ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Queer Tools for Studying Digital Television

part I|54 pages

Historicity

chapter 1|12 pages

Queer Power

Multicultural Empowerment Narratives on Digital-Era TV

chapter 2|13 pages

Briggs, Family, Queer

chapter 3|13 pages

In the Queer-View Mirror

Looking at 1991

chapter 4|14 pages

Like Living in a Different Time Zone

SBS's Queer Orientations

part II|54 pages

Temporal Play

chapter 5|12 pages

Making Things Perfectly Sketch

Reflexive Queer and Trans Themes in Sketch Comedy

chapter 6|12 pages

Realizing Unrealizable Joy

Forming Queer Utopia in The Fathers Project

chapter 7|11 pages

Murdering Our Queer Past

chapter 8|17 pages

Obscure Temporalities

Dark and the Queering of Time Travel

part III|56 pages

Ideological Limitations

chapter 9|13 pages

The Television-Industrial Closet

chapter 11|13 pages

How Do Trans Men Make Babies?

Transkids and Reproductive Fantasies

chapter 12|14 pages

Queer Aesthetics in the Streaming Age

part IV|50 pages

Industrial Contextualization

chapter 14|11 pages

Producing Inclusion and Intersectionality

Queer Showrunners of Color in Contemporary Television

chapter 15|14 pages

Living in the Gray Area

Bisexual Resignifications in Desiree Akhavan's The Bisexual

chapter 16|10 pages

Visual Pleasure and Video-Sharing Platforms

If I Was Your Girl and the Representation of Black Sexuality