The Unreality of MTV’s Reality Shows
MTV’s early ’00s reality shows were entertainment for the channel’s younger viewers, but they also provided an “identity workbook” for their audiences.
duke university press
How “Hip Checks” Betray Our Gender-Mediated Gaze
Erica Rand applies the sports method, “hip checks”, to explore race and gender bias in ‘The Small Book of Hip Checks’.
Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (excerpt)
Ikette Claudia Lennear, rumored to be the inspiration for Mick Jagger's "Brown Sugar", often felt disconnect between her identity as an African American woman and her engagement with rock. Enjoy this excerpt of cultural anthropologist Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens, courtesy of Duke University Press.
Jack Halberstam’s ‘Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire’ (excerpt)
Enjoy this excerpt of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, wherein Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the 20th century.
Can Queer Studies Rescue American Universities?
Matt Brim's Poor Queer Studies underscores the impact of poorer disciplines and institutions, which often do more to translate and apply transformative intellectual ideas in the world than do their ivory-tower counterparts.
Television and Women’s History through the Lens of Soap Operas
Media critic Elana Levine's Her Stories explores television history and the conflicts of generation, gender, and race in the heyday of "women's" soap operas.
‘Going Stealth’: Trans Politics and Surveillance Practices
When activists cooperate with a repressive state, who gets left behind?
William E. Connolly on the Indifference of the World to Human Endeavor
In Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth, political theorist William E. Connolly explores how our assumption that the world is made for us has led us into a dangerous complacency.
Robert Christgau, Collected: ‘Book Reports’
The columns, reviews, and essays covering the intersections of musical narratives, sociology, history, and economics in Book Reports, from the Dean of American Rock Critics, is much more than just the man on the tunes.
Quinlan Miller’s ‘Camp TV’ Could Use Some Levity
Under the aegis of fluidity, Quinlan Miller advances a trans-conscious viewpoint in Camp TV that happily takes a pick-ax to more basic gender studies approaches to pop media.
Sarah Banet-Weiser Takes on Institutionalized Misogyny in ‘Empowered’
Empowered centralizes popular feminism's ability to expose an injurious site where dominant masculinity is fallible.
‘Bright Signals’ Is a Rich Cultural and Social History of a Taken-for-granted Medium
In the development of television, "color wars" are analogous to the adoption of VHS over BetaMax and Blu-ray over HD-DVD technologies. Murray's study shows how the adoption of standards in media technology directly impact audiences to this day.