Queers in American Popular Culture

Queers in American Popular Culture
Author: Jim Elledge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 990
Release: 2010-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313354588

This three-volume collection of essays reveals the widespread existence of queer men and women in American popular culture, and showcases their important yet little-known role in shaping our society over the last 120 years. The virtually unknown existence of gay, bisexual, and queer men and women in American popular culture from the late 1800s through the present day is a fascinating topic for many readers, regardless of their own orientation. Whether it's the father of bodybuilding, famous closeted entertainers or sports stars, or the leading characters in current television shows and films, queer men and women have changed the face of American popular culture and society for over a century. Ironically, most of the fascinating information, anecdotes, and revealing facts about well-known figures in American culture are virtually unknown to the typical U.S. citizen. Elledge's Queers in American Popular Culture covers a wide variety of historical and current topics that documents how the queer community has been—and continues to be—one of the most significant shapers of American popular culture. Currently, no other book covers queer topics in American popular culture as broadly as this text.

Queers in American Popular Culture

Queers in American Popular Culture
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2010
Genre: Gay people in popular culture
ISBN:

A collection of articles explores the role of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in shaping American popular culture from the late 1800s to the present.

Out in Culture

Out in Culture
Author: Corey K. Creekmur
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 574
Release: 1995
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822315414

Out in Culture charts some of the ways in which lesbians, gays, and queers have understood and negotiated the pleasures and affirmations, as well as the disappointments, of mass culture. The essays collected here, combining critical and theoretical works from a cross-section of academics, journalists, and artists, demonstrate a rich variety of gay and lesbian approaches to film, television, popular music, and fashion. This wide-ranging anthology is the first to juxtapose pioneering work in gay and lesbian media criticism with recent essays in contemporary queer cultural studies. Uniquely accessible, Out in Culture presents such popular writers as B. Ruby Rich, Essex Hemphill, and Michael Musto as well as influential critics such as Richard Dyer, Chris Straayer, and Julia Lesage, on topics ranging from the queer careers of Agnes Moorehead and Pee Wee Herman to the cultural politics of gay drag, lesbian style, the visualization of AIDS, and the black snap! queen experience. Of particular interest are two "dossiers," the first linking essays on the queer content of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and the second on the production and reception of popular music within gay and lesbian communities. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography--the most comprehensive currently available--of sources in gay, lesbian, and queer media criticism. Out in Culture explores the distinctive and original ways in which gays, lesbians, and queers have experienced, appropriated, and resisted the images and artifacts of popular culture. This eclectic anthology will be of interest to a broad audience of general readers and scholars interested in gay and lesbian issues; students of film, media, gender, and cultural studies; and those interested in the emerging field of queer theory. Contributors. Sabrina Barton, Edith Becker, Rhona J. Berenstein, Nayland Blake, Michelle Citron, Danae Clark, Corey K. Creekmur, Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Heather Findlay, Jan Zita Grover, Essex Hemphill, John Hepworth, Jeffrey Hilbert, Lucretia Knapp, Bruce La Bruce, Al LaValley, Julia Lesage, Michael Moon, Michael Musto, B. Ruby Rich, Marlon Riggs, Arlene Stein, Chris Straayer, Anthony Thomas, Mark Thompson, Valerie Traub, Thomas Waugh, Patricia White, Robin Wood

The 2000s Made Me Gay

The 2000s Made Me Gay
Author: Grace Perry
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1250760151

From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman "Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” —Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL "If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book.” —Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell. Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers

Zombies, Migrants, and Queers
Author: Camilla Fojas
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252099443

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.

Icons of American Popular Culture

Icons of American Popular Culture
Author: Robert C. Cottrell
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2009-09-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 076562835X

Traces the evolution of American popular culture over the past two centuries. In a lengthy chronology of landmark events, and ten chapters, each revolving around the lives of two individuals who are in some way emblematic of their times, this provides a window on the social, economic, and political history of US democracy from the antebellum period to the present.

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music
Author: Nadine Hubbs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-03-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520958349

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

American Queer, Now and Then

American Queer, Now and Then
Author: David Shneer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317263820

queer [adj]: 1 differing from what is usual or ordinary; odd; singular; strange 2 slightly ill; 3 mentally unbalanced 4 counterfeit; not genuine 5 homosexual: in general usage, still chiefly a slang term of contempt or derision, but lately used by some as a descriptive term without negative connotations --Webster's Dictionary queer [adj]: used to describe a 1 body of theory 2 field of critical inquiry 3 way of proudly identifying a group of people 4 way of seeing the world 5 sense of difference from the norm -- David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, Queer in America, Now and Then Contrasting queer life today and in years past, this landmark book brings together autobiographies, poetry, film studies, maps, documents, laws, and other texts to explore the meaning and practice of the word queer. By this Shneer and Aviv mean: queer as both a form of social violence and a call to political activism; queer as played by Robin Williams and Sharon Stone and as lived by Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena; queer in the courthouses of Washington D.C. and on the streets of hometown America. Contextualizing these contemporary stories with ones from the past, and understanding them through the analytic tools of feminist social criticism and history, the authors show what it means to be queer in America.

The Queer Art of Failure

The Queer Art of Failure
Author: Jack Halberstam
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011-09-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822350459

DIVProminent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films./div

Relocations

Relocations
Author: Karen Tongson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814769675

What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia's little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as Lesser Los Angeles-a global prototype for sprawl-Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia's nowherespaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.