Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire

by Amy Villarejo

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We live as and through television." Wonderful and subtle - worth reading very carefully. I'm still digesting.

[ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

so expansive I kept losing it a little

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steeped in theory the book is an exploration of queer television. As the author argues "...the book finds a few nodes of interest for election on television's own mode of existence, its way of life (and death). These nodes are located at pivotal moments when the temporality of television change."8 While there are some interesting sections in the book too often the analysis is lost in the use of theory ridden thick text.

"But what of queer time in 1970 or thereabouts? Why is it that by the 1970s, gay men and lesbians had generated a whole new procedure or disclosure and a foundation for "gay liberation" called "coming out". What accounts for a lag of delay of almost one hundred years between Karl Heinrich Ulrich's passionate exhortations to tell queer stories (in the 1960s) and the mid twentieth-century's founding of an inner gay truth to be visibly, publicly, monumentality, melodramatically revealed within a complex social web?" 95

"One queen described his London neighbourhood as "a huge homosexual kingdom just below the surface of ordinary life with its own morals and codes of behaviour.""When I walk through Notting Hill Gate," he gushed, "I feel I'm at a gigantic homosexual party." 131

"As I understand that term, associated with Lisa Duggan's work, the homonormative appears as a neoliberal logic that upholds and sustains normative values while abandoning queer commitments to economic redistribution, social justice, and sexual freedom. At the same time, homonoramativity fragments queer cultures, as Gayle Rubin has argued, by hiearchizing and demonizing some sexual culture and practices while entering and exalting others." 144