Reading Moonlight, reading the other

ABSTRACT

This article brings a quare perspective to Moonlight’s reception. We argue that many straight viewers identified the film’s representational innovations but resisted its call to interrogate their preconceived notions about Black queerness. Instead, many audiences focused on others’ interpretations of the film. They perceived Black viewers as homophobic, demonstrating third-person effect, and used that stance to demonstrate their own progressive politics. In addition to documenting Moonlight’s reception, this study demonstrates how reading a text through the imagined reception of other viewers can shift focus from connecting with the material conditions of marginalization to proving one’s own progressive bona fides.

KEYWORDS:

• Reception studies
• Black audiences
• Quare theory
• Moonlight
• Intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 David Sims, “Moonlight is a Film of Uncommon Grace,” The Atlantic, October 26, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/moonlight-barry-jenkins-review/505409.

2 Joanna Di Mattia, “The Aesthetic of the Ecstatic: Reimagining Black Masculinity in Moonlight,” Screen Education 93 (2019): 10.

3 Mark D. Cunningham, “Nigger, Coon, Boy, Punk, Homo, Faggot, Black Man: Reconsidering Established Interpretations of Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality through Noah’s Arc.” In Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (Rutgers University Press, 2012); Shinsuke Eguchi, Bernadette M. Calafell, and Nicole Files-Thompson, “Intersectionality and Quare Theory: Fantasizing African American Male Same-Sex Relationships in Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom,” Communication, Culture & Critique 7, no. 3 (2014); Robin R. Means-Coleman and Jasmine Cobb, “No Way of Seeing: Mainstreaming and Selling the Gaze of Homo-Thug Hip-Hop,” Popular Communication 5, no. 2 (2007); Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: NYU Press, 2013).

4 E. Patrick Johnson, “In the Quare Light of the Moon: Poverty, Sexuality and Makeshift Masculinity in Moonlight,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 43, no. 3 (2019): 70.

5 Mary Emily O’Hara, “‘Moonlight’ Makes Oscars History as 1st LGBTQ Best Picture Winner,” NBC News, February 27, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/moonlight-makes-oscars-history-1st-lgbtq-best-picture-winner-n726116; Di Mattia, “The Aesthetic of the Ecstatic.”

6 O’Hara, “‘Moonlight’ Makes Oscars History.”

7 Daniel Reynolds, “Moonlight May Win at Oscars, But Out Actors Still Lose,” Advocate, February 24, 2017, https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2017/2/24/moonlight-may-win-oscars-out-actors-still-lose.

8 Steven W. Thrasher, “Moonlight Portrays Black Gay Life in its Joy, Sadness and Complexity,” The Guardian, October 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/29/moonlight-movie-barry-jenkins-black-gay.

9 André Wheeler “Moonlight Changed the Game for Black, Queer Cinema,” Them, October 22, 2021, https://www.them.us/story/moonlight-changed-the-game-for-black-queer-cinema.

10 Wheeler, “Moonlight Changed the Game.”

11 Ibid.

12 Adam Howard “Marketing ‘Moonlight’: LGBTQ-Themed Film Could be Tough Sell for Audiences,” NBC News, October 21, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/marketing-moonlight-lgbt-themed-film-could-be-tough-sell-audiences-n670536.

13 Howard, “Marketing ‘Moonlight.’”

14 Alfred Martin, Jr., The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 2.

15 Kristen Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (London: Routledge, 2015).

16 Graham Winfrey “How ‘Moonlight’ Beat the Odds to Reach Theaters in African-American Neighborhoods,” Indiewire, December 1, 2016, https://www.indiewire.com/2016/12/moonlight-box-office-awards-season-barry-jenkins-a24-1201751113.

17 Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rukmini Pande, Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race (University of Iowa Press, 2016); Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies,” Transformative Works and Cultures 20 (2015).

18 Winfrey, “How ‘Moonlight’ Beat the Odds.”

19 Jhally and Lewis, Enlightened Racism.

20 e.g. Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies”; Shinsuke Eguchi and Myra N. Roberts, “Gay Rapping and Possibilities: A Quare Reading of ‘Throw That Boy P***y,’” Text & Performance Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2015); Nathian Shae Rodriguez, “Hip-Hop’s Authentic Masculinity: A Quare Reading of Fox’s Empire,” Television & New Media 19, no. 3 (2018).

21 Karma Chávez, “Pushing Boundaries: Queer Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International & Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013); Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.”

22 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.”

23 Ibid.

24 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 126 (emphasis in original).

25 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 126.

26 Eguchi, Calafell, and Files-Thompson, “Intersectionality and Quare Theory,” 373.

27 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 127.

28 Eguchi, Calafell, and Files-Thompson, “Intersectionality and Quare Theory.”

29 Patricia Hill Collins, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power?,” Signs 22, no. 2 (1997).

30 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.”

31 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 11.

32 Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policies,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989).

33 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 8.

34 Rodriguez, “Hip-Hop’s Authentic Masculinity.”

35 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 141.

36 Collins, Black Sexual Politics.

37 Ibid.

38 Johnson, “In the Quare Light,” 71.

39 Ibid.

40 Eguchi and Roberts, “Gay Rapping and Possibilities.”

41 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.”

42 Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting; Means-Coleman and Cobb, “No Way of Seeing.”

43 Eguchi, Calafell, and Files-Thompson, “Intersectionality and Quare Theory.”

44 Martin, The Generic Closet.

45 Gust A. Yep and John P. Elia, “Racialized Masculinities and the New Homonormativity in LOGO’s Noah’s Arc,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 7 (2012).

46 Kristin J. Warner, “A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show: City of Angels and the Plausible Deniability of Color-Blindness,” In Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 60.

47 Kristin J. Warner, “ABC’s Scandal and Black Women’s Fandom,” In Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, ed. Elana Levine (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 34–5.

48 Kristen J. Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017).

49 e.g. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 1991); Jhally and Lewis, Enlightened Racism; Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives; Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers.

50 Jhally and Lewis, Enlightened Racism (1992), 95.

51 Martin, “For Scholars … ”

52 Ashton Toone, Amanda Nell Edgar, and Kelly Ford, “‘She Made Angry Black Woman Something That People Would Want To Be’: Lemonade and Black Women as Audiences and Subjects,” Participations 14, no. 2 (2017). https://participations.org/Volume%2014/Issue%202/10.pdf.

53 Martin, “For Scholars … ”

54 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives; Wanzo, “African American Acafandom.”

55 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.”

56 We report the terms participants used to describe themselves. Categories do not total 100% because some participants declined to answer some demographic questions.

57 Alfred L. Martin, Jr., “Fandom While Black: Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry and the Contours of US Black Fandoms,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 6 (2019): 737–53.

58 Martin, “Fandom While Black,” 742.

59 Martin, “For Scholars … ”

60 Martin, “For Scholars … ”

61 Jhally and Lewis, Enlightened Racism, 3.

62 Johnson, “In the Quare Light,” 70.

63 Participant names are researcher-assigned pseudonyms.

64 Demographics omitted when participants declined to provide them.

65 Collins, Black Sexual Politics.

66 Racquel J. Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

67 Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

68 Martin, The Generic Closet.

69 Johnson, “In the Quare Light,” 70.

70 Collins, Black Sexual Politics; Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997).

71 Neal, Looking for Leroy; Martin, “For Scholars … ”; Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation.”

72 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.”

73 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.”

74 Neal, Looking for Leroy, 2.

75 Johnson, “In the Quare Light”; Neal, Looking for Leroy.

76 Dyer, White.

77 Martin, “For Scholars … ,” 73.

78 Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers.

79 Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers.

80 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.”

81 Johnson, “In the Quare Light,” 70.

82 Winfrey, “How ‘Moonlight’ Beat the Odds.”

83 Douglas M. McLeod, William P. Eveland, and Amy I. Nathanson, “Support for Censorship of Violent and Misogynic Rap Lyrics: An Analysis of the Third-Person Effect,” Communication Research 24, no. 2 (1997).

84 Sigal Barak-Brandes, “‘I’m Not Influenced by Ads, but Not Everyone’s Like Me’: The Third-Person Effect in Israeli Women’s Attitude Toward TV Commercials and their Images,” The Communication Review 14, no. 4 (2011).

85 Johnson, “In the Quare Light.”