die onstage; you are constantly aware of mortality—the actor’s and your own and the risk of failure. To watch someone stretch the bounds of what the human voice can do, what the tennis racquet can do, is to be in connection with that; it produces something that is, if not spiritual, transcendent.
I’ve also learned so much from Black scholars and writers about how to do the collective autobiography my book includes. Performance can give us the capacity to be in relation to one another by all being enthralled to this singular figure, the diva. Our attentions may be on her, but they are also in the service of the collective we that gets formed in that moment. I wanted the form of my book to honor that.
SM: That also relates to the spiritual—in Varieties of Religious Experience, William James says something like a religious experience is anything where we feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Your book tracks several ways that divas connect us to something bigger than ourselves. The diva connects us to the other people who worship her. A truly virtuosic performance, excessive in the best sense, connects us to a larger sense of the possible. And virtuosic performances also help us experience massive, fabulous accretions of time. When we watch divas perform, we experience the many years they have spent perfecting their magic. Divas are bigger than themselves because they contain all the moments they have spent getting really, really, really amazing at what they do.
To write this book, you had to situate yourself in history. I want to ask about this in relation to this quote from your book: “I was born in the fringe—the gold and shimmering fringe—they made for so many like me.” What feels historically specific to you about that? There have been divas for centuries, so what do you consider distinct about the divas you discuss, from the early 1970s forward?
DP: The early 1970s was a moment, especially for women of color, of possibility in terms of civil rights in this country. The women that I am calling divas had a very important role in that: Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone.
For people of my generation, even though we were perhaps not conscious of it as little tiny babies, there was something about being born into a moment where we thought, oh, history maybe is going toward our side a little more. And then seeing that hope systematically dismantled over the course of our lifetime in the last 50 years brings a particular generational grief. I wanted this book to speak to that generation and remember that there was a tiny bit of space made for us, and acknowledge our sense of deep loss.
SM: Your book also feels to me like a meditation on being moved, in both the physical and emotional senses.
DP: Movement is very central to this book, maybe because I am Mexican American and ideas of migration, of how to move, have always been central to how we are in the world. You are either migrating, as my father did literally migrate to the United States, or your movement is constrained from migrating because of the brown body that you are in.
We live in a world of ongoing and increasing policing of the movement of our bodies. So it’s very powerful to be moved by someone who seems to transcend the confines of the role she is in because of how she dances, as in the case of Rita Moreno, or because of her charisma, like Aretha Franklin on the VH1 Divas Live concert. Sometimes the diva allows a trans subject to imagine a way of moving in a world that is dangerous for them to move in.
Seeing these women can help us find creative ways to push a little bit against how our own movements are constrained. The poet in me wants to show how by attending to what we might overlook or take for granted, we can actually be transported, find a moment of transcendence. A poet tries to excavate that transcendent moment from the ordinary, to use language in surprising ways that achieve a sense of extraordinary movement. I was trying, in my writing, to create connections to the diva and to how the diva herself makes those imaginative leaps. Sometimes those imagined movements are the only movement we might have that is free.
SM: Your book is about being enthralled to divas, and it is also its own writerly performance of divadom. You simultaneously occupy the position of the fan and of the diva.
How does that relate to this being a nonfiction book written by a poet? I’m especially interested in how you make performances come alive for the reader.
DP: My training as a performance scholar and my training as a poet come together in this book because both of them are about exquisite attention to the things that might otherwise pass us by. One thing performance scholars have to do is document ephemeral performances. I wanted to explain why we might feel transported when we watch Rita Moreno dance in West Side Story—to look closely at what the dancing is doing, how it is working on us. Simple description won’t capture its magic or its transcendence or the way it moves us. Poetic language can, even though or precisely because it’s more oblique. I was always aiming to show us something we don’t know about the thing we think we know so well. If the book is doing what it is supposed to, there is something electric and performative about the writing.
The diva is so often seen as remote and unattainable and onstage; I wanted to see how divas allow for a connection. And I wanted to perform that for the reader—so by the time we get to the Labelle chapter of the book, I am talking to the reader a lot more, attempting a deep intimacy that makes the text performative.
SM: You are not just telling us what you felt, you are helping us feel it along with you.
DP: That is the hope.
SM: It worked for me!
You write a lot about diva duets and solidarity among divas. There’s Cher and Ann-Margret supporting Tina Turner at a crucial juncture, after Turner finally left her abusive husband. There’s Serena and Venus Williams as an example of a supportive diva duo. There’s competition in these dynamics, but there’s also a sense of friendly, athletic teamwork, of everyone involved inspiring one another to be their best self.
DP: I’ve cowritten an article in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical with Stacy Wolf about diva duets, especially on variety shows in the ’60s. I’ve always been interested in how we love the diva because she is singular and doesn’t always play well with others, but at the same time there has often been a mutual inspiration that can happen between divas. There is a long history of diva pedagogy, like Celia Cruz training La India as her successor. A passing of the crown.
This also comes through in the Labelle chapter, where I talk about how they moved away from the girl group structure of a lead vocalist and backup singers. Instead, they aimed to be more like the rock bands of the ’70s, harmonizing and communing and coming together to create a song. I talked about them at the end of the book because part of the book’s narrative arc was building up to this idea of diva collectivity. They model that in how they shared the lead in a way that still allows us to hear what each of their voices can do individually. What they do together is not just harmony; it’s also about each of them taking turns at conveying respect for the others and supporting each individual singer as she soars. Their arrangements model a diva sociability: Now it is my turn and now it is your turn and we are just going to keep going and going.
One of the chapters that sadly got cut from the book was about the cast of The Color Purple musical revival with Cynthia Erivo and Danielle Brooks and Heather Headley. I was really excited about what happens when you have three Black divas onstage together. You don’t often get to see more than one diva in a Broadway play. There is only the one. Sometimes there’s two, if you think about Wicked. But rarely three, and in a way that isn’t about being catty, or trying to steal the spotlight from one another. Instead, it’s about acknowledging mutual membership in a small select club of very virtuosic women. Which sends a message to women that they don’t have to fear other women. That refuses how we are taught, as women, that another woman who is excellent at something I do or want to do is a threat to me. What if you regard her as someone you want to know? What can you learn? Witnessing that onstage in that production had a profound effect on me.
SM: At one point you describe Tina Turner’s voice as being like a lioness lifting a cub in her clenched jaw. You were trying to capture a certain sonic quality, but it is also a maternal image. You also describe your diva friend Jaime as “the she-wolf who raised me to ruin myself.”
We’ve already talked about the diva as a teacher, but what about the diva as a mother? Someone who helps you give birth to yourself.
DP: I’ll talk about that in two ways. I have a chapter on the performance artist Jomama Jones, who is the drag alter ego of Daniel Alexander Jones. I watched Daniel perform as Jomama when I had just become a mother. I was really struggling, as many mothers do, with the early 2000s idea of intensive motherhood, that you are now the CEO of your brood—
SM: Without the CEO pay.
DP: Exactly. You are going to relinquish your career and give your all to your kids—be self-abnegating and take pride in that. It is an awful framework, so I was seeking out different models of motherhood than the one around me. Seeing Jomama Jones made me think about the legacy that she comes out of: the drag ball houses of Harlem and other places. RuPaul also comes out of this tradition.
The mother of the house mothers her various children by being her most spectacular, most artistic, most self-actualized version of herself. Having that be a model for me was really important given the historical moment in which I was becoming a mother, when working women were spending more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms did in the ’60s. Divas like Jomama Jones offered me a model for how to think beyond the confines of that historical moment.
Motherhood also comes into play when I talk about how the term diva started being deployed in the early 2000s through girl culture products. Suddenly girls were called on to be divas. In the 1990s there was girl power, and then in the early 2000s, girl power changed to diva power. “Be a diva.” A good girl, a successful girl was someone who was either secretly a diva like Hannah Montana or fully a diva and wore sparkly everything and could excel in certain ways but still needed to be ordinary because she couldn’t be too threatening.
I was interested in thinking about how and why this was circulating all over the place in the early 2000s—shortly before I became a mother. This was also the same moment that Venus and Serena Williams were ascending and being vilified for being all the things that exemplify a diva girl. It was important for me to mark that historical moment from my point of view as the mother of a girl who is coming to the world as a brown and Black girl. The cultural message was that she would be hailed as a diva only if she was white and fit the racialized confines of whiteness. But if she were a virtuosic brown girl wearing her little heart pendant necklace and hoop earrings and beautiful sparkly braids—as Venus and Serena were doing—she would be vilified. That chapter was all about sustained rage. It was important for me not to resolve the rage, but to keep building it, because that is how I felt.
I also wanted to show that I was trying to say to my daughter, “See, here are these models. Look how Venus and Serena were able to maintain themselves and each other because—going back to the diva duet—they supported each other.” This might be the way for my girl to manage moving through this world with her virtuosity and sense of connection intact.
SM: Are there other divas you wish you’d had time and space to include?
DP: So many. Speaking of duets, I had a chapter about Lena Horne doing a duet with Judy Garland on The Judy Garland Show. Some chapters got cut not because I didn’t love those divas but because the book was part memoir and I had to attend to narrative arc. Some chapters fell off because they didn’t facilitate that arc. I had to cut the chapter about Nina Simone learning to play the piano and me learning to use the typewriter to learn how to write poems. Another chapter that didn’t make it in was about the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, who is a totally different diva because she is so butch. A lot of folks, especially younger ones, have asked why I’m not talking about Beyoncé or other younger divas. And that’s because they weren’t in my pantheon. This book is about my pantheon, but I’m not denying anyone else’s.
It was important to situate divas in a story of my life and my generation and that also meant that many divas, young and old, whom I love, didn’t fit in the end. It was hard to kill my darlings, or in my case, my divas.
SM: Is there anything you want to say about the book that hasn’t come up?
DP: I want to underscore that the character I am in the book is definitely not a diva. She is a bumbling acolyte. That was important because it invites the reader in to stumble along with me. I also want to mark, as I do in the Divine chapter, how it was sometimes terrifying for me to be in relation to divas. It doesn’t always start with, “Oh, I’m so enthralled!” Sometimes it starts out with terror, “Oh my God, my body! What do I do with my body? Oh shit, my body is beyond my control, but I want to be in it, but how do I be in it?” There can be threat as much as pleasure. Divas help us inhabit all these feelings.
SM: That range of feeling—being awed, terrified, disappointed—is itself part of reverence.
DP: Yes. And now that I’ve finished the book, the word diva is no longer what I thought it meant. Oh no, what do I do? What is it now? What does it mean now? Oh my God, I’m running to catch up. 