Television Studies in Queer Times

Book excerpt: 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.