Cultural Politics

General Sites

• The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s (GLAAD).GLAAD's site contains much on popular cultural representations of minoritized sexualities, including a LauraWatch and other sites.
• Gay and Lesbian Film Reviews.

Online Articles

• Advertisers’ Strategies to Target Gay Audiences in Attitude and Gay Times. An article by Rebecca Phillips.
• The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace. An article by Michael Heim.
• Examples of ads using sex to sell. A site by Richard Taflinger, Washington State University.
• Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual TV Characters. A comprehensive list of characters and episodes in which they appear, by David Wyatt.
• Holy Homosexuality Batman!: Camp and Corporate Capitalism in Batman Forever. An article by Freya Johnson.
• Queer Horror: Decoding Universal’s Monster. An article by Gary Morris offering a queer theoretical reading of classic horror films of the 1930s.
• Queer Ripley. An article by J. Serpico analyzing the sexual politics of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
• The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema. An article by Ray Davis on the use of effeminate characters as plot foils in early Hollywood films.
• Staging the Slut: Hyper-Sexuality in Performance. An article by Kim Nicolini.
• Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? An article by Allucquere Rosanne Stone on the complexities of embodied identity in cyberspace.
• Bisexuality And How To Use It: Toward a Coalitional Identity Politics. Examines representations of bisexuality (as different from both heterosexuality and homosexuality) throughout media and among activists themselves.

Bibliography

[Few topics on popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone. These reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further offlinestudy.]

Burston, Paul and Colin Richardson, eds.A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture.New York: Routledge, 1995.

Good collection of essays on various ways that gays and lesbians have been represented in and have responded to popular culture.

 

Creekmur, Corey K, and Alexander Doty, eds.Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture.Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Wide-ranging collection of analyses by academics, journalists, and artists examining representations of non-conforming sexuality in various genres, styles and forms of pop culture.

Doty, Alexander.Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Witty re-reading of popular figures from Jack Benny to Laverne and Shirley as having a “queer” subtext.

Gamson, Joshua.Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

The best book on the strange and wondrous phenomenon of Jerry Springer-style “tabloid” talk shows, and its ambiguous celebration/exploitation of sexual non-conformists.

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia.Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Brilliant interpretation of a major Chicano art retrospective that raises key questions about the construction of high art vs. popular art among marginalized ethno-racialized groups, and issues of gender and sexuality in Chicano art and political movements.

Russo, Vito.The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

Classic study of the history of homosexual representation in Hollywood film.

Walters, Suzanna Danuta.All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

An excellent book looking not only at gay visibility in film but in all forms of media up to its publication in 2001. While this book focuses primarily on television, it does pick up where Russo (above) left off.