This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twenty- first century. The complex political, cultural, and economic milieu requires new terms and conceptual frameworks to study television and media through a queer lens. Gathering a range of well-known scholars, the book takes on the relationship between sexual identity, desire, and television, breaking new ground in a context where existing critical vocabularies and research paradigms used to study television no longer hold sway in the ways they used to. The anthology sets out to confound conventional categories used to organize queer television scholarship, like “programming,” “industry,” “audience,” “genre,” and “activism.” Instead, the anthology offers four interpretive frames – historicity, temporal play, ideological limitation and industrial contextualization – in the interest of creating new queer tools for studying digital television in the contemporary age.
This collection is suitable for scholars and students studying queer media studies, television studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.
1: "Queer Power: Multicultural Empowerment Narratives on/about Digital-Era TV," Ron Becker
2: "Briggs, Family, Queer," Melissa Hardie and Amy Villarejo
3: "In the Queer-View Mirror: Looking at 1991," Nick Salvato
4: "Like Living In a Different Time Zone": SBS’s Queer Orientations," Robert Payne
5: "Making Things Perfectly Sketch: Reflexive Queer and Trans Themes in Sketch Comedy," Candace Moore
6: "Realizing Unrealizable Joy: Forming Queer Utopia in The Fathers Project," Hunter Hargraves
7: "Murdering Our Queer Past," Bridget Kies
8: "Obscure Temporalities: Dark and the Queering of the Time Travel," Michael DeAngelis
9: "The Television-Industrial Closet," Julia Himberg
10: "TV’s Ins and Outs, or (Bat) Signals and (Caped) Crusades," Lynne Joyrich.
11: "How do Trans Men Make Babies? Transkids and Reproductive Fantasies," Slava Greenberg
12: "Queer Aesthetics in the Streaming Age," Jake Pitre
13: "Televising Lesbian Feminist Love-Politics on Dyke TV," Lauren Herold
14: "Producing Inclusion and Intersectionality: Queer Showrunners of Color in Contemporary Television," Sarah Sinwell
15: "Living in the Gray Area: Bisexual Resignifications in Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual," Maria San Filippo.
16: "Visual Pleasure and Video-Sharing Platforms: If I Was Your Girl and the Representation of Black Sexuality," Faithe Day
Biography
F. Hollis Griffin is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media and the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, where he is also affiliated with the Digital Studies Institute and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. He is the author of Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age (2017), which was named an “Outstanding Academic Title” by CHOICE, the publication of the American Library Association. He has published research in Television and New Media, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Media & Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Popular Communication, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Feminist Media Histories, and the anthologies Ryan Murphy’s Queer America, The Companion to Reality Television and The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Television and New Media, Communication, Culture, & Critique, Film Criticism, and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. He has also served on the Board of Directors for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, where he was Secretary.
