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Indiana University Press - F. Hollis Griffin

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145 pages

English

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The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBT media are less "new" than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBT media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences—while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering—are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Cities as Affective Convergences
2. The Aesthetics of Banality After New Queer Cinema
3. Commodity Activism and Corporate Synergy on Cable TV
4. Toward an Actually Queer Criticism of Television
5. Wanting Something Online
Afterword: #LoveWins
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Digital Media

Gender Studies

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Película fotográfica

History of film

LGBT

Film

Media

Informations

Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	09 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253024596
Langue	English

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Extrait

FEELING NORMAL
FEELING NORMAL
Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age
F. Hollis Griffin
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by F. Hollis Griffin
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02447-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02455-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02459-6 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 16
With love to my great-grandmother, Rose Steinmuller, 1912-2009
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Cities as Affective Convergences
2 The Aesthetics of Banality after New Queer Cinema
3 Cable TV, Commodity Activism, and Corporate Synergy (or Lack Thereof)
4 Toward a Queerer Criticism of Television
5 Wanting Something Online
Afterword: LoveWins
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
O NE HEARS ABOUT it ahead of time, and then one learns it: when you finish writing a book, you want to thank everyone you have ever met. First, thanks to my editor, whose keen eye and gentle encouragement were exactly what this project needed. Raina Polivka knew the book I wanted to write and then she let me write it. It turns out that hers was no small act of faith. I felt lucky when she saw something worth paying attention to in a bunch of convoluted e-mails and messy initial pages, and I still feel that way now. Thanks also to Janice Frisch for her patience, kindness, and attention to detail in moving the manuscript through the production process-if only other first-time authors could be as lucky in this regard. Thanks to Amy Villarejo for being a generous reader and an eager interlocutor. Amy s insights are such a big part of this book-and, really, who I am as a scholar-that I will forever be grateful to her. Thanks also to Ron Becker; his gracious mentorship and careful notes inform many of these pages, as well. Thanks to my advisory committee at Northwestern-Nick Davis, Patrick Johnson, and Mimi White-for helping me identify the questions I wanted to wrestle with in the years after I graduated. Thank you to the Mellon Foundation for giving me a fellowship at Colby College; it provided me with the time and space I needed to start thinking about this project. Thanks also to my mentor while I was at Colby, Lisa Arellano, whose mix of wit, warmth, and wisdom saw me through more than a few dark moments in the period when I was first trying to imagine what this book might look like.
Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Denison-Suzanne Condray, Amanda Gunn, Alina Haliluc, Bill Kirkpatrick, Sangeet Kumar, Jeff Kurtz, Omedi Ochieng, and Laura Russell-as well as Lauren Araiza, Kristen Cole, Regina Martin, Anna Nekola, and Jo Tague. As I wrote (and continued to rewrite), their kind words and good energy helped me a great deal. Thanks to the students who enrolled in the Queer Studies Senior Seminar I taught in spring 2015. They read a draft of the introduction to this book for a class session, and I may have learned more from them that day than they learned from me. Also at Denison, thanks to Cheryl Johnson, Sally Scheiderer, and the Communication Department Fellows for their help in getting the final product in order for publication. Thanks to the Gerber/Hart Archives in Chicago and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society and Archives in San Francisco for access to their collections. The materials I found there turned out to be the linchpin of this book. And thank you to the Denison University Research Fund (DURF) for the grant that helped me finish that research.
Thanks to Flow, In Media Res, MediaCommons , and Velvet Light Trap for letting me make some rudimentary attempts to think through the issues that would only make sense to me when I wrote this book. Thanks to attendees and fellow panelists for their feedback when I presented this research at conferences, including meetings of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Console-ing Passions, American Studies Association, International Communication Association, National Communication Association, and American Historical Association, as well as the conferences on Cultural Studies and The Popular at American University of Paris, TV in the Academy at University of Vermont, Queering the Media at Colby College, Interfaces of Play and Game at Universit di Bologna, and A Hundred Years of Film Theory at Universit t Leipzig. Thanks also to Diane Negra for inviting me to participate in the plenary at the Television Cities Conference at University College Dublin. It later proved to be a pivotal moment in my getting chapter 1 off the ground. An article that intersects with and then developed adjacent to chapter 4 appears in Cinema Journal . I thank the editors there, as well.
Thanks to the friends and colleagues who read chapter drafts: Ben Aslinger, Eric Freedman, Racquel Gates, Julia Himberg, Elana Levine, Elizabeth Nathanson, Michael Newman, Allison Perlman, Bryce Renninger, Avi Santo, Kyle Stevens, and Damon Young. The list of people who read early pages bleeds into the list of folks I want to thank for fielding the crazy text messages and e-mails I sent while writing (and, let s face it, also when I wasn t writing): Dean Allbritton, Henry Russell Bergstein, James Carlisle, Rob Curtis, Jimmy Draper, Ben Hladilek, Vicky Johnson, Ron Martirano, Kristine McMahon, Laura Montemarano, Kevin Ohi, Kevin Sanson, Ryan Warden, and Kristen Warner. Their encouragement has shaped these pages more than they know. And thanks to the friends I have made since moving to Ohio: Kurt Lavetti, Mary Anne Lewis, Meris Mandernach, Alison Sauers, Jordan Smith, Eric Teague, Mary and Erik Turocy, and Steven Weber. They have graciously listened to me talk about this book more often than they may have wanted. Among these friends, I owe particular thanks to Lisbeth Lipari for being a devoted mentor and a kindred spirit whose intellect challenges me and humbles me in equal amounts. And I am especially grateful to Jessica Bean for letting me be Romy to her Michele when I moved to Columbus. Jessica is a terrific dinner date and wonderful sounding board in addition to being my friend and partner in crime.
I would be remiss in not thanking my family members and loved ones because they are always my biggest cheerleaders. Thank you to my siblings, Jennifer Robertson and Rachel Griffin, because I have hit the lotto in this department: they are smart and kind and funny, and talked me off the proverbial ledge about the research and writing process more than a few times. Thank you to my parents, Donna and Hollis Griffin, for encouraging me from the beginning and trying to impress upon me that I can do anything. And thank you to the grandparents, aunts, and uncles who have always helped me in my attempts to believe that. Yet my biggest thanks go to Alex Beekman. Alex has helped me understand the difference between what is internal and what is external and shown me that the road to contentment always travels through compassion. That we have begun walking that road together has filled me with more happiness and serenity than I have ever known. Writing this book transformed me as a scholar, and meeting Alex transformed me as a person. I owe him a debt of gratitude that I enjoy paying back very much.
But my final thanks are for my great-grandmother, Rose Steinmuller (1912-2009). To her family, she was known as Nanny. Thank you to Nanny for getting on a boat in Europe and moving to New York City, where she had to live small but would only dream big. For her, those dreams made the hard times more bearable. Nanny lost herself and escaped her troubles, however intermittently, in soap operas and musicals. In Nanny s life I see a familiar conflict: the tension between one s investment in the good life as it is depicted in media forms and an understanding of how rarely those dreams ever come to fruition. Nanny s love for movies and television never delivered the kind of life she fantasized about, but they were no less compelling to her for that. This book could not possibly be for anybody else.
FEELING NORMAL
Introduction
I LIKE TO tell people that everything I know about being a gay man I learned by watching television. That claim is only partially true, however, as I probably learned just as much by renting movies and chatting with people online. Twenty years removed from my first struggles with sexuality, I understand now that I consumed so much gay and lesbian media in my youth because I wanted to put myself near bodies and places with parallels to my own narrative and history. In doing that, I was trying to situate myself in a world built around desire. 1 No matter how loving and supportive one s family might be, to experience same-sex desire while growing up in heteronormative culture is to doubt what you know about yourself. In this context, gay and lesbian cinema, television, and online media provide important though fraught resources. I, for one, looked to them because I wanted to feel normal. A nebulous term for an affective state, fee