Review of Fawaz, Queer Forms

Review of Queer Forms, by Rams Fawaz

Queering the Cable Airwaves: The Evolution of LGBTQ2+ Community Television in Ontario, Canada (1977-2001)

Drawing on archival research, oral history interviews, and close reading, this dissertation develops a history of LGBTQ2+ cable access television programming in the province of Ontario, Canada from 1977 to 2001. In particular, this dissertation traces cable access’s entanglements with local LGBTQ2+ groups and movements, as well as with other forms of media dedicated to amplifying LGBTQ2+ causes in the province. I argue that LGBTQ2+ community television programming was guided by what I conceptualize as queer access mobilization, a process through which queer individuals and groups mobilize to increase access to media and information, as well as access to social, cultural, and/or political networks. In other words, I show that local queer groups and individuals took to the platform with hopes of reaching out to wider constituencies, building solidarity with other groups and individuals at a time when the LGBTQ2+ movement was gaining ground in the province and in Canada as a whole, and communicating information that was not readily available via the mainstream media. I further posit that queer access mobilizations are deeply rooted in an ethics of care and a praxis of connection, as I attend to the relational and affective dimensions of cable access programming. This dissertation, therefore, tells both the story of the LGBTQ2+ movement in Ontario through the lens of cable access television, and the story of the medium of cable access television through the eyes of the LGBTQ2+ movement. It proposes an innovative way of doing media history and queer history, while foregrounding the voices of individuals who were often not included in official histories of LGBTQ2+ activism in the province. It also tells the story of LGBTQ2+ cable access archives, how they came to be, how they can be recovered, and how they can be mobilized in the digital age

Alternative News and Views on the Canadian Cable Airwaves: Queer Reimaginings of Television in the 1970s

Around the same time that the feminist and LGBTQ2+ movements were becoming visible in Canada, public access emerged in the early 1970s in the aftermath of social and technological changes and took the form of mandatory commitment on the part of the cable companies to provide equipment, training, and transmission for “citizen-produced programming” (Goldberg 1991, 10). Feminist and queer activists subsequently took to the medium of public access, creating shows which exemplified a type of information and connective activism (McKinney 2020; Renzi 2020) as they “[brought] together people, their visions of justice…and provide[d] access to information” (McKinney 2020, 2). This paper will revisit early queer public access shows which aired in the 1970s in Canada, such Toronto-based show Gay News and Views. Specifically, this paper will argue that public access television in the 1970s was intimately linked to activist circles, who were emboldened by community cable’s potential to solve a variety of social, political, and economic problems (Streeter 1997). Activists were not only committed to amplifying and transmitting visions of feminist, gay, and lesbian liberation on the Canadian airwaves, but also reimagined the medium of television as an “electronic soapbox” which would constitute the “ideal vehicle of communication for a truly pluralistic, participatory society” (Linder 1999, xxvii). While these optimistic views of cable access allowed various groups to have a platform to communicate about political projects in various Canadian provinces, this paper will also interrogate the emancipatory potential of community cable in Canada’s specific media context and analyze the limits which structured the possibility to (re)imagine queer television programs in the country. Works Cited Goldberg, Kim. The Barefoot Channel: Community Television as a Tool for Social Change. New Star Book, 1991. McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Duke UP, 2020. Linder, Laura R. Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Praeger, 1999. Renzi, Alessandra. Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota P, 2020. Streeter, Thomas. “Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Television.” The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, edited by Michael Curtain and Lynn Spigel. Routledge, 1997, pp. 221–243