Queer Media Studies

Abstract

I just wrote a book on queer media studies, but I never fully understood how I got started on it until I sat down to write this piece.1 In retrospect, I see the questions that started it off and the research that provided me with jumping-off points more clearly. The scholars whose work I sought to model were located in feminist media studies. My book is a good example of how queer media scholarship is informed and contoured by work in feminist media studies insofar as it relies on the conceptual logics and unconventional archives that characterize that body of work. What follows is a story in reverse. I chart how my own research in queer media studies owes a tremendous debt to feminist media studies, working backward to identify overlaps and tensions between the two. From there, I underscore why the gaps and overlaps between queer and feminist media studies are so useful for rigorous analysis of sex, gender, sexuality, and media culture. In my book, I parse out the feelings of freedom, belonging, and transcendence that contemporary cinema, television, and online media make available to audiences comprised of sexual minorities. The book is heavily informed by Lauren Berlant's work on twentieth-century women's culture in The Female Complaint (2008).2 I am most moved …