Fan-ning the flame: Representations of lesbian romance on cult television, from subtext to main text

While promoting recent seasons of supernatural Western horror series Wynonna Earp (2016), cable channel Syfy released several fan-style videos championing the show’s resident lesbian couple: the protagonist’s sister, Waverly, and police officer Nicole Haught (celebrated via the portmanteau “WayHaught”). In 2019, a network “shipping” its own queer characters in service of fans contrasts starkly with the televisual landscape twenty, or even ten, years prior, when viewers invested in lesbian characters and/or same-sex couples relied on subtext and fan paratexts to fuel their enthusiasm for mostly unacknowledged or thwarted relationships between female characters. In this article, I engage in a two-part interrogation of the representation of lesbian romance on cult television shows in the last twenty-five years, with a focus on Wynonna Earp and its historical antecedents—supernatural, sci-fi, and fantasy shows featuring women and their female companion(s) (whether close friends or lovers). This includes a historiography of the development of lesbian fan communities around certain shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as an analysis of the narrative stakes and character development in both historical and contemporary shows, like Earp, in order to interrogate their representations of subtext or main text romantic pairings

Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community

The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable. “In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/textbooks/1004/thumbnail.jp

“Pynk” Aesthetics, Black Femininity, and Queer Afrofuturism in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer

Singer/actress Janelle Monáe’s first three concept albums—Metropolis (2008), The ArchAndroid (2010), and Electric Lady (2013)—and her most recent “emotion picture”, Dirty Computer (2018), speak cogently to the intersections of Black queer identity, gender performance, and femme aesthetics. What coalesces vividly in Monáe’s oeuvre is her insistence that a refusal to conform to expectations around Black femininity is at the heart of her political viability, powerfully asserted in songs like “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2013), “Pynk” (2018), and “Django Jane” (2018). As such, Monáe and her work foreground disobedience within and against the mainstream as a vital tool of freedom and progress. The visual album Dirty Computer, the release of which coincided with Monáe officially coming out as queer, sheds the emphasis on the cyborg personae from her earlier albums and offers an intimate, non-linear narrative that questions the boundaries between human and machine, reality and fiction, and the present and the future. Via her character Jane—a pansexual, polyamorous, Black femme who navigates the dystopian world of the album—Monáe offers Dirty Computer as a musical reflection on memory, femininity, love, sex, race, difference, and power. My proposed essay refracts femme theory, particularly theories of queer resistance and failure, through an Afrofuturist lens in order to interrogate the digital activism, intersectional representation, and aesthetics of Monáe’s Dirty Computer, alongside some of her earlier narrative music videos. I will also consider how articulations of Black femme identities in popular culture can and do speak to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, queer politics, and feminist activism

Mourning Becomes the Mad Men: Notes on Nostalgia

To say that Mad Men exhibits some ambivalence toward Don Draper as a character anyone might admire or emulate would be an understatement. So, too, the show’s sense of nostalgia evinces a continual tension between longing and disavowal. The series represents its era, setting and cast of characters as simultaneously alluring and repellent. In this essay, I explore two aspects of the show’s nostalgic appeal; in both cases, the pleasures of Mad Men’s nostalgia are such that the show both indulges and repudiates its viewers’ desire(s). First of all, it presents a fiction of the 1960s that renders some of its most abhorrent elements at the very least fascinating, if not downright appealing, from sanctioned workplace misogyny and widespread philandering to rampant smoking, alcoholism and consumerism. Mad Men asks, “Wasn’t it beautiful?” while flaunting the era as past; here fiction and history merge to offer a joint disavowal: you can’t go home again, but would you really want to? Secondly, the show presents us with a prickly protagonist; despite his success, Don does not quite fit in with his coworkers. More overtly charming and confident than his coworkers, he is also the most damaged character and, as a protagonist, does not offer much of a foothold for potential viewer identification. While he is innovative as a creative director, Don’s personal life is stuck in the past. He is constantly bogged down by his troubled upbringing, war-time secrets, and memories of his once-happy marriage. Therefore, he is unable to fully assimilate into the rapidly changing present. Mad Men articulates not only viewers’ potential nostalgia (for being part of an era of hope and radical change), but also Don’s yearning for an identity that has always been a fiction. It is through Don that these desires merge and Mad Men plays out the dangers of living in the past, but it also marks viewers as helpless against its nostalgic appeal

Looking for pleasure : art, spectatorship, and desire in a televisual age

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Visual and Cultural Studies Program, 2010.Looking for Pleasure: Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in a Televisual Age posits that the popularity and pervasiveness of television in the past half-century has significantly influenced the ways in which we approach and interpret all visual objects in Western culture. Three terms form the foundation of this dissertation: the televisual age, the televisual gaze, and televisual pleasure. The televisual age denotes our current society in which television, specifically, and a ubiquitous image culture, in general, have increasingly dominated the popular understanding of how things are represented, how images are processed, how what we see garners its social and cultural meaning, and how spectators can and should relate to a world of visual objects. Stemming from this changing outlook towards visual objects, the televisual gaze signifies a way of looking, seeing, watching, and visualizing that is closely linked to this aforementioned image-saturated cultural context. While this gaze characterizes the proliferation of the image within a vast audience that includes more than just a singular viewer, it also delineates the viewer’s experience of watching and inscribing her desire within, of, and for the visual object. Lastly, televisual pleasure describes the affective and affected relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, marking the tenuous and permeable boundaries between visual productivity, excess, and desire. In Chapters 1 and 2, this project considers the situated experience of viewing art in the space of the museum, from the articulation of the viewer’s body in relation to Minimalist sculpture to the realization of the contemporary sublime in light-works by artists from Dan Flavin to Olafur Eliasson. Chapters 3 and 4 explore two different types of television viewership: on the one hand, the compulsive, erotic gaze of the voyeur vis-à-vis shows such as Sex and the City and The L Word, and, on the other hand, the inquisitive, sometimes violent look of the investigator in crime drams such as CSI and Medium. Ultimately, this project examines both the viewer’s desire—how her individual gaze and subjective experience reflect on the work or show’s ambient community formation—and how we come to understand representations in relation to what they signify, whether nature, truth, justice, or death. By drawing parallels between such ostensibly disparate media as contemporary art and television, this dissertation asserts “televisuality” as a new model for visual experience in the contemporary age. In a society saturated by the ubiquity of television and its visual aftereffects, the faculty of vision has been presumed a primary mode for communication. Images are always coming at us—whether in art museums and galleries, in the space of our own homes, on busy street corners, in storefront windows, and even in elevators. This project explores how visual culture—in particular, televisual culture—has influenced art production and changed, or in some cases failed to change, the act of viewing and the role of the spectator in the contemporary period

Introduction -- Issue 12: The Future of the Archive / The Archive of the Future

Introduction to Issue 12 of Invisible Culture: "The Future of the Archive / The Archive of the Future.

Amplifying Our Voices: Feminist Scholars Writing for the Public

The current moment is a critical time for feminist scholars to engage in the public sphere. Feminist scholars can play a vital role in bringing to light marginalized perspectives and an interdisciplinary, intersectional analysis of current events. This essay focuses on public engagement through writing for the popular press. As feminist scholars, writers, and editors, we employ our work with Ms. magazine as a case study in order to discuss the challenges and rewards of writing for the public. We argue that developing and amplifying one’s public voice through writing for the popular press is an important form of activism for feminist scholars