Bugs Bunny Scholarship Is a Wascally Wesearch Wabbit Hole is by the Editors of JSTOR Daily and aptly appears as part of their Research Rabbit Hole series of posts.

“What’s up, Doc? Dunno, but let’s see what the PhD’s are saying about everyone’s favorite rascally rabbit. As always on JSTOR Daily, the links to this quirky list of Bugs Bunny scholarship and other random mentions of him in the JSTOR database are free for all readers.

“The Signifying Rabbit

“In 1995, literary and cultural studies scholar Eric Savoy situated Bugs Bunny in the context of queer theory, recuperating him as a “queer cultural icon, a parodie diva, whose campy excesses and canny games are profoundly though tacitly indebted to the African-American rhetorical tradition of Signifying…as back-talk.” Once Savoy helped us see how Bugs sabotages binary logic, we fell in love with this essay, which is such a perfect amalgam of 90s cultural criticism.

“Bugs Bunny at Guantánamo

“According to the June 5, 1987 edition of the Guantánamo Gazette—part of a collection of US Government documents about Cuba that the University of Florida posted on JSTOR—CBS aired a full hour of Bugs Bunny at the Guantánamo base on Friday mornings. See the last page of this document, bottom right. See all the other documents in this collection for some serious inquiry into US-Cuba relations.

“Southern Fried Foster: Representing Race and Place through Music in Looney Tunes Cartoons

“Some of Bugs Bunny’s best-known “roles” center on music: think of The Rabbit of Seville, released in 1950, or What’s Opera, Doc?, released in 1957. It’s not surprising, then, that music was an important part across the entire Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies collection, helping to create a sense of space and place as the stories unfolded on the screen. More than that, however, the scores defined a sense of race, especially in the cartoons that depicted enslaved African Americans, blackface minstrelsy, and the South. Musicologist Joanna R. Smolko examines “the complex associations and subtexts that are constructed through the pairing of Stephen Foster songs with particular images and themes across these cartoons, especially those scored by Carl Stalling (1891–1972)…”

Please click here to continue reading what the scholars are saying about Bugs.