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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018
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S(t)imulating history: Queer historical play in Gone Home and The Tearoom
More LessAbstractIn this article, I analyse two recent videogames about queer history, Gone Home (2013) and The Tearoom (2017), to demonstrate the potential of play as a method of queer historical engagement. Responding to recent scholarship on queer history and nostalgia in popular culture, I contend that videogames offer novel ways for interacting with the past that foreground the positive affective dimensions of play (joy, pleasure, camp, humour, etc.) without denying the realities of historical trauma and injury. Queer historical play, I posit, is an alternative method for engaging with the queer past that breaks from the overwhelming emphasis on trauma and the antisocial in queer studies of history and queer studies more broadly.
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‘This Burning Desire is Turning Me to Sin’: The intrapersonal sexual struggles of two Disney singing villains
More LessAbstractUsing a typological approach to villain characteristics and functions, this article examines two Disney singing villains: Gaston (Beauty and the Beast [Trousdale and Wise, 1991]) and Frollo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Trousdale and Wise, 1996]). Both characters face incongruence between private and public identities, hold high social standings in their respective communities and are narcissistic, stopping at nothing to get what they feel is owed to them. Each is framed in a monster/man dichotomy, socially superior, but morally and ethically inferior to the male protagonist of the film. Their songs are used to position them, characterize their inner struggles and provide a gateway into their inner complexities, especially as contrasted to their male protagonist counterparts who sing less than they do.
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‘You’re standing on my neck’: Feminist cynicism and queer anti sociality in MTV’s Daria
More LessAbstract‘Look right through me / Say I’m gloomy / Yea, so sue me [...] I’ve got to be direct / It’s like a big train wreck / You’re standing on my neck / You’re standing on my neck,’ sing post-grunge band Splendora, throughout the opening sequence to MTV’s popular 1990s cartoon series, Daria. Brooding, sarcastic, and surly, Daria Morgendorffer – a teenager and unapologetic misanthrope from the small, fictional town of Lawndale – has much to offer scholars of feminist negativity and queer anti-social theory. Following Lee Edelman’s rejection of a communitarian, heteronormative ‘politics of hope,’ this article seeks to theorize Daria as an important feminist killjoy and queer cynic; one who vehemently disavows the liberal humanist and capitalist-driven narratives of heroism, optimism, femininity and success that so often saturate teenage television programming. Lauding negativity’s ability to ‘poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary thinking’, as Jack Halberstam writes, this article is interested in the kinds of alternative imaginings that are produced by one’s refusal to ‘grow up’ and to ‘fit in’.
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Lesbian chic, femme-ininity and feminist dialogue: Reflecting on The L Word
More LessAbstractShowtime’s The L Word, which aired from 2004–09, attracted a broad audience in part by featuring a caricature of lesbianism that is heteronormatively appealing – femme, white and cosmopolitan. Drawing on queer popular culture and scholarship on The L Word, this article analyses several of the show’s scenes in order to challenge interpretations of the show as geared for the male gaze and of the lesbian chic as un-subversive. Strategic appeal of the lesbian chic ideal seductively brings viewers in, but once there, they encounter moments of feminist dialogue on identity politics, violence against women and representation as well as a queering of dominant representations of femininity.
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Pink dreams, blue world: Power, fantasy and desire in Alain Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose
By Nolan BoydAbstractAlain Berliner’s film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) tells the story of Ludovic Fabre, a young transgender girl living in a suburban community outside of Paris. The film uses Ludovic’s story as a lens through which to examine the social policing of queerness and transgender embodiment. This article joins other previously published work about the film in reading it through a Foucauldian lens in order to examine the extent to which social power structures lend shape to normative understandings of gender identity and expression, but this article’s intervention lies in its combination of this Foucauldian perspective with a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that invokes Lacan’s territory of the real, symbolic and imaginary and the authorization of social ‘law’ within this psychic terrain. I argue that the film’s powerful deployment of desire and fantasy can be analysed within a psychoanalytic framework to delineate the operations of social power and illuminate the extent to which queer gender expression is rendered outlaw and abject within hegemonic normative society.
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Off the clock: Is drag ‘just a job’?
More LessAbstractMany contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professional identity often presented as incompatible trans identity. However, recent events, such as Facebook’s ‘real names’ issue, and trans drag performer Peppermint’s highly publicized tenure on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present), have put tension on this fairly narrow definition of drag. In this article, I use these recent moments of tension between drag and trans identity as a jumping off point to track the history of the definition of drag as ‘just a job’ and scrutinize the simplicity of this statement. Drawing on the work of trans historian Susan Stryker, theatre historian Laurence Senelick and drag ethnographer Esther Newton, among others, I use both recent and historic moments of convergence and overlap between drag and trans communities to problematize the definition of the two identities as mutually exclusive.
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Book reviews
Authors: E. Das Janssen, Michael Anthony DeAnda and Emily WatlingtonAbstractEntering Transmasculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse, Matthew Heinz (2016) Chicago: Intellect, 300 pp., ISBN: 9781783205684, h/bk, $71.66
Queer Game Studies, Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (eds) (2017) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9781517900366, h/bk, $108.00; ISBN: 9781517900373, p/bk, $27.00
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe (eds) (2017) Seattle: University of Washington Press, 296 pp., ISBN: 9780295742007, h/bk, $90.00; ISBN: 9780295741376, p/bk, $40.00
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Media Review
More LessAbstractSense8, created by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski (2015–18, US: Netflix)
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Classic Media Review
More LessAbstractThe Odd Couple, created by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall (1970–75), Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Television
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