For scholars … When studying the queer of color image alone isn’t enough

ABSTRACT

The availability of more black queer images provides an opportunity to re-assess the ways we tend to study such images. When we bring our theoretical toolboxes to bear on a text, it does not necessarily illuminate all that we imagine it does. In this short essay, I examine the ways production-, reception- and industry-based questions about the series Pose engender a different set of conclusions about the series beyond deciding whether or not it is a positive or negative representation of black queers.

KEYWORDS:

• media studies
• media industry studies
• media reception studies
• intersectionality

Notes

1 Julie D’Acci, “Cultural Studies, Television Studies, and the Crisis in the Humanities,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 422.

2 Tony Bennett, “Text and Social Process: The Case of James Bond,” Screen Education 41 (1982): 9.

3 Kristen J. Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 33.

4 Edward Schiappa, Peter B. Gregg, and Dean E. Hewes. “Can One TV Show Make a Difference? Will & Grace and the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis.” Journal of Homosexuality 51, no. 4 (2006): 15–37.

5 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding in the Television Discourse,” in Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America, ed. Darnell M. Hunt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46.

6 Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

7 Katherine Sender, “Dualcasting: Bravo’s Gay Programming and the Quest for Women Audiences,” in Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris & Anthony Freitas (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 314.

8 Alfred L. Martin Jr., “The Queer Business of Casting Gay Characters on U.S. Television,” Communication, Culture & Critique 11, no. 2 (2018): 288.

9 Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (New York: Routledge, 2015), 33.

10 Lesley Goldberg, “Ryan Murphy Make History with Largest Cast of Transgender Actors for FX’s Pose,” The Hollywood Reporter, October 25, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/ryan-murphy-makes-history-largest-cast-transgender-actors-fxs-pose-1051877.

11 Martin, “The Queer Business of Casting Gay Characters,” 283.

12 Cynthia Littleton, “‘Pose’ Cast, Producers Talk Emotional, Empowering Journey to Make TV History”, Variety, January 5, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/pose-ryan-murphy-fox-janet-mock-trans-1202655173.

13 Alfred L. Martin Jr., “Scripting Black Gayness: Television Authorship in Black-Cast Sitcoms,” Television & New Media 16, no. 7 (2015): 661.

14 Goldberg, “Ryan Murphy Makes History.”

15 Fogel, Alexa. 2019. Interview by Author. Tape Recording. March 22, Iowa City, IA.

16 Quoted in Martin, “The Queer Business of Casting Gay Characters,” 293.

17 Ibid., 289.

18 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 12.