Sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are widely considered conformist in their depictions of gender roles and sexual attitudes. In Camp TV Quinlan Miller offers a new account of the history of American television that explains what campy meant in practical sitcom terms in shows as iconic as The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as in more obscure fare, such as The Ugliest Girl in Town. Situating his analysis within the era's shifts in the television industry and the coalescence of straightness and whiteness that came with the decline of vaudevillian camp, Miller shows how the sitcoms of this era overflowed with important queer representation and gender nonconformity. Whether through regular supporting performances (Ann B. Davis's Schultzy in The Bob Cummings Show), guest appearances by Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, or scripted dialogue and situations, industry processes of casting and production routinely esteemed a camp aesthetic that renders all gender expression queer. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations.

About the Author
Quinlan Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Reviews
"Camp TV offers us theoretical and methodological challenges to presumptions and argumentations common in queer media histories...hence the usefulness here of a new terminology entirely. What the book also offers, however, is an impressive model of full-scale approach to queer media histories." -- Taylor Cole Miller * New Review of Film and Television Studies *

"A revelatory historical reassessment of US network sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s.... Miller combines scholarly rigor with the engaged, politicized vivacity of a subversive connoisseur and the banter of a raconteur in order to rewrite dominant histories of the sitcom, camp, and LGBTQIA+ media representation.... A tour de force abounding with compelling and witty textual analyses fueled by painstaking archival research."

-- Ken Feil * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *
"A detailed picture of the production and cultural contexts of queer gender appearance in sitcoms, ranging from non-conforming dress and gestures to critiques of heterosexual marriage." -- Katharine Mussellam * Jump Cut *
"[Camp TV] is impressive and provides a necessary re-reading of neglected and devalued texts that cast our present studies of contemporary queerness into provocative question. . . . This book will be a valuable contribution to courses in television history, queer studies and, especially, studies of the queer in popular culture, and will be an antidote to institutional narratives that have solidified unproductively around the 'newness' of queer TV." -- Judith Fathallah * Critical Studies in Television *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478003038
Author Quinlan Miller
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g