Full Description
"The Queer Politics of Television" is a radical book, which brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. In one of the first books to do so, Samuel A. Chambers exposes and explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows - including "Six Feet Under", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Desperate Housewives", "The L Word", and "Big Love" - as serious, important texts and reading them in detail through the lens of queer theory. Chambers makes the case for the profound significance of 'the cultural politics of television': the way in which the text of a television show itself engages with the politics of its day. He argues for queer theory's essential contribution to any understanding of the political, and initiates a larger project of queer television studies, treading the same path as queer film studies. This book makes an important and fresh contribution to queer theory and to the understanding of television as politics.
Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Queer Theory and the Cultural Politics of Television
Chapter 1
Telepistemology of the Closet
Chapter 2
The Alterity of the Present
Chapter 3
From Representation to Norms: Reifying Heteronormativity
Chapter 4
Desperately Straight: Subverting Heteronormativity
Chapter 5
The Meaning of 'Family'
Chapter 6
Marriage and The Queer Family
Episode Guide
Works Cited
Index
