Close to You

Karen Carpenter and the

Body-Martyr in Queer Memory
Julian Binder

Abstract: There has been much thought given to role of the body as a site of
political, physiological, and cultural negotiation. What place then does the
beloved and astonishingly affective singer of 1970s soft-rock, Karen Carpenter,
occupy in this weighty discourse? Karen’s death from complications related to
her eating disorder in 1983 shocked the public, eliciting a new wave of cultural
consciousness about the embodied nature of mental illness. But beyond the
stereotypical white suburban Carpenters fan, Karen and her story had already
become a cult favorite amongst the queer avant-garde as soon as four years
after death, a mysterious phenomenon that I argue is decidedly queer in its
emotional trafficking of Karen’s subjectivity, among other areas. This essay
explores the ways in which our bodies double as cultural repositories, as hal-
lowed sites of memory, and as icons of martyrdom with the capacity to emit a
healing resonance analogous to their fabricated religious counterparts. I must
admit, this paper might also be guilty of occasionally engaging in the typical
essentializing tendency toward Karen’s personhood. For her sake then, reader,
I ask you to ponder the following question with the same aversion to neat
finality that you apply to your own story as you flip the page: who really was
Karen Carpenter?

Keywords: embodied, Karen Carpenter, martyrdom, memory, queer, subjectivity

On 30 April 1973, a few months after Richard Nixon’s second inauguration

as President of the United States, and amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War,
­Richard Carpenter thanked President Nixon for inviting him and his sister
­Karen’s soft rock group, The Carpenters, to play at the White House that night
(Crescent Noon 2008). The occasion was a state dinner put on for West German
Chancellor Willy Brandt, and the band had flown in to Washington, DC, for
the night in the middle of a hectic touring schedule. That same day, Nixon
addressed national radio and television audiences about the resignation and
firing of a number of his advisors hours before the Carpenters took to the stage,
where the President himself introduced Karen, Richard, and their band, calling
them “young America at its very best” (Schmidt 2010: 100–101). With a career
that included the White House appearance, no lyrical allusions to sexuality

Screen Bodies Volume 5, Issue 1, Summer 2020: 18–30 © The Author(s)

doi: 10:3167/screen.2020.050103 ISSN 2374-7552 (Print), ISSN 2374-7560 (Online)
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f­ urther than romantic love and longing, and avoiding overt political statements,
the Carpenters’ brand of wholesome, soft pop-rock has been framed as having
been antithetical to those of their often “controversial” and politically conscious
contemporaries on the charts in the early 1970s (Saukko 2006).1
Despite their “square” and mundane image, the Carpenters have left a legacy
that has endured and been subject to constructions of memory and reproduc-
tion in unlikely, queer places—and this is especially true of the Karen Carpenter
legacy in the years following her death in 1983. In 1987, four years after Karen’s
widely reported death from heart failure brought on by anorexia, Todd Haynes
garnered widespread recognition for the first time with a Barbie doll arthouse
dramatization of Karen’s life, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Sonic Youth
included a tribute to Karen on their 1990 album Goo entitled “Tunic (Song for
Karen),” which was accompanied by a Karen-themed music video (see Sonic
Youth 2009). The band’s lead singer, Kim Gordon, even penned a passionate
open letter to Karen, who was one of her heroes (Gordon 2015). Four years later
in 1994, Sonic Youth was joined by punk and feminist bands like Shonen Knife
and the Cranberries, among others, for a cover album entitled If I Were a Car-
penter. More recently, the queer and gender-non-conforming cabaret performer
Justin Vivian Bond (2017) has performed songs sung by Karen in their shows
Justin Bond Is Close to You and Down on Creation: On Top of the World with The
Carpenters intermittently since 2007. But why did these disparately alternative,
underground, and often queer artists and performers spend (and in one case,
why have they spent) their time and energy paying tribute to and investing
in the memory of the Carpenters and, more specifically, the memory of Karen
Carpenter? What was it about Karen, marketed as wholesome, innocent, and
virginal someone who, according to biographer Randy Schmidt, “was addicted
to needlepoint . . . loved Disneyland and collected Mickey Mouse memorabilia
. . . [and] adored Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, and reruns of I Love Lucy” that
resonates with queer subjectivity? (Schmidt 2011). Evidenced by the afore-
mentioned historical constructions of memory, as well as through virtual blogs,
forums, and comment sections online, Karen’s status as a queer icon is not a
subject of debate in this article—it is assumed. The question is why Karen has as-
cended to this status in queer and queer-adjacent memory. Similarly, the purpose
of this article is not to construct a voyeuristic history of Karen’s life and health,
to make an attempt to alter the memory of Karen, or to make claims about the
“truth” of her supposedly controlling family, illness, or death. It does, however,
aim to explore why and how the memory of her life, her health, her family, and
her death are remembered—and to what end—in order to reveal the aesthetic
and emotional underpinnings animating queer identification with her memory.
“Queer” itself shall not be defined in the interest of allowing the reader to draw
discursive connections to diverse modalities of being that could prove useful in
the future, given the dearth of scholarship about Karen ­Carpenter (Stryker 2008).
2 0 / S C R EE N B O D I E S

To place Karen Carpenter within a queer space of memory, within an under-

standing of media representations of queer people and youth, specifically with
regard to Eric Rofes’s ideas about the repetition of the “martyr-target-victim”
narrative of persecution in public “narratives, visuals, and historic incidents . . .
who and what we think of as GLBT youth” (Driver 2008: 4–5), is helpful in
pointing to the ways in which Karen’s life story fits within entrenched public
narratives of the queer life story, however obscuring and shallow the “martyr-­
target-victim” narrative may be about the true intersectional complexity of
every­day queer realities. By mapping this “martyr-target-victim” framework of
representation onto the memory of Karen, and its themes of innocent naïveté,
victimhood, and a tragic quest for perfection all caused by an unloving mother
and controlling brother, her relevance to queer subjectivity and its historical iso-
lation, alienation, and struggle for bodily autonomy begins to make sense. An
illustrative example of Karen’s place in this narrative framework of martyrdom
can be found in the title of a queer-authored cultural-history-themed Word-
Press blog entitled “KAREN CARPENTER DIED FOR YOU SINS” (Anonymous
2014). Within supposedly progressive cultural paradigms where “queer youth
become valued and supported as long as they don’t challenge the status quo by
looking or acting too queer” (Driver 2008: 5), queer constructions of memory
have identified Karen’s life story as validating a queer desire for autonomy over
their bodies and subjectivity, remembering her as a kind of martyr. Karen’s life
is remembered as a tragic pursuit of perfection, a tragedy manifestly located in
her body by way of her visible illness and death (Saukko 2006). In this context,
I argue that the memory of Karen as a queer icon is rooted in her remembrance
as a body-martyr, which is affirmed through aesthetic markers of queerness in
Karen’s public life and mobilized through cultural constructions of memory as
a proxied queer process of self-healing and care.
The memory of Karen as a body-martyr can be traced to narratives surround-
ing her lack of autonomy over her body and its image, and her life culminating
in a tragedy of unachieved perfection that parallels both individual and collec-
tive queer experiences of repression. To understand the nature of the memory of
Karen Carpenter in relation to her body, it cannot be understated how, accord-
ing to Joan Brumberg, “Karen’s death made anorexia nervosa a household term
and underscored the serious consequences of the disorder” (qtd. in Bowers and
Grey 2005: 92). As a white celebrity whose image was deliberately constructed
as innocent, suburban, and “family-friendly” by executives like Herb Alpert at
the Carpenters’ label A&M Records, Karen personified anorexia for the first time
in a way that diseases are sometimes required to be in order to prominently
make their way into the public consciousness (Bowers and Grey 2005; Schmidt
2010). According to Peggy Bowers and Stephanie Grey, writing about anorexia
in the years after Karen’s death, “Karen Carpenter, the iconography that she rep-
resented, became interchangeable with the public’s understanding of eating dis-
 C l os e to Y ou / 2 1

orders in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” In their view, Karen Carpenter became
“‘that pop star who died of anorexia,’ and anorexia the illness ‘that killed Karen
Carpenter’” (Bowers and Grey 2005: 101). Yet, Karen’s status in queer memory
as a body-martyr, while materially centered in her visible decline and death, has
more to do with the posthumous framing of her life and death—she came to
be seen as a passive female victim who lost control over her body—than with
her actual illness.
A retrospective article on the Carpenters from 1996 in the New York Times
proclaimed that “anorexia, in the end, claimed victory over her body and her
name” (Hoerburger 1996). Here, anorexia is personified, and the example en-
capsulates how Karen’s life story was remembered not as a narrative of “female
strength or self-reliance, [but as one of] a desperate little girl, bereft of any
control of her own life, ultimately succumbing to the premier feminine pa-
thology that would claim the lives of so many like her” (Bowers and Grey
2005: 99). This memory of Karen as a “desperate little girl” had been con-
structed over time from the beginning of the duo’s career and can be linked
to how Karen’s brother Richard’s ultimate control over the Carpenter sound
and image, and even over Karen herself, was always made clear in interviews
and reports. The author of a 1974 Rolling Stone feature, around the height of
the group’s fame, wrote that “Richard never stops working. It is he who is the
driving force behind the Carpenters. It is he who selects the material, arranges
it, makes most important decisions and in general keeps the ball in the air”
(Nolan 1974). Karen, whose sentiments about fluffier topics like the Carpen-
ters’ fandom are featured, is portrayed as the doe-eyed sidekick to Richard’s
masculine hard work and male genius, the author’s abridged quote of her
modest intentions for the wildly successful group summing up this image:
“I mean . . . we only wanted to . . . make a little music” (Nolan 1974). Karen’s
reliance on Richard is tied not only to the decisions about the band, but to the
very existence of Karen’s own subjectivity, the author writing: “So long has
she deferred to her brother, it seems, she cannot express a distinct personality
of her own.” Without Richard, “Karen retreats into giggles and facial takes,
becomes a gum-chewing comedienne or a spoiled princess who doesn’t allow
herself to think out loud with strangers. Or close friends? Or even alone?”
(Nolan 1974).
The narrative of a quest for perfection permeated accounts of Richard’s
control over Karen and the group, especially when it came to their live per-
formances, which were critically panned in the 1970s in part due to Richard’s
insistence that the live songs perfectly mirrored the studio takes (Lott 2009).
The idea that Karen’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to contribute to this per-
fection due to her struggle with her weight and due to her abandonment of
the drumming that was her true musical passion, which she did in order to
meet the desires and expectations of Richard and her label, is the tragedy that
2 2 / S C R EE N B O D I E S

powers her body-martyr status (Schmidt 2010). A key component of the per-
fection tragedy, and one that aligns with queer memories of forced repression
of sexual desire, is the repression of Karen’s sexuality and maturity in order to
achieve and maintain the Carpenters’ “family-friendly” image. Aside from the
reality of this repression—Karen’s sexually suggestive, disco-vibed solo album
was scrapped because Richard and A&M Records officials rejected it, leaving her
devastated—the memory of Karen as an innocent child deepens the emotional
weight of the perfection tragedy (Schmidt 2010). After referencing the Rolling
Stone feature from 1974 that spoke of Karen as being “in some ways, like a child
. . . who probably missed out on one or two normal stages of adaptation to
the real world,” Bowers and Grey note that “even at her graveside eulogy, Karen
would continue to be referred to as a child despite the fact that she was 32 years
old,” and add that “this imprisonment in a state of eternal adolescence is central
to the anorexic allegory for young women” (2005: 106).
The memory of Karen as the infantilized victim at the center of a perfection
tragedy allows for individual queer identification with Karen: queer individuals
and their bodies, never able to meet the expectations of the heteropatriarchy’s
binary norms of sexuality and gender, which are locally manifested in the ex-
pectations of their families and communities, often lead to self-harm (including
the development of eating disorders) and the repression of their sexual desires,
and are subject to efforts of family members to change or control their behavior
and identity (Human Rights Campaign N.D.). Beyond the queer individual, the
denial of Karen’s emotional subjectivity by Richard after her death and efforts
to censor media about Karen’s life that was unflattering toward the Carpenter
family both provide powerful queer parallels on a collective level. In a 1988
essay for TV Guide, Richard stood firm in his repeatedly espoused opinion that
Karen’s anorexia had nothing to do with the stress of her life in the public eye or
with her overbearing family, writing: “Some people blame it on career pressures
or a need to take more control of her life. I don’t think so. I think she would
have suffered the same problem even if she had been a homemaker” (Schmidt
2010: 7). Richard would soon after opine in an interview that anorexia was “ge-
netic, the same way talent is . . . I have no answers” (Schmidt 2010: 8). In this
chapter of Karen’s memory, a supposed expert, her brother Richard, spread the
word about Karen’s illness as lacking a deep psychological or emotional basis,
dismissing her illness as a biological inevitability.2 Richard’s denial of Karen’s
emotional subjectivity, which is at the heart of any mental illness, draws close
parallels with the ways in which queer subjectivity has been historically denied.
Namely, the history of sexological knowledge production by perceived experts
who sought to pathologize homosexuality is directly linked to queer peoples’
systematic exclusion from notions of social citizenship. An example of this is
the 1944 G.I. Bill, the benefits of which were not extended to those who had
been dishonorably discharged for homosexuality (Canaday 2003). Richard’s
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denial extended not only to statements to the press, but also to exacting con-
trol over depictions of Karen and the Carpenter family, like in the 1988 CBS TV
movie The Karen Carpenter Story (Joseph Sargent). Cast and crew complained
of constant rewrites, a “whitewashing” of the story, and painful suppression of
emotions onset due to Richard’s presence (Schmidt 2010). The denial narrative
was also publicized through Richard’s vehement legal battles against media he
felt unfairly represented his family as the chief contributors to Karen’s death, like
Haynes’s Superstar. Despite a glowing reception, Superstar had to be officially
pulled from circulation after legal action and copyright claims from Richard
Carpenter, A&M Records, as well as Barbie-owner Mattel (Frye 2009). Yet these
efforts to stifle historical production and the memory of the Carpenters that
were centered on the disputed circumstances of Karen’s death not only added
underground appeal to Superstar, which enhanced its budding cult status, but
also reinforced memory of Karen as a body-martyr in the corporeal sense, the
memory of her body controlled, edited, and censored by her brother (Hilder-
brand 2005). Drawing parallels to the ways queer folks have been historically
denied space in popular media that honored their humanity and emotional
subjectivity, the early years after Karen’s death being contemporary to the denial
and mocking of the AIDS crisis by the Reagan administration for instance, the
denial narrative that dominated the years after Karen’s death corresponds well
to the collective queer consciousness (Vanity Fair 2015). The denial narrative is
in part what motivated Haynes to produce the film in the first place, telling an
interviewer in 1989 that “Karen Carpenter’s image is still being controlled and
manipulated by Richard and the family. That’s so sad” (Leyda 2014).
The Carpenters’ aesthetic, both sonic and visual, contributes to Karen’s place
in queer memory, especially when read as camp. Musically, Karen’s low voice and
her early reputation as a drummer both contribute to her queer remembrance.
Described by the author of “Karen Carpenter Died for Your Sins” as a “chocolate-­
and-Valium voice [that] has a smile in it,” Karen’s low, husky voice—tinged with
melancholy—resonates in some queer memories as butch (Anonymous 2014).
One commenter on a 2011 AfterEllen article entitled “Karen Carpenter Was a
Superstar, But Was She a Gay Icon?” shared their insight: “My partner is a big
Karen Carpenter fan and says the reason why so many lesbians liked her was
because she had a gay voice. What is a lesbian voice? Like Anne Murray’s voice.
Like the Linster says, ‘resonant, smoky, deep alto’” (The Linster 2011). ­Karen’s
“tomboy” aesthetic, publicized through her widely reported and televised drum-
ming skills, supplemented her remembrance as butch. Karen came first in a
1975 Playboy Magazine poll to crown the best drummers in music, beating
out Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who would later claim in a special
Led-Zeppelin-focused edition of Creem that “she couldn’t last ten minutes with
a Zeppelin number” (Tauriello 2013). This “tomboy” persona has been used as
evidence for Karen as a figure who challenged gender, like on Justin Bond’s
2 4 / S C R EE N B O D I E S

website where their Carpenter-themed drag show is described as a delve into

the musical catalog of “gender outlaw and body dysmorphia poster-girl Karen
Carpenter” (Bond 2017).
Camp is a sensibility brought to life by its audience, which is made up of,
according to Susan Sontag (1964), queer folks who “by and large, constitute
the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp.” When compared
to Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” The Carpenters’ songs and accompanying visuals,
featuring desexualized overdramatic lyrics, like in “Rainy Days and Mondays”
where Karen sings lyrics like “standing around, nothing to do but frown, rainy
days and Mondays always get me down,” as well as mundanely cheery portraits
and stage-shots of the Carpenter siblings on albums, posters, and music videos,
easily meet the camp criteria. The polished, studio-sharp, yet overbearingly
emotional sound Richard was intent on producing and meticulously recreating
live, dubbed by one reviewer as “polite-plastic pop,” fits Sontag’s (1964) notion
that “all Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice” and
the idea of the purest form of camp as “always naïve” (Schmidt 2011). With
innocent lyrics set to mournful arrangements, often featuring strings, such as on
“Rainy Days,” the Carpenters’ music has the “essential element [of pure camp]
seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Sontag goes on, writing that “Camp rests
on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can,
corrupts it.” For this reason, the memory that Karen was unable to maintain the
illusion of innocent perfection that the marketing of her image was centered on,
what I have here called “the perfection tragedy,” and that she was remembered
as a victim places the Carpenters in the ever-changing camp canon, especially
as her anorexia became visible in late-career music videos like “Touch Me When
We’re Dancing” (Nolan 1974; Retro Channel Anglo 2016). Time itself and the
development of narratives around Karen’s memory have played key roles in the
Carpenters entering into this canon. Fitting with Sontag’s (1964) idea that “the
process of aging . . . arouses a necessary sympathy” that identifies something as
camp, Superstar director Todd Haynes describes how “at first [The Carpenters’]
songs seem banal and manipulative and overly sentimental . . . [but] gain a new
kind of depth as we’ve learned how Karen Carpenter has suffered. There’s a real
sadness and the voice gets all the more beautiful as you find out” (Leyda 2014).
Beyond camp, Freya Jarman-Ivens makes a compelling case in her book
Queer Voices for how Karen’s voice and the Carpenters’ studio techniques create
a musical space for “the emergence of queer,” and she asserts that “because
their work is so consistently derided, and because that derision is based on
such gendered logic, I will argue that the Carpenters’ music participates in a
meta-queering process, wrestling political power from the musically masculine
and reconstructing the basis of how musico-political power may be assigned
and wielded” (2011: 67–68 ). Jarman-Ivens debunks the fantasy of opposition-
ality that has been musically and culturally ascribed to acts like Pink Floyd,
 C l os e to Y ou / 2 5

the Beatles, and Radiohead, who have been lauded and labeled “worthy” of
study as alternative and considered as pushing against the mainstream. Taking
after Theodor Adorno’s 1941 essay “On Popular Music,” Jarman-Ivens writes
that this illusion of oppositionality merely plays into the pseudo-individualistic
“fiction of novelty,” “[duping] the audience into accepting a predigested and
standardized form” of composition, different musical variations of “young-lads-
just-doing-­their-thing” (2011: 63). Richard’s manipulation of Karen’s vocals in
songs like “Goodbye to Love,” overdubbing them and selectively eliminating any
hint of natural breath through stretches of difficult phrasing, is reminiscent of
the cyborg, a part-human part-machine subject, resulting in a queer exposure
of the limits of the “natural” (2011: 90).
Apart from the output of media by Karen and the Carpenters during her life,
constructions of memory, like the CBS TV biopic and Todd Haynes’s film, have
reinforced the memory of the Carpenters as camp. Mary Desjardins recounts
“one of the campiest scenes” in the CBS biopic, where “her mother [Agnes]
refuses the psychiatrist’s pleas that she tell Karen she loves her because ‘Karen
knows we love her’” (2004: 40). Another example of camp in the film is when
Agnes “pushes her son into taking Quaaludes, exclaiming how ‘they’re not
drugs, they’re prescription medicine!’” (2004: 40). Haynes’s Superstar, Desjar-
dins writes, multiplies the Carpenters’ inherent camp aesthetic intentionally to
intellectual ends “in its self-conscious exposure of filmic representational prac-
tices and the conventionality of genres and narrative verisimilitude,” augment-
ing the Carpenters’ camp associations in queer memory (2004: 44).
Understanding why Karen occupies space in queer memory helps us identify
how queer constructions of her memory serve to function as more than mere
tributes. Given Karen’s status as a body-martyr at the center of a perfection-­
seeking tragedy, these constructions of memory, which all involve embodying
an imagined version of Karen’s subjectivity, facilitate a process of proxied queer
self-healing or care through a rectification of the denial narrative. Todd Haynes’s
Superstar, Kim Gordon’s song and music video for “Tunic (Song For Karen),
Justin Bond’s drag act, and even covers like Frank Ocean’s “Close to You” on
his 2016 album Blonde all feature an embodiment of Karen’s physical or mu-
sical likeness. If the conventional live-action biopic “is an attempt to discover
biographical truth,” according to Dennis Bingham (2010: 7), how do we under-
stand works that embody Karen, but either intentionally subvert or preclude
the genre’s standard formats and conventions of embodiment? In the case of
Superstar, dolls are used in place of actors, and in addition to flashing imagery
of Nazi concentration camps, title-cards offer intellectual and psychoanalytical
framing to the story being told about Karen (LinaHazel 2014).3 In another
example like the “Tunic” music video, produced for a song whose lyrics are told
from the first-person perspective of Karen, Gordon sits in childlike denim dress
in front of a mound of stuffed animals.
2 6 / S C R EE N B O D I E S

Figure 1.
Sonic Youth, “Tunic
(Song for Karen)”
music video.

Later in the video, the Karen character appears overlaid with a skeleton—which
signifies Karen’s anorexic form as well as death—singing “I’m disappearing,
getting smaller every day.”

Figure 2.
Sonic Youth, “Tunic
(Song for Karen)”
music video.
 C l os e to Y ou / 2 7

The singer later adds an empowering spin to the lyric “But I look in the mirror,
I’m bigger in every way,” modifying it to “But when I open my mouth to sing—
I’m bigger in every way” (Sonic Youth 2009). In How to Be Gay, David Halperin
argues that male homosexual culture, which I argue can be expanded to include
non-cis queer cultures, “involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting,
and reusing mainstream culture, of decoding and recoding the heterosexual or
heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture, so that they come
to function as vehicles of gay or queer meaning” (2012: 12). Following this ex-
planation of queer identifications with the mainstream as a vehicle for meaning,
I argue that the narratives of memory around Karen and her death described
at length above indeed function as “vehicles of queer meaning” in their re-
membrance, but not only because of their parallels to certain queer struggles.
Through the narratives’ exposition and rectification in queer productions like
Superstar, “Tunic,” and drag shows that seek to honor the memory of Karen’s
perceived emotional subjectivity, queer constructions of Karen’s memory func-
tion as a proxy for the healing of the queer subjects themselves. In Superstar’s
case, the context of Haynes’s role in AIDS activism and the denial of the crisis’s
severity in government and media discourse of the 1980s renders Superstar’s
focus on body-horror, through both the Holocaust imagery and through the
shaving of the Karen-doll’s face as its anorexia progressed, functional. In effect,
the honoring of Karen’s perceived emotional truth through exposition of her
family’s neglect, in the context of both of the real-world memory of Richard’s
denial narrative and the denial surrounding the AIDS crisis, for example, is ca-
thartic for the queer viewer, in that remembrance of queer truths denied is, if
only temporarily and through phantom proxy, resolved. However, perhaps it is
best to place this proxied mechanism into a category less adjacent to the idea
of closure, as is the notion of healing, considering the reality of an indefinite
end to trauma, queer or otherwise. Here, Manuel Tironi and Israel Rodríguez-­
Giralt’s definition of care privileges the mechanism I have described above into
a space of perpetual movement, one where the process of care is in as constant
motion as the subjects themselves: “In a context of prolonged and systematic
harm, care emerges as a way to render [an individual or collective’s] suffering
understandable, knowable and actionable, and thus as a mode of intervention
that instantiates politics in different spaces and at several scales” (2017: 89). This
idea of healing or care by proxy might also explain why it has been queer and
queer-adjacent artists who have pursued these unauthorized embodiments of
Karen’s imagined subjectivity.
This article has revealed why Karen Carpenter, through her remembrance as
a tragic camp figure and body-martyr, has occupied a place in individual and
collective queer memory. It has also explored how constructions of memory
surrounding Karen serve a functional purpose, as they provide healing or care
for the queer subject. This article, already ambitious in its effort to make sense of
2 8 / S C R EE N B O D I E S

Karen’s place in queer memory, and, in effect, her legacy in our culture at large,
does not address many important issues intersecting with the queer memory of
Karen. It does not examine “queer” or define who and what the term refers to,
includes, and excludes. While deliberate in the interest of both scope and the
reader’s imaginings of the “queer” container, further explorations of which mo-
dalities of being resonate with Karen’s imagined subjectivity could lead to useful
findings at intersections of ideology and identity that continue to play out in
American popular culture. In accounts of Karen’s life by her dear friends, as well
as in the minimal scholarship currently in circulation that explores her legacy
and memory, the idea of “doing justice” to Karen permeates these individuals’
motivations. Karen’s best friend in life, Freya Franklin, expressed this desire to
biographer Randy Schmidt, urging him to “do good for Karen” (Schmidt 2010:
xv). I hope that this article is able to expand ideas of how we pursue this justice,
this “doing good” for those we admire, so that the memory of those categorized
as victims can depart from the realm of pity, of endless sorrow, and enter the
realm of discursive imagining and endless expansion.

Julian Binder is a reluctant writer and burgeoning artist living in Brooklyn. They
studied at McGill University in Montreal, and are interested in uncovering the
depth of meaning around subjects often dismissed as shallow, yielding discur-
sive and often strange results.

Notes
1
Biographer Randy L. Schmidt (2011) provides a useful summary of the memory of Kar-
en’s life in his article “Karen Carpenter: Unlikely Gay Icon” in The Advocate: “With a repertoire
of classic recordings like ‘Rainy Days and Mondays,’ ‘Superstar,’ ‘Goodbye to Love,’ and ‘Top
of the World,’ the Carpenters have gone down in history as the top-selling American musical
act of the 1970s. Theirs was a matchless combination of Karen’s rich, mournful, smoky alto
perfectly ensconced by Richard’s brilliant compositions and arrangements in a sweet swell
of aural lushness. . . . The girl next door from Downey, Calif., by way of New Haven, Conn.,
Karen was an awkward tomboy who loved all things baseball. She lived in the shadow of
her older brother, the obvious favorite of mom Agnes. Her father, Harold, rarely spoke and
was often shushed. . . . Richard was the family’s musical prodigy. Like mom, Karen idolized
Richard and took on many of his interests, with music becoming their shared passion. She
took up drums at Downey High, becoming the school’s first female drummer. . . It was her
unusual combo of singing and drumming that grabbed the music world’s attention just a
few years later when the sibling duo debuted on Herb Alpert’s A&M Records label. Against
her will, though, she was soon weaned from her singing drummer safe haven and pushed
into the center-stage spotlight to front of the group. When Karen’s eating disorder surfaced
during the summer of 1975, collective gasps were audible from audiences when she took the
stage . . . [in 1979] Karen set forth on a creative mission of experimentation and soul-search-
ing [working on a solo album, which was rejected].” She died from heart failure in 1983. For
more on Karen Carpenter, see Saukko 2006.
 C l os e to Y ou / 2 9

2
Of Richard’s reaction to the solo album Karen nervously played in front of him and A&M
Records executives, Karen’s good friend Frenda Franklin recalled to Schmidt that “he told her
it was shit. All Karen ever wanted was his approval. It could have turned everything in her
life around . . . I don’t think it even fazes him . . . what does it take to just be kind? . . . They
could see she was melting away like a snowman in front of their faces, but they couldn’t do
it. It was brutal” (Schmidt 2010: 212).
3
One of these title-cards, at 6:19 in the version cited here, reads: “As we investigate the
story of [Karen’s] life and death we are presented with an extremely graphic picture of the in-
ternal experience of contemporary femininity. We will see how Karen’s visibility as a popular
singer only intensified certain difficulties many women experience in relation to their body.”

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