Download or read book The Generic Closet written by Alfred L. Martin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes. Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness. By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.

Download or read book The Generic Closet written by Alfred L. Martin, Jr. and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes. Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness. By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.

Download or read book Monsters in the Closet written by Harry M. Benshoff and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1997-11-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monster in the Closet is a history of the horrors film that explores the genre's relationship to the social and cultural history of homosexuality in America. Drawing on a wide variety of films and primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials, fanzines, men's magazines, and popular news weeklies, the book examines the historical figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious and social models of homosexuality. While recent work within gay and lesbian studies has explored how the genetic tropes of the horror film intersect with popular culture's understanding of queerness, this is the first book to examine how the concept of the monster queer has evolved from era to era. From the gay and lesbian sensibilities encoded into the form and content of the classical Hollywood horror film, to recent films which play upon AIDS-related fears. Monster in the Closet examines how the horror film started and continues, to demonize (or quite literally "monsterize") queer sexuality, and what the pleasures and "costs" of such representations might be both for individual spectators and culture at large.

Download or read book Color by Fox written by Kristal Brent Zook and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the overwhelming success of "The Cosby Show" in the 1980s, an unprecedented shift took place in television history: white executives turned to black dollars as a way of salvaging network profits lost in the war against video cassettes and cable T.V. Not only were African-American viewers watching disproportionately more network television than the general population but, as Nielsen finally realized, they preferred black shows. As a result, African-American producers, writers, directors, and stars were given an unusual degree of creative control over shows such as "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," "Roc," "Living Single," and "New York Undercover". What emerged were radical representations of African-American memory and experience. Offering a fascinating examination of the explosion of black television programming in the 1980s and 1990s, this book provides, for the first time ever, an interpretation of black TV based in both journalism and critical theory. Locating a persistent black nationalist desire--a yearning for home and community--in the shows produced by and for African-Americans in this period, Kristal Brent Zook shows how the Fox hip-hop sitcom both reinforced and rebelled against earlier black sitcoms from the sixties and seventies. Incorporating interviews with such prominent executives, producers, and stars as Keenen Ivory Wayans, Sinbad, Quincy Jones, Robert Townsend, Charles Dutton, Yvette Lee Bowser, and Ralph Farquhar, this study looks at both production and reception among African-American viewers, providing nuanced readings of the shows themselves as well as the sociopolitical contexts in which they emerged. While black TV during this period may seem trivial or buffoonish to some, Color by Fox reveals its deep-rooted ties to African-American protest literature and autobiography, and a desire for social transformation.

Download or read book Against the Closet written by Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues that from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of transgressive sexuality to express African Americans' longings for individual and collective freedom.

Download or read book Looking Good Every Day written by Nancy Nix-Rice and published by Palmer/Pletsch Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any woman can look and feel lovely, regardless of her age, bank balance, or pant size, and Looking Good . . . Every Day defines a simple yet sophisticated standard for women to determine exactly which clothes and accessories will showcase their unique beauty. The “points of connection” method explains that the more characteristics that exist in common between a woman and her outfit, the more lovely she will look. It shifts emphasis from hiding her perceived figure challenges and focuses on spotlighting her personal assets. By choosing wardrobe additions in this way, everything in her closet will work together. She has more outfits from fewer garments, allowing her to buy higher-quality garments without increasing her budget. Photography of real women—ranging from 22 to 80 years old and from size 4 to 24—illustrates the universal impact “points of connection” make in their appearance.

Download or read book Black Women As Cultural Readers written by Jacqueline Bobo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking study of African-American women's responses to literature and film. . . . Bobo focuses on a small group of middle-class African-American women as they process literature (by Terry McMillan, Alice Walker) that addresses their own experiences. . . . This work should command the attention of all scholars of American popular culture. -- Choice How do black women react as an audience to representations of themselves, and how do their patterns of consumption differ from other groups? Interviews with ordinary black women from many backgrounds uses novels and films to reveal how black female audiences absorb works. -- Midwest Book Review

Download or read book Rolling written by Alfred L. Martin, Jr. and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses. Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture, tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production crew and writers for television comedy. Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse.

Download or read book Resurgent Antisemitism written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dating back millennia, antisemitism has been called "the longest hatred." Thought to be vanquished after the horrors of the Holocaust, in recent decades it has once again become a disturbing presence in many parts of the world. Resurgent Antisemitism presents original research that elucidates the social, intellectual, and ideological roots of the "new" antisemitism and the place it has come to occupy in the public sphere. By exploring the sources, goals, and consequences of today's antisemitism and its relationship to the past, the book contributes to an understanding of this phenomenon that may help diminish its appeal and mitigate its more harmful effects.

Download or read book The Closet written by Danielle Bobker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet—and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. In The Closet, Danielle Bobker presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print. Focused on the connections between status-conscious—and often awkward—interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social and media landscape, The Closet examines dozens of historical and fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies, and the "moving closet" of the coach, among many others. In the process, the book conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court, and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer theory, The Closet discovers uncanny echoes of the eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century coming-out narratives. Featuring more than thirty illustrations, The Closet offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to resonate today.

Download or read book The Hero s Closet written by Gillian Conahan and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosplayers rejoice! The Hero’s Closet is the ultimate DIY guide to creating unique and fantastical homemade costumes This essential handbook offers detailed, step-by-step instructions that cover the basics of sewing costumes (which often require skills not found in standard sewing guides) to help even the most novice sewists create the costumes of their dreams. A skilled crafter and avid cosplayer, Gillian Conahan walks readers through finding inspiration online and through their fandom; shares insight into translating character art into real-world garments; and offers advice on pattern selection, alterations, fabrics, and embellishment techniques. The Hero’s Closet is the first how-to handbook on the art of sewing for cosplay. A must-have guide for Comic Con and Halloween, it’s essential for all ambitious fans with a DIY spirit who love the idea of cosplay, but need the inspiration and technical tips to make an awesome costume.

Download or read book Watching While Black Rebooted written by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences. Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.

Download or read book General John A Rawlins written by Allen J. Ottens and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one succeeds alone, and Ulysses S. Grant was no exception. From the earliest days of the Civil War to the heights of Grant's power in the White House, John A. Rawlins was ever at Grant's side. Yet Rawlins's role in Grant's career is often overlooked, and he barely received mention in Grant's own two-volume Memoirs. General John A. Rawlins: No Ordinary Man by Allen J. Ottens is the first major biography of Rawlins in over a century and traces his rise to assistant adjutant general and ultimately Grant's secretary of war. Ottens presents the portrait of a man who teamed with Grant, who submerged his needs and ambition in the service of Grant, and who at times served as the doubter who questioned whether Grant possessed the background to tackle the great responsibilities of the job. Rawlins played a pivotal role in Grant's relatively small staff, acting as administrator, counselor, and defender of Grant's burgeoning popularity. Rawlins qualifies as a true patriot, a man devoted to the Union and devoted to Grant. His is the story of a man who persevered in wartime and during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction and who, despite a ravaging disease that would cut short his blossoming career, grew to become a proponent of the personal and citizenship rights of those formerly enslaved. General John A. Rawlins will prove to be a fascinating and essential read for all who have an interest in leadership, the Civil War, or Ulysses S. Grant.

Download or read book The Other Side of the Closet written by Amity Buxton and published by Trade Paper Press. This book was released on 1994-06-07 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask for ask desk.

Download or read book Janeites written by Deidre Lynch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, as Jane Austen has moved center-stage in our culture, onto best-seller lists and into movie houses, another figure has slipped into the spotlight alongside her. This is the "Janeite," the zealous reader and fan whose devotion to the novels has been frequently invoked and often derided by the critical establishment. Jane Austen has long been considered part of a great literary tradition, even legitimizing the academic study of novels. However, the Janeite phenomenon has not until now aroused the curiosity of scholars interested in the politics of culture. Rather than lament the fact that Austen today shares the headlines with her readers, the contributors to this collection inquire into why this is the case, ask what Janeites do, and explore the myriad appropriations of Austen--adaptations, reviews, rewritings, and appreciations--that have been produced since her lifetime. The articles move from the nineteenth-century lending library to the modern cineplex and discuss how novelists as diverse as Cooper, Woolf, James, and Kipling have claimed or repudiated their Austenian inheritance. As case studies in reception history, they pose new questions of long-loved novels--as well as new questions about Austen's relation to Englishness, about the boundaries between elite and popular cultures and amateur and professional readerships, and about the cultural work performed by the realist novel and the marriage plot. The contributors are Barbara M. Benedict, Mary A. Favret, Susan Fraiman, William Galperin, Claudia L. Johnson, Deidre Lynch, Mary Ann O'Farrell, Roger Sales, Katie Trumpener, and Clara Tuite.

Download or read book The Comedy Studies Reader written by Nick Marx and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader. This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and original essays that consider a variety of themes and approaches for studying comedic media—the carnivalesque, comedy mechanics and absurdity, psychoanalysis, irony, genre, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nation and globalization. The authors range from iconic theorists, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Linda Hutcheon, to the leading senior and emerging scholars of today. As a whole, the volume traces two parallel trends in the evolution of the field—first, comedy’s development into myriad subgenres, formats, and discourses, a tendency that has led many popular commentators to characterize the present as a “comedy zeitgeist”; and second, comedy studies’ new focus on the ways in which comedy increasingly circulates in “serious” discursive realms, including politics, economics, race, gender, and cultural power.

Download or read book Black Cinema Visual Culture written by Artel Great and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This culturally and politically timely collection examines new Black films and moving images that have, once again, excited and possibly shifted the global media landscape. At a moment some scholars have described as post-post-racial, Black Cinema & Visual Culture provides new, urgent definitions and theories for Black cinema and furthers the development of its critical discourses. Gathering some of the leading scholars and critics in the field, this book enriches and advances the study of Black film and media and its social and political implications at a breakthrough period of expansion in the 21st century. This anthology tackles a wide range of topics from social justice, new media, and Afrofuturism, to race, gender, sexuality, mass incarceration, cultural memory, and Afrosurrealism, exploring the current climate of Black cinematic art that has proven wildly popular with domestic and global audiences, including hit films like Get Out and Marvel’s Black Panther. Together, these essays deepen understandings of Black visual culture, its creative image-makers, the political economy of Hollywood, and the cultural politics at the intersection of modern cinema, streaming platforms, and digital technologies. Black Cinema & Visual Culture will serve as an important learning tool for university courses spanning topics in film studies, American film and television, cultural studies, American studies, African Diaspora studies, media activism, social analysis, and African-American studies. This volume will also provide a benchmark in popular and intellectual circles for anyone interested in popular culture, Black-American cinema, media, issues of race in Hollywood, or Black culture and the conditions that shape both its art and politics.