{"title":"Affective production value on queer community television: a case study of the Gay Cable Network and Gay USA","authors":"L. Herold","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2196782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2196782","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article assesses the significance of the Gay Cable Network (GCN), a production company that aired a dozen shows on public access cable television made by and for LGBTQ New Yorkers. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with producers, hosts, and assistants at GCN, I argue that LGBTQ producers experience both transformational opportunities for political engagement as well as precarity, frustration, and loss through public access cable television production. I evaluate the social experience of television production to analyze what I am calling affective production value: a metric that establishes how community media production generates a range of powerful emotional experiences for its producers. I examine the daily experience of queer television production through GCN founder Lou Maletta’s tireless efforts to produce and distribute LGBTQ programming for more than twenty years as well as the continuing efforts of his contemporaries on Gay USA, an LGBTQ news program that still airs weekly. Examining cable access shows in terms of affective production value allows scholars to decenter normative standards of production quality in order to understand how local production generates meaning for its producers, offering us the opportunity to explore the personal and cultural impact of community television production.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"292 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45182617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“It’s not really a cat”: art, media, and queer wildness in Cat People (1942, 1982)","authors":"Alex Zivkovic","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2196221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2196221","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). I reorient the scholarship of these films towards issues raised by animal studies: asking what the films’ investigations into animal representations might offer for understanding depictions of women, monsters, and interspecies intimacy across different media. I argue that the two horror films repeatedly expose the inability of static representations like statues, paintings, or photographs to fully ‘capture’ animals or animality. Instead, animal affects are conveyed through shadows, montage, sexual activity, and corporeal violence. Since the cat women protagonists turn into panthers when they feel strong emotions or have sex, this concern with representing animality is intimately tied with representing sexuality. By intertwining these issues, the films suggest that queer wildness is a characteristic that transcends animals, people, and even bodies. In particular, the 1982 film embraces the posthumanist implications of this wildness by concluding with a scene of interspecies intimacy that evokes calls for queer ecological entanglements beyond visual mediation.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"236 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49367030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The category is: streaming queer television","authors":"Zoë Shacklock","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2202597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2202597","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Streaming television is often seen as a progressive space for queer representation, due to the wealth of queer people and stories found across its programmes. Yet for queer people to be seen on streaming television, they must first be made visible at the level of the interface, which determines which programmes are presented to users and in what ways. Through the organisation of the interface, streaming television acts as a discursive formation that creates knowledge about what it means to be queer. Borrowing from both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lynne Joyrich, I argue that streaming television constructs an epistemology of the category, in which queerness is presented as categorisable and predictable. I explore how the two key features of streaming television’s interfaces – categories and algorithms – produce an understanding of queerness as normatively visible and inseparable from consumer choice. Yet while streaming giants generate a neoliberal conception of normatively visible and consumable queerness, queer-specific streaming services such as Revry offer a different, ‘messier’ understanding of queer lives, suggesting that streaming television holds the potential for a more radical interface with queerness.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"316 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44520398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melancholy, respectability, and credibility in Sean Baker’s Tangerine","authors":"Paige Macintosh","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2194781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2194781","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A complex cinematic history of trans characters precedes contemporary representations of trans people — one of normalizing trans identity through class, gender, and race. In the context of contemporary American cinema, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) demonstrates alternative strategies for representing trans characters and marks a turning point in trans cinema. Tangerine presents a grittier version of transgender experience than was seen in mainstream trans films released during the mid-2010s. The film challenges victimization narratives and the pathologization of the trans body, appealing directly to trans audiences. Moreover, the film’s trans-affirmative casting advocates trans agency, while its depictions of state and individual violence systematically critique conventional trans tropes in earlier trans films. However, the film’s paratexts re-affirm some of the industrial patterns that continue to marginalise trans industry workers. Prominent reviews and interviews with the cast and crew spotlight the redirection of this trans film’s cultural and financial capital away from trans workers and toward industry elites. Ultimately, Tangerine signals a complex turning point in trans media, whereby media industries increasingly value trans performers and consultants for their capacity to legitimize trans media, but trans industry workers continue to remain vulnerable within these industries’ complex power dynamics.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"211 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46509862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital space and embodiment in contemporary cinema: screening composite spaces","authors":"Henry Powell","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2211914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2211914","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"370 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42611050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: queer/trans media now","authors":"Matthew Connolly","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2207437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2207437","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This special issue highlights a range of scholarship on LGBTQ+ film and media, encompassing a variety of subjects from across numerous decades and explored through a diverse range of methodologies. If these articles collectively define ‘queer/trans media now’, it is due to their capaciousness, dexterity, and generative provocation – qualities essential to articulating the value of queer/trans media and its study in an age of expanding potentiality and ever-growing backlash.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"129 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47705460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Unique joy’: Netflix, pleasure and the shaping of queer taste","authors":"Clara Bradbury-Rance","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2193521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2193521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the ‘Netflix imaginary’ and how it shapes our understanding of queer taste and legibility in contemporary visual culture. While Netflix has promoted itself as a bastion of LGBTQ inclusivity and other forms of ‘diversity’, this article considers the platform not on the basis of celebrated LGBTQ ‘Netflix Originals’ such as Sex Education or Queer Eye but rather on how our navigations of the platform’s content throw our queer attachments and recommendations into pleasurable chaos. If the ‘Netflix imaginary’ is built around personalisation – that is, the promise of knowledge and insight – it more often generates bewilderment and surprise. But the article argues that this uncanny algorithmic meddling also has the potential to generate its own source of fun, entertainment and queer pleasure. By analysing what consumers are led to understand of the site’s dependence on and commitment to collaborative filtering, algorithmic signposting and customer agency and choice, I consider how we might employ a queer method for engaging subversively with Netflix’s representational inconsistencies and inadequacies – how we might see Netflix itself as a queer method for reconfiguring queer taste.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"133 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44330534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Death and collective autobiography in Silverlake Life: The View from Here","authors":"Gabriel Kitofi Tonelo","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2205812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2205812","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the creative process of Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), from the perspective of its authorial multiplicity. Silverlake Life is regarded as one of the main representatives of autobiographical documentary in the 1990s. The specificity of the film is found in the circumstances of the death of the filmmaker-autobiographer, Tom Joslin. By recognizing a tripartite process of creative autonomy among Tom Joslin, Mark Massi and Peter Friedman, this article outlines both how each individual contributed to the achievement of the film and how Silverlake Life preserves its status as autobiographical documentary despite the tragic deaths of both Joslin and Massi before the film’s completion. This work of comprehending the film’s collaborative autobiographical process was made possible through the analysis of three extratextual sources: the original proposal for the film, written by Tom Joslin and which appears at the beginning of the narrative; the written diary of Mark Massi, Joslin’s widower; and extensive interviews with Peter Friedman on the subject.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"267 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48462047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer times in Moonlight","authors":"M. Stekl","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2206391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2206391","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The time is out of joint in Moonlight (2016). While Barry Jenkins’ film appears to divide Chiron’s life into three chronological periods, each stage both repeats and anticipates something of the others, on the levels of both form and content – from the recurrence of heteronormative, antiBlack violence throughout Chiron’s life to the reprisal of the police-like flashes of light that cinematographically periodize his story, this narrative is (un)structured by repetition. This essay asks how Moonlight’s reiterative temporality might intervene in the ‘temporal turn’ in queer studies. By emphasizing the structuring repetition of antiBlackness, I want to complicate the utopian aspirations of queer futurism, in the vein of José Esteban Muñoz, as well as the psychoanalytic elision of race that defines queer anti-futurism, or the ‘anti-social thesis’, after Lee Edelman. What is the (non)place of Blackness in romances of queer futurity? In romances of queer negativity? In conversation with prior queer and Black scholarship on Moonlight, I argue that the film stages Blackness as a disruption to both straight and queer temporalities as we know them. Ultimately, I suggest that the film posits a third way out of the futurism/anti-futurism deadlock in queer studies: the iterability that (de)constructs Black(ness)’s narrative gestures toward an absolute open(ended)ness which is unrealizable as futurity and which is inextricable from the endlessly reiterated antiBlack, antiqueer violence of the modern world.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"338 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43478085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transmasculinity on television","authors":"A. d’Harcourt","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2211569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2211569","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"363 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44058750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}