From a call to papers for a proposed special session at the 1998 Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco in December:

Martha Stewart is one of North America's preeminent arbiters of middle-class style and taste. In her multiple and synthesized roles as author and trademark, financial icon and cultural magnate, über-Wasp and Chief Executive Housewife, archetype of white femininity and immigrant dream, Stewart's influence extends across visual and print media and has spawned numerous parodies. It is clear that there are contradictions here that bear investigation. Our panel seeks to consider the following questions:

• How does Stewart's work serve to construct notions of whiteness and middle-class heterosexual identity?

• How is Stewart produced by the culture of late capitalism?

  

• What would [feminist theorist] Judith Butler make of Stewart's aggressively heterosexual performance?

• Do camp parodies of Stewart represent queer subversions of dominant discourses?

• What is the function of nostalgia in Martha Stewart? Is it an "imperialist nostalgia"?

• What is the significance of Stewart's aesthetic of cleanliness and perfection?

• Bearing in mind Anne McClintock's work in Imperial Leather, what is the connection between nineteenth-century discourses of dirt and purity and Stewart's postmodern urban aesthetic?

• What can we make of the connection between Stewart's actual life and the virtual life that is apparently the subject of Martha Stewart Living?

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