Television Studies in Queer Times

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.

Part I: Historicity: Placing Television Programming and Practices in Historical Context
1: "Queer Power: Multicultural Empowerment Narratives on 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
Part II: Temporal Play: Queer Histories and Possibilities
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 Time Travel," Michael DeAngelis
Part III: Ideological Limitations: The Boundaries of What's Possible
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
Part IV: Industrial Contextualization: Studying Production Processes
13: "Televising Lesbian Feminist Love-Politics on Dyke TV," Lauren Herold
14: "Producing Inclusion and Intersectionality: Queer Showrunners of Color in Contemporary Television," Sarah E. S. 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 J. Day