Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture - Softcover

Doty, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816622450 ISBN 13: 9780816622450

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1993

Synopsis

As a concept, "queerness" describes a cultural common ground between gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and other non-straights, but it also suggests a diverse and often uncategorizable cultural space that is everywhere in mass culture. Whether recognized or denied, queerness is an approach to mass culture that is shared by people with every kind of sexual self-definition. In "Making Things Perfectly Queer", Alexander Doty argues that films, television, and other forms of mass culture consistently elicit a wide range of queer responses, and suggests a framework for interpreting mass culture that stands as a corrective for many standard cultural approaches. Doty demonstrates how queer readings can be - and are - performed by examining star images like "Jack Benny" and "Pee-wee Herman", women-centered sitcoms like "Laverne and Shirley" and "Designing Women", film directors like George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner, and genres like the musical. In developing these readings, he suggests that queerness, not straightness, just might be the most pervasive sexual dynamic at work in mass culture production and reception.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Doty, who teaches film and gay and lesbian studies at Lehigh University, is concerned in this volume with uncovering gay/lesbian/bisexual elements in unexpected places in popular culture. He wishes "to challenge the politics of denotation and connotation" in traditional "heterocentric" critical practice. Otherwise "heterocentric texts can contain queer elements, and basically heterosexual, straight-identifying people can experience queer moments," he writes, especially if one understands "queer" as encompassing more than just sexual behavior, but, rather, a range of cultural phenomena as well. Doty offers cogent analyses of the interaction between queerness and auteurist film theory, particularly as applied to a gay director like George Cukor or a lesbian filmmaker like Dorothy Arzner; of the lesbian inflections of female-bonding sitcoms like Laverne and Shirley ; and of Pee-wee Herman and gay male misogyny. Doty is an incisive writer, well versed in both pop and academic literature. His work is less jargon-ridden than is usual in critical theory books, and his choices of subject matter should help broaden the audience for this provocative book.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0816622450
• ISBN 13: 9780816622450
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168