Big Love Research Articles

PENDUSTAAN MANUSIA TERHADAP ALLAH

Human’s lying and insulting to God is inappropriate because human lives at God’s mercy. God is the most perfect being in which He is the only being (one), does not need any other existence and has dominion over All things. The Qur’an and hadith carry various news in which it tells about the greatness of Allah and his power that sometimes still doubted by some people such as people who doubt life after death even though before creation, the condition of man who was still in the form of origin (land) was a form of the first death of human. Among the main points in this article is talk about faith and monotheism, where the statement that Allah has broken His promises is a lie and the accusation that he took a son is an insult. With the Qur’an and hadith as the foundation for breaking every accusation that is thrown to Allah, it is impossible to think that it can be in God’s substance, and when someone can understand it as well, it can have a big impact on their faith and deliver a big love to their only one God. This research was conducted using the qualitative method, which entailed gathering data from various sources, connecting the data, and then using the data as a foundation to deny all lying and amplifying that thrown to Allah and as a foundation that Allah was the truth, and and only God all of time.

Review: New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy: Polyamory, Polygamy, and Reality Television, by Michelle Mueller

This unique volume investigates the points of connection between a selection of contemporary consensual non-monogamous religious groups and their portrayal in reality TV shows set on American soil. These programs offer insights into the beliefs and practices of these alternative communities by portraying some of their member families—such as the Browns in Sister Wives, the Snowdens in Seeking Sister Wife, the Mooneys in Newlyweds, and the Williamses in My Five Wives. The investigation includes certain polygamous fundamentalist Mormon communities and representations of New Age, Neopagan, and Neo-Tantric polyamorist groups, including members of the LGBTQ community.The book begins with the introduction of the religious groups and TV programs under examination as well as definitions of key terms employed, such as swinging and poly-affectivity, as part of a broader discussion of current non-monogamous familial relations and practices. Michelle Mueller’s interdisciplinary approach draws from various fields of the social sciences and allows her to take advantage of a variety of methods in her research, including participant observation, case study, and interview. She also lends a personal touch to the book by allowing some of her own memories to round out her observations.The bulk of the volume focuses on fundamentalist Mormon polygamist communities in Utah, such as the Kingstons, the Peterson group and the Allred group, whose “interdenominational” relations are also surveyed. Mueller reflects on their portrayals in the new media as well as on their reception among members and nonmembers, which is a valuable aspect of her research. She finds that these media representations contributed significantly to a broader social recognition of these groups, a shift in public opinion that she explains by the liberal-minded media and by the specific nature of the genre of the reality show. In addition to religion, gender, and sexuality, however, she also considers the social positionings that are essential to these representations, such as race, class, and political standing, following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional model. In the process, Mueller draws on further theorists. For example, she employs Nathan Rambukkana’s model for investigating the intersection of race (Whiteness) and class (the middle class) in Big Love, but also surveys lifestyle changes and the economic standing among Mormon polygamous families based on Christian Klesse’s study of poly-economics in polyamorous families. She finds that the conscious progressive image of fundamentalists in these reality shows as regular White middle-class Christians contributes significantly to their increasing recognition in U.S. society as demonstrated by TLC’s Sister Wives, for example, which ran for a record 18 seasons despite its modest reception as signaled by its relatively low IMDb rating.Mueller also takes a careful look at the theology and spirituality of the groups portrayed and the specific ways in which their non-monogamous practices derive from their belief systems and the values these carry for them. In this respect, she separates the polygamous Mormons—who find comfort in biblical polygamy and, except for the patriarch, tend to engage in a traditional, heteronormative, monogamous lifestyle—from the non-Christian polyamorous groups, some of which completely depart from monogamy and welcome members with non-conforming gender identities and/or sexualities. In her understanding, based on Gayle Rubin’s formulation of sex hierarchy, these non-Western alternative religious practitioners are located on the margins or outer limits of society and take the opportunity provided by their rather liberal media representations to challenge and subvert the normative Christian monogamous family model and sexual practices and thus to claim space for themselves away from the periphery. In addition to sexuality, the other field of uneven power relations Mueller integrates into her analysis regards the position of women: Is their engagement in practices of polyamory or polygamy empowering? What challenges do they face in these familial settings? What strategies can they employ in their negotiations of power? How can feminist readings do justice to their specific life circumstances?Based on research Mueller conducted for over a decade, this is a book grounded in theory and empirical evidence. Perhaps wishing to include too much at times, this volume is still an exciting contribution to the study of contemporary American media and the representation and position of alternative faiths and lifestyles on American soil.

LuLaRich

LuLaRich

Playing (the Casino) Indian: Native American Roles in Peak TV

The current television era, sometimes called “Peak TV,” was ushered in with serious creatordriven shows of the late 1990s. The increasingly frequent Indian character type of the manipulative, money-hungry, and usually criminal casino “chief”/CEO simultaneously offers dramatically significant guest-star roles for Native actors and reflects a neoliberal version of the Noble Savage fit for twenty-first century audiences. This article analyzes examples of the “casino Indian: characterization found in the award-winning television dramas The Sopranos, Big Love, The Killing and House of Cards. Adapting the figure of the imagined “Indian” to suit the anxieties of our political and economic moment, each of these critically acclaimed shows have created an image of “Indianness” in relation to “casinos” and thereby have added the casino Indian trope to the long-established line of “Indian” characters crafted by non-Native “experts,” writers, and artists of the stage and screen.

The Story of Jewish Polygamy

Abstract This Article examines intersection of law, religion, and culture in evolution of polygamy in Jewish tradition. It traces development of Jewish thought on polygamy over time by assembling and analyzing relevant discussions, arguments, decisions, and biblical interpretations from time of Hebrew Bible passages, when plural marriage was an accepted part of Jewish society, to early Middle Ages when practice was formally and conclusively rejected. In doing so, Article attempts to untangle various influences--both practical and doctrinal, internal and external--on evolution of marriage law in Jewish communities. These findings highlight mutable nature of marriage norms within a religious community, adaptability of religious doctrine to practical needs of community, and potentially progressive force of religious morality in advancing women's rights. INTRODUCTION: POLYGAMY AND RELIGION IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE Judaism's relationship with polygamy has always been fraught with tension and perhaps can best be summed up by fact that word for co-wife in Hebrew is tzarah, literally trouble. As many know, practice of polygamy was once considered part and parcel of Jewish culture, at least in theory, but nowadays that is no longer case. The story of Jewish polygamy has no clear-cut ending; there was no one defining moment or document that shifted Jewish societies in Western Europe away from polygamy and into monogamy. But over time, these norms did shift for reasons we examine in this Article. For past several years, issue of marriage and of marital forms in particular has been a prominent feature on both national (1) and international stage. (2) Efforts to lift prohibitions on same-sex marriage in this country and abroad have inspired people on all sides of political spectrum to speak about virtues of monogamy's core institution and to express views on who should be included within it. (3) While public discourse over marriage in United States and around world has focused primarily on gay marriage, issue of legalizing plural marriage has been gaining considerable attention in recent years. (4) In United States, TV shows such as TLC's Sister Wives, HBO's Big Love and Showtime's Polyamory: Married and Dating have brought concept of plural marriage into nation's collective living room. Polyamory, practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with knowledge and consent of everyone involved, has even been called the next civil rights movement. (5) The discussion of polygamy presents valuable angles for reconsidering contemporary marriage debate. First, plural marriage raises novel questions beyond those presented by gay marriage because it turns not on idea of who can be in a marriage, but rather on very institution of marriage itself as consisting of a two-and-only-two part unit. Second, plural marriage, unlike gay marriage, represents an alternative bundling of marital principles that may be described as traditional within a broad range of cultures and religious communities. (6) In this context, an examination of what a religious tradition has had to say about marriage over time can inform our understanding of what religion is capable of saying about topic today. This Article will focus on history of polygamy in Jewish tradition and will examine why, after millennia of experimentation, a religion walked away from a practice it had once legitimized. We will follow this history through various streams of Jewish law and tradition, and watch as debate slowly shifts from a question of legality to morality, from could to should. We will focus on three historical realities over time that make sense of this evolution: First, all of Jewish law is, at its core, an act of holding multiple values in a dialectic tension. …

Modern Polonya romanında yabancı(laşmış) bir kadın

Maria Kuncewiczowa has gained an important place among modern Polish literature novelists with her psychological novel entitled Cudzoziemka (The Stranger Woman). The novel, which based on the theme of alienation, one of the popular concepts of the twentieth century, reects the psychological changes, caused by the experience of the focus gure, Roza Żabczynska. Roza Żabczynska is an unhappy woman who feels strange even beside her family, can not reconile with today and therefore always runs away to past. Her big love whom she left behind, incompleted music career and unfullled dreams capture her in a great sense of strangeness which starts from Russia and extends to Poland. In her work which is an example of psychological novel, the author frequently uses the technique of stream of consciousness and internal monologues. While creating a bi-directional time stream to go away from the chronological time sequence, at the same time she gets the reader follow the events through the mind of the focus gure. She expands her psychological work with the perspectives of Roza's lineage, social position, traditions and customs. By this way, she discusses the focus gure at many levels and in a three-dimensional reality. In this study, the focus gure of the novel entitled The Stranger Woman will be analyzed on the axis of estrangement concept.

Bigger Love

To a greater extent than any short-form medium, serialized narratives create real-life and often shared experiences of inhabiting worlds whose long-evolving plotlines and unwieldy meanings defy our cravings for knowledge and plenitude. Comparative study of mid-Victorian-era and turn-of-the-millennium serial cultures can show how these narratives negotiate the transitions between productive and financial economies which recur within "long centuries" that otherwise differ. The "Bigger Love" described in this essay is a serialized structure and structure of feeling born of "quality" modes of production and reception during two "golden ages"—both of which coincided with periods of advancing capitalist financialization. Delineating and comparing two such periods—"the long 1860s" and "the long 2000s"—this essay explores three axes of enlargement: from the Bigger Methods of the Annales School to the Bigger Stories and Bigger Houses at work in Anthony Trollope's serialized Barsetshire novels and millennial television series such as Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer's HBO show Big Love.

Dulce María Loynaz: un libro, un viaje y un gran amor. Notas y enigmas para un estudio de «Jardín»

La publicación en el año 2013 de la novela italiana Ella non risponse, de Matilde Serao, traducida al español por la escritora Dulce María Loynaz, y el estudio introductorio que hace la investigadora cubana Zaida Capote para tal volumen constituyen los ejes que motivan el presente ensayo. El propósito principal de este gira en torno a la traducción de Dulce María Loynaz: las posibles motivaciones que determinaron la elección de la obra a traducir, particularidades estilísticas presentes en el ejercicio de traducción y valoraciones sobre la «influencia» de la novela italiana en Jardín, de la poeta cubana. Con la presentación de este interesante caso entre escritoras se busca, además, abrir una discusión sobre algunas nociones relativas a la traducción y a las influencias literarias.

Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and TelevisionDavid R.Coon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television David R. Coon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.In Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television, David R. Coon, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Washington Tacoma, offers insight regarding presentations of suburbia in recent popular media and the ways in which they reflect American values revolving around issues of gender, family, marriage, race, and privacy. Thematically organized, Look Closer begins with a comparison of American Beauty and Desperate Housewives to exemplify a trend in recent film and television, to create a dichotomy between images of generic suburban subdivisions and narratives that expose dark realities of lives lived in these spaces. Coon sets these images against those of the 1950s and 1960s, proposing that recent narratives subvert the meaning of earlier, utopian spaces to emphasize complexities of life in the suburbs.Look Closer focuses on themes central to suburban identity: tradition, family, community and gender roles. It also considers the precarious character of the suburban middle-class in the early twenty-first century and the difficulty many encounter in maintaining the American Dream. Each chapter utilizes case studies to elucidate a particular theme and suggests how content in film and media relates to issues in the nation at large.Utilizing Pleasantville and The Truman Show, Coon proposes that film uses the intertextuality of suburbia to establish meaning and examines the realities of suburban life relative to idealized rhetoric of other nostalgia-driven narratives. A great deal of this chapter focuses on advertising literature rather than on film and television, which he contrasts with the narratives of Hollywood film to point out that nostalgia-based suburban communities are not feasible realities.American Beauty and Big Love highlight tensions between public and private and how boundaries are negotiated in suburban settings. Coon proposes that discourses of privacy promote conservative values, marginalizing those that do not fit mainstream social norms. His insightful statement that the eyes of neighbors become the metaphorical eyes of a conservative society highlights and substantiates the conventional values that suburbia symbolizes. This section is a nuanced consideration of the negotiation of boundaries (individual, familial, and communal), the existence of hierarchies of privacy, and the ways in which privacy is granted to or withheld from particular segments of the population.Consideration of Far From Heaven and Desperate Housewives clarifies ways in which exclusion and inclusion, based on race and sexual orientation, are negotiated and a facade of homogeneity is maintained within suburban narratives. …

Remarkable lives: Clare Campbell in conversation with Jerome Carson

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Clare Campbell. Design/methodology/approach – Clare provides a short autobiographical account of her life. Clare is then interviewed by Jerome and describes the life enhancing impact of creativity in her own life. Findings – Clare describes her work initially with Wild Woman workshops and then Big Love Sista. Research limitations/implications – Big Love Sista started when some 40 women all came and painted self-portraits in Clare’s house, which led to an exhibition of 100 life sized portraits on women in recovery from difficult life events. Practical implications – Apart from the healing power of Art, Clare’s work shows the power of bringing leaders together with disadvantaged groups, using the medium of the circle to provide unique experiential change. Social implications – Community leaders have access to lots of resources and opportunities. In coming together with disadvantaged groups, they can serve as role models, but equally they can be inspired by those they encounter in the medium of the circle. Originality/value – Clare and those colleagues she has worked with over the years has shown the power of community and the transformative effects of groupwork. Few individuals can have had such a dramatic effect on so many people.

A stunning plurality: Unravelling hetero- and mononormativities through HBO’s Big Love

Sexism, heteronormativity and mononormativity are constitutively entangled, but to what extent does undoing one undo the others? Through a reading of HBO’s Big Love, a television series about a polygamous family that is conservative in every way except their plural marriage, this article argues that there are ways in which intimacy might be politically transgressive even as it reinforces gender and sexual norms. Expanding on the definition of ‘mononormativity’ through analogy to Berlant and Warner’s (1998) ‘heteronormativity’ it is argued that in order to do justice to the complexity of intimate politics we must attend to relational norms and their transgression.

Fat and Thin Sex: Fetishised Normal and Normalised Fetish

Fat and Thin Sex: Fetishised Normal and Normalised Fetish

The memory of a friend: Lorenzo Capussotti (1947-2014).

I will never forget the morning of Wednesday 18th of June when I received news of the death of Renzo. I remember those moments, at first of disbelief and pain and then a huge sense of emptiness: how will I cope without my friend and our interminable chats? In fact Renzo had a quality that characterized him above all else, and that was to listen: he loved the art of conversation and he loved talking about everything because he was an enthusiast and a curious man. His favorite topic of conversation was surgery, which, after Livia, Alessandro, and Umberto was his big love. After a life lived in the operating room, he was still able to get passionate about technical aspects of a particular operation or to sustain hours of discussion about a complication during surgery. It was his curiosity together with his generosity that made him available to all colleagues that needed his advice. He was always ready to listen and share his knowledge and he always did it with respect. He loved debates of clinical cases because he understood how important it was to know the patient well. He loved debates at congresses if these were based on clinical experience and on scientific data. He would become strict and could lose his temper with ‘‘amateurs’’ especially if presumptuous. He considered hepatic surgery something too serious, to witness stupidities in silence. But he also had no hesitation to intervene even with famous colleagues, Italian or foreign, especially if he saw the mistreatment of someone younger. Sometimes I would insist he ignored the issue, but in the end, I admired him for his character. Surgery completely absorbed him and he dedicated the small amount of remaining time to Livia, his life companion, discreet and always close, and to Alessandro and Umberto for whom he felt a huge sense of tenderness and love that he could not hide, and they were always at the center of his thoughts. His collaborators were like a second family to him, not only his alumni that he always protected, but also all the people who worked with him and he knew how to involve and make them feel important in their roles. In more recent times, they represented one of his major thoughts. We loved each other and were rarely in disaccord. When this happened, I would always say that perhaps we were good friends only because more than 600 km were separating us. He would remind me that it was thanks to him that I had become a Hepatobiliary surgeon which was true. I met Renzo in 1974 in Turin while I was doing my specialization in thoracic surgery; he was already a chatterbox, he listened, he was curious and through these many encounters we shared the common passion for G. Nuzzo (&) A. Gemelli Hospital, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart School of Medicine, Rome, Italy e-mail: gennaro.nuzzo@rm.unicatt.it; gennanuzzo@gmail.com

Home sweat home: perspectives on housework and modern relationships

Dedication Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: Hung Out to Dry: Laundry Advertising and the American Woman, 1890-1920 by Kristi Branham Chapter 2: Snapshot Photography, Women's Domestic Work and the Kodak Moment 1910s-60s by Nicola Goc Chapter 3: From Chimney Sweeps to House Elves: Housework, Subject Formation, Agency, and British Children's Fantasy Literature 1863-2007 by Hannah Swamidoss Chapter 4: Appliance Reliance: Domestic Technologies and the Depersonalization of Housework in Postwar American Speculative Fiction by Andrea Krafft Chapter 5: Making Easier the Lives of our Housewives: Visions of Domestic Technology in the Kitchen Debate by Nicole Williams Barnes Chapter 6: Supernatural Housework: Magic and Domesticity in 1960s Television by Kristi Rowan Humphreys Chapter 7: Every Day Should Be Like Sunny Weather: Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon Channel Carol Channing to Resolve the Politics of Housework for a New Generation of Parents by Mimi Choi Chapter 8: Spaces of Masculinity and Work: Bringing Men Back into the Domestic Sphere by Elizabeth Patton Chapter 9: Kauering Home in Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet by Gust A. Yep and Ryan Lescure Chapter 10: Good Luck Raising the Modern Family: Analyzing Portrayals of Sexual Division of Labor and Socioeconomic Class on Family Sitcoms by Nancy E. Bressler Chapter 11: No Longer Whistling While You Work? Reanimating the Cult of Domesticity in The Incredibles by Christopher Holliday Chapter 12: I Couldn't Do It without Her: Big Love, Sister Wives, and Housework by Rita M. Jones Suggested Reading About the Contributors

“Proud Mormon Polygamist”: Assimilation, Popular Memory, and the Mormon Churches inBig Love

Abstract:This article explores the tensions between the official Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as popular memory of these subcultures are created through a variety of media representations, including fictional programming like Big Love, media branding campaigns from both secular and religious groups, and reality programming such as Sister Wives and Polygamy USA. Using Hebdige’s concepts of hegemony, subculture, and assimilation, as well as Spivak’s subaltern, this paper analyzes the ongoing discourse of assimilation and rejection of the Mormon Church in American society though the representations of these groups in popular media.

Playmates and Polygamists

This paper explores the feminine reclamation of polygamy seen in female-oriented American television shows Big Love, The Girls Next Door, and Sister Wives in terms of their commentary on contemporary gender roles in neoliberal society. Reception discourses suggest these programs respond to feminine frustrations with the burdens of work and domesticity and the isolation associated with hyper-individualist late capitalist society. Using textual strategies associated with feminine media forms and contemporary feminine culture, such as the investment in the female group, the female gaze at the female body, and the reclamation of feminine history, these shows demonstrate femininity's capacity to critique as well as support mainstream society. Still, femininity's tendency to merge escapism and cultural critique, seen in all three shows, points to the difficulty of considering it progressive or regressive, instead suggesting that it should be considered as a different conceptual and social space, as a varied set of structures, practices, reading protocols, and an ethics of self that patriarchal cultures cannot easily co-opt.

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal by J. Jack Halberstam (review)

Reviewed by: Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal by J. Jack Halberstam Avery Brooks Tompkins Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. By J. Jack Halberstam. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012; pp. xxv + 157, $26.95 cloth. Recently, I asked students in a gender studies class what they thought about feminism. Blank stares. “Okay, you’re all staring at me and this is awkward. You read some texts for today about feminism, what did you think?” I asked, trying to break the silence. Slowly, the discussion that ensued revealed a contradictory complexity: They felt that earlier forms of feminism are not relevant to their current struggles and that they do not embody the stereotypes associated with being feminists; that said, they recognized that they still need feminism. J. Jack Halberstam’s new book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, discusses these complexities in ways that make sense for younger generations of feminists (and soon-to-be feminists) who are attuned to the messy intersections of gender and sexuality with race, class, and nationality in everyday life. Overall, Gaga Feminism is an accessible guide to new feminisms for anyone who might be skeptical, and an engaging read for those who are already on board. Halberstam begins with a lengthy introduction that explains the figure of Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new feminism, arguing that Gaga’s monstrosity lends itself to a new politics of gender and sexuality that push feminism in queer directions. The queer sentiments within Gaga feminism are highlighted when Halberstam purports, “This punk or wild feminism hints at a future rather than prescribing one; it opens out onto possibilities rather than naming them; it gestures toward new forms of revolt rather than patenting them” (xiii). Further, Halberstam sets up Gaga as a performative practice of feminism that works to redefine and rework more traditional notions of gender equality. The rest of the book is divided into several short chapters that touch on key themes: queering notions of gender and sexuality, challenging marriage and traditional kinship structures, and a recognition that Gaga feminism already exists in various forms of popular culture and everyday life. For those who are familiar with Halberstam’s earlier works, In a Queer Time and Place and The Queer Art of Failure, Gaga Feminism will echo many of the sentiments in those [End Page 224] texts, albeit in a much less theoretical manner. For this reason, Gaga Feminism would be an excellent introduction to some of Halberstam’s ideas and arguments, particularly for undergraduate students who could potentially find some of the earlier texts more difficult. That said, Gaga Feminism is by no means simplistic or redundant. Most of the text focuses on rethinking gender, sexuality, kinship, and family through a Gaga feminist lens. In the middle sections of the book, Halberstam begins by discussing a new politics of reproduction through the popular media coverage of Thomas Beatie (beginning in 2008), who was described in the media as being the first transgender man to become pregnant while also being legally recognized as male on identification documents. Halberstam then moves to more in-depth discussions about heteronormativity, heteroflexibility, and queering the gay marriage debate by referencing a variety of popular media, including the film The Switch, which illustrates issues within family and heteronormative romance structures, such as supposedly deep connections between people solely due to blood relation and continuing relationships where there is no chemistry between the individuals involved. Halberstam uses Big Love, The Golden Girls, and Desperate Housewives to argue that although these shows present the viewer with complex and anti-normative notions of kinship and family, “lesbianism is the love that dare not speak its name” (53). That said, not all of Halberstam’s arguments refer to or are made through forms of popular culture. Halberstam also outlines the complexities of the globalization of “gay” and the failure of metronormative gay politics in the United States to translate to a global context. Further, Halberstam utilizes earlier arguments from The Queer Art of Failure to suggest that Gaga feminism encourages us to move queer theoretical applications outside the academy and into the everyday. Overall, Gaga Feminism...

When You Walk Through the Garden: HBO and the Cross Pressures of Post-Secular Humanism

Arguing that HBO has been a key player in the creation of a post-secular aesthetic, this article claims that the central figure of this aesthetic is an exaggerated human who is caught between the "cross pressures" of atheism and theism, depravity and purity, violence and transcendent peace, and homosexuality and religiosity. Through a consideration of The Sopranos, Entourage, True Blood, Rome , and Big Love , I contend that HBO has been at liberty to advance fresh representations of religion and spirituality due to its alternative economic model. Because religion is an advertising taboo, the typical figure of humanity represented on network TV is a thin veneer compared to the complex figures that HBO has mobilized.

Love between Sisters: Queering Polygamy in Big Love

Love between Sisters: Queering Polygamy in <i>Big Love</i>

The queer politics of television

The Queer Politics of Television is a radical book, which brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. In one of the first books to do so, Samuel A. Chambers exposes and explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows - including Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, The L Word, and Big Love - as serious, important texts and reading them in detail through the lens of queer theory. Chambers makes the case for the profound significance of 'the cultural politics of television': the way in which the text of a television show itself engages with the politics of its day. He argues for queer theory's essential contribution to any understanding of the political, and initiates a larger project of queer television studies, treading the same path as queer film studies. This book makes an important and fresh contribution to queer theory and to the understanding of television as politics.