Download or read book The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom written by Tison Pugh and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.
Download or read book Masculinities in the US Hangout Sitcom written by Greg Wolfman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-25 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinities in the US Hangout Sitcom examines how four sitcoms – Friends, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, and New Girl – mediate the tense relationship between neoliberalism and masculinities. Why is Ross in Friends so worried about everything? This book argues that the men in Friends and similar shows that follow young, straight, mostly white twentysomethings in major US cities are beset by a range of social and economic concerns about their place in society. Using multiple methods of analysis to examine these shows – including conjunctural analysis, historiographical method, and critical discourse analysis – a range of topics in these shows are examined, from sexuality through to homosociality, from race through to nationality. This book makes an insightful contribution to work on the television sitcom and on neoliberalism in culture and society. It will be an ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, post-graduates, and researchers in a range of disciplines including television and screen studies, critical studies on men and masculinities and humor studies.
Download or read book Very Special Episodes written by Jonathan Cohn and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very Special Episodes explores various examples of the "very special episode" to chart the history of American television and its self-identified status as an arbiter of culture. Through the study of this unique television format, this anthology traces the history of television's engagement with many of the most important political, aesthetic, economic, and social movements that continue to challenge our society today.
Download or read book Chaucer s Losers Nintendo s Children and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology written by Tison Pugh and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts--from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Nintendo's Legend of Zelda franchise, from Edward Albee's dramatic masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy novels--Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children's questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive strategies for uncovering the disruptive potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.
Download or read book Good Old Fashioned Values written by Melissa Vosen Callens and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-07-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seth MacFarlane has made an immense mark on popular culture through both his live action and animated television series: Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show, and The Orville. While MacFarlane has garnered a large legion of fans, even those who do not personally watch Family Guy, this longest running series, will be quick to recognize images of Peter and Stewie Griffin: a caricature of the clueless dads from sitcoms of yesteryear and an inexplicably queer-coded evil baby genius, respectively. This book explores Family Guy and Seth MacFarlane's other animated series closely, examining how the series uses satire and other strategies to construct specific ideas related to sex, gender, and family. The authors argue that the series, like many other television series, contribute to our collective understanding of family, and reinforce (at times) unfavorable gender stereotypes.
Download or read book Queer Adaptation written by Pamela Demory and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays illuminates the intersection of queer and adaptation. Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary: to identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else that seems more original, more authentic. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to what is assumed to be “normal” or “straight.” This ground-breaking volume brings together fifteen original essays that critically challenge these assumptions about originality, authenticity, and value. The volume is organized in three parts: The essays in Part I examine what happens when an adaptation queers its source text and explore the role of the author/screenwriter/director in making those choices. The essays in Part II look at what happens when filmmakers push against boundaries of various kinds: time and space, texts and bodies, genres and formats. And the essays in Part III explore adaptations whose source texts cannot be easily pinned down, where there are multiple adaptations, and where the adaptation process itself is queer. The book includes discussion of a wide variety of texts, including opera, classic film, genre fiction, documentary, musicals, literary fiction, low-budget horror, camp classics, and experimental texts, providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad ways in which queer and adaptation overlap.
Download or read book Television and the Genetic Imaginary written by Sofia Bull and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complex ways in which television articulates ideas about DNA in the early 21st century. Considering television’s distinct aesthetic and narrative forms, as well as its specific cultural roles, it identifies TV as a key site for the genetic imaginary. The book addresses the key themes of complexity and kinship, which function as nodes around which older essentialist notions about the human genome clash with newly emergent post-genomic sensibilities. Analysing a wide range of US and UK programmes, from science documentaries, science fiction serials and crime procedurals, to family history programmes, sitcoms and reality shows, Television and the Genetic Imaginary illustrates the extent to which molecular frameworks of understanding now permeate popular culture.
Download or read book Marginalized Women and Work in 20th and 21st Century British and American Literature and Media written by Hediye Özkan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marginalized Women and Work in 20th- and 21st-Century British and American Literature and Media examines the intricate relationship between marginalized women and work through critical essays about representations of women’s work in non-canonical literary writings, mass media, and popular culture. Covering a broad range of texts including Paule Marshall’s fiction, Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, and the Netflix series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker, among others, this collection takes an intersectional approach in order to shed light on the definition and meaning of marginalized women's work and the value of their labor in the capitalistic economic systems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Disrupting Dignity written by Stephen M. Engel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why LGBTQ+ people must resist the seduction of dignity In 2015, when the Supreme Court declared that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the “equal dignity” of marriage recognition, the concept of dignity became a cornerstone for gay rights victories. In Disrupting Dignity, Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle explore the darker side of dignity, tracing its invocation across public health politics, popular culture, and law from the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis to our current moment. With a compassionate eye, Engel and Lyle detail how politicians, policymakers, media leaders, and even some within LGBTQ+ communities have used the concept of dignity to shame and disempower members of those communities. They convincingly show how dignity—and the subsequent chase to be defined by its terms—became a tool of the state and the marketplace thereby limiting its more radical potential. Ultimately, Engel and Lyle challenge our understanding of dignity as an unquestioned good. They expose the constraining work it accomplishes and the exclusionary ideas about respectability that it promotes. To restore a lost past and point to a more inclusive future, they assert the worthiness of queer lives beyond dignity’s limits.
Download or read book The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres written by Traci B. Abbott and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to the increase in transgender characters in scripted television and film in the 2010s, trans visibility has been presented as a relatively new phenomenon that has positively shifted the cis society’s acceptance of the trans community. This book counters this claim to assert that such representations actually present limited and harmful characterizations, as they have for decades. To do so, this book analyzes transgender narratives in scripted visual media from the 1960s to 2010s across a variety of genres, including independent and mainstream films and television dramatic series and sitcoms, judging not the veracity of such representations per se but dissecting their transphobia as a constant despite relevant shifts that have improved their veracity and variety. Already ingrained with their own ideological expectations, genres shift the framing of the trans character, particularly the relevance of their gender difference for cisgender characters and society. The popularity of trans characters within certain genres also provides a historical lineage that is examined against the progression of transgender rights activism and corresponding transphobic falsehoods, concluding that this popular medium continues to offer a limited and narrow conception of gender, the variability of the transgender experience, and the range of transgender identities.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Multilingualism and Language Varieties on Screen written by Irene Ranzato and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book LGBT Inclusion in American Life written by Susan Burgess and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling explanation of the American public’s acceptance of LGBT freedoms through the lens of pop culture How did gay people go from being characterized as dangerous perverts to military heroes and respectable parents? How did the interests of the LGBT movement and the state converge to transform mainstream political and legal norms in these areas? Using civil rights narratives, pop culture, and critical theory, LGBT Inclusion in American Life tells the story of how exclusion was transformed into inclusion in US politics and society, as pop culture changed mainstream Americans thinking about “non-gay” issues, namely privacy, sex and gender norms, and family. Susan Burgess explores films such as Casablanca, various James Bond movies, and Julie and Julia, and television shows such as thirtysomething and The Americans, as well as the Broadway sensation Hamilton, as sources of growing popular support for LGBT rights. By drawing on popular culture as a rich source of public understanding, Burgess explains how the greater public came to accept and even support the three central pillars of LGBT freedoms in the post–World War II era: to have consensual adult sex without fear of criminal penalty, to serve openly in the military, and to marry legally. LGBT Inclusion in American Life argues that pop culture can help us to imagine unknown futures that lead beyond what we currently desire from contemporary politics, and in return asks now that the mainstream public has come to accept LGBT freedoms, where might the popular imagination be headed in the future?
Download or read book The New Witches written by Aaron K.H. Ho and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Charmed ended in 2006, witches were relegated to sidekicks of televisual vampires or children's programs. But during the mid-2010s they began to resurface as leading characters in shows like the immensely popular The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Charmed reboot, Salem, American Horror Story: Coven, and the British program, A Discovery of Witches. No longer sweet, feminine, domestic, and white, these witches are powerful, diverse, and transgressive, representing an intersectional third-wave feminist vision of the witch. Featuring original essays from noted scholars, this is the first critical collection to examine witches on television from the late 2010s. Situated in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, essays examine the reemergence and shifting identities of TV witches through the perspectives of intersectional gender studies, hauntology, politics, morality, monstrosity, violence, queerness, disabilities, rape, ecofeminism, linguistics, family, and digital humanities.
Download or read book All the Rage written by Suzanna Danuta Walters and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Splashed against the tumultuous Clinton years and framed by the clash between gay political might and anti-gay activism, All the Rage presents the first authoritative guide to the new gay visibility. From the public outing of Ellen DeGeneres to the vicious murder of Matthew Shepard, gay lives and images have moved onto the center stage of American public life. Lesbians and gay men are indeed everywhere, from television sitcoms to Budweiser ads, from the White House to the Magic Kingdom. Combining personal stories with incisive analysis, Suzanna Danuta Walters chronicles this historic moment in our culture, arguing that we live in a time when gays are seen, but not necessarily known. Many consider the new gay visibility a sign of social acceptance, while others charge that it is mere window dressing, obscuring the dogged persistence of discrimination. Walters moves beyond these positions and instead argues that these realities coexist: gays are simultaneously depicted as the sign of social decay and the chic flavor of the month. Taking on the common wisdom that visibility means progress, All the Rage maps the terrain on which gays are accepted as witty accessories in movies, gain access to political power, and yet still fall into constrictive stereotypes. Walters warns us with clarity and wit of the pitfalls of equating visibility with full integration into the fabric of American society. From the playful TV fantasies of lesbian weddings on Friends to the very real obstacles confronting gay marriage, from the award-winning comedy Will & Grace to Bible-thumping radio superhost Dr. Laura, All the Rage takes on naive celebrants and jaded naysayers alike. With a sophisticated mix of caution and optimism, it provides an illuminating guide through these exciting, controversial times.
Download or read book Up from Invisibility written by Larry Gross and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling—and perhaps unable—to fully comprehend and honor it? While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore—the first gay bookstore in the country—or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.
Download or read book Comic Drunks Crazy Cults and Lovable Monsters written by David Scott Diffrient and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contradictory to its core, the sitcom—an ostensibly conservative, tranquilizing genre—has a long track record in the United States of tackling controversial subjects with a fearlessness not often found in other types of programming. But the sitcom also conceals as much as it reveals, masking the rationale for socially deviant or deleterious behavior behind figures of ridicule whose motives are rarely disclosed fully over the course of a thirty-minute episode. Examining a broad range of network and cable TV shows across the history of the medium, from classic, working-class comedies such as The Honeymooners, All in the Family, and Roseanne to several contemporary cult series, animated programs, and online hits that have yet to attract much scholarly attention, this book explores the ways in which social imaginaries related to "bad behavior" have been humorously exploited over the years. The repeated appearance of socially wayward figures on the small screen—from raging alcoholics to brainwashed cult members to actual monsters who are merely exaggerated versions of our own inner demons—has the dual effect of reducing complex individuals to recognizable "types" while neutralizing the presumed threats that they pose. Such representations not only provide strangely comforting reminders that "badness" is a cultural construct, but also prompt audiences to reflect on their own unspoken proclivities for antisocial behavior, if only in passing.
Download or read book Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures written by Monica Flegel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.
