In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television's lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

Ethereal Queer offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s.

About the Author

Amy Villarejo is Professor of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, also published by Duke University Press, and Film Studies: The Basics; coauthor of the BFI Film Classics volume Queen Christina; and coeditor of Keyframes.

Reviews
"Amy Villarejo, already an important and increasingly influential voice in the fields of film theory, gender, and sexuality, here presents a dramatically new intervention in both television theory and debates over queer representation. Ethereal Queer moves beyond concerns about visibility and positive images to provide valuable ways of understanding the force of television in the twentieth century, bringing media studies and continental philosophy into vibrant and productive dialogue."-Jeffrey Sconce, editor of Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics
"[A]n engaging, brilliant, and meticulous account of queerness, temporality, and television. The book abounds with fundamental insights . . ." -- T. E. Adams * Choice *
"Elegantly written, often witty and even moving, this thought-provoking book is both tightly focused and ambitious in its approach to television and queerness. Amy Villarejo offers brilliant insights into theoretical and televisual texts, repeatedly providing new ways of confronting and moving beyond the intersection of sexuality and television."-Patricia White, Professor of English Literature and Film Studies, Swarthmore College
"[P]arts of Ethereal Queer are excellent-- particularly when it comes to Villarejo's apt dissection of recent Western Media conglomeration and how it has impacted television spectatorship." -- Anna Hamilton * Bitch *
"Whether she's citing Theodor Adorno or Amistead Maupin, pondering Our Miss Brooks or American Family, Amy Villarejo channels her lifelong love of television while at the same time analyzing its function as a 'pragmatic pedagogy of queer life.' I couldn't ask for a better TV Guide than this set of gripping meditations that dares to dream so brilliantly on our behalf."-B. Ruby Rich, author of New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut
"The brilliance of Villarejo's argument is that she shows that prior to the increase of open LGBT characters on television, closeted or one-off queer characters represented an act of survival, representation, and identity that television lacked.... Villarejo's thesis proves worthy of tuning into and remembering for a long time to come." -- John Erickson * Lambda Literary Review *
"A fine exploratory entry into the intersection between television studies and queer theory....Villarejo offers nuanced and sustained meditations on her aptly titled ethereal subject matter....Wholly readable and at times quite enjoyable (Villarejo's own occasional autobiographical notes are well served by her engaging prose), Ethereal Queer emerges as a probing undertaking that sketches out possible methods and approaches to queer representation in that ever-shifting medium of television." -- Manuel Betancourt * Film Quarterly *
"Villarejo explodes the parameters of genre studies, queer historiography, and the identity politics of "representational justice" to put forward a theoretical meditation on temporality, wherein queer identity and televisual presentation inform, indeed constitute, each other but themselves only ever appear as ethereal (4, 5).... Ethereal Queer advances the postidentitarian impulses of these other volumes on intricate intellectual grounds without falling into the "queering" of anything not strictly heteronormative." -- Heather N. Lukes * Women's Studies Quarterly *
"Ethereal Queer's robust philosophical interventions undoubtedly enrich and challenge ongoing discussions in queer and media studies about how television's 'prosthetic lifeworlds' constantly refigure sexuality and gender. Let's not be shy: Villarejo's book is a showstopper." -- Candace Moore * GLQ *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822354956
Author Amy Villarejo
Format Hardback
Page Count 216
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 426g