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Hollis Griffin

University of Michigan, Communication and Media, Faculty Member

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Address: University of Michigan
Department of Communication and Media
North Quad, Room 5370
105 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

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Universidad de Chile

Indiana University

Michael Lawrence

University of Sussex

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Cardiff University

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Books by Hollis Griffin

Television Studies in Queer Times

This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twen... more This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twenty- first century. The complex political, cultural, and economic milieu requires new terms and conceptual frameworks to study television and media through a queer lens. Gathering a range of well-known scholars, the book takes on the relationship between sexual identity, desire, and television, breaking new ground in a context where existing critical vocabularies and research paradigms used to study television no longer hold sway in the ways they used to. The anthology sets out to confound conventional categories used to organize queer television scholarship, like “programming,” “industry,” “audience,” “genre,” and “activism.” Instead, the anthology offers four interpretive frames – historicity, temporal play, ideological limitation and industrial contextualization – in the interest of creating new queer tools for studying digital television in the contemporary age.

Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

"As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passio... more "As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passionate, and lucid. Whether he’s explaining Grindr’s memes or the gayborhoods of Chicago, cable travel programs or online networks, Griffin discovers how it feels to be queer in the digital age." ―Amy Villarejo, Author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire

The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBT media are less "new" than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBT media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences―while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering―are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable.

Papers by Hollis Griffin

Doing Bad Film History: Lessons on Archive and Method from John Waters

The Routledge Companion to American Film History , 2025

Director John Waters releases an annual "Top 10" list of what he thinks are the best films releas... more Director John Waters releases an annual "Top 10" list of what he thinks are the best films released in a given year. First published in Artforum and, more recently, released in the online magazine Vulture, Waters' lists are notable for their heterogeneity, surprise inclusions, and notable omissions. In the two decades he has been doing the lists, they have featured the directorial work of arthouse and critical darlings like Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and Catherine Breillat alongside more pointedly mainstream fare. One year, Waters applauded the comic book movie Joker (2019) for being "the first big-budget Hollywood movie to gleefully inspire anarchy." 1 Another year, he championed Blackfish (2013), the activistminded documentary about animal abuse in theme parks, as being "a whale snuff-film documentary that'll make you root for the kidnapped killer mammal and wish he had eaten alive Sea World's evil owners." 2 Moreover, in keeping with his reputation as the "Pope of Trash," other lists champion gross-out movies from the Jackass series, the stoner comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), and the mockumentary Brüno (2009), wherein star Sacha Baron Cohen plays the role of a gay Austrian fashion journalist who, among other things, interviews the families of child models to ask them if their toddlers need liposuction and gets whipped by a dominatrix at a swinger's party. Waters' "Top 10" lists participate in cultural conversations regarding questions of value, aesthetics, and power at work in cinema culture in much the same way that his movies do. I see the lists re-conceptualizing cinema history in a manner that questions conventional notions of good taste. In the process, they reimagine film canons by denaturalizing aesthetic hierarchies. In doing so, Waters offers provocative methods for theorizing and writing cinema history differently than it is typically theorized and written. As many scholars have noted, Waters' investments in cinema history can be seen in all of his work. 3 This essay looks to his recent museum exhibition Indecent Exposure to consider how the visual media he produces for exhibition in museums-specifically his photography and installation art-provides new ways of thinking about film history. Waters "Top 10" lists distill the historical purview seen in his other work rather neatly: droll hostility toward the opinions of the traditional arbiters of good taste, devotion to his own beloved objects from cinema history no matter their place in conventional film canons, and, perhaps above all else, genuine affection for the cultural margins and the people who feel most at home

Sexual diversity and streaming television: Toward a platform studies approach to analyzing LGBTQ+ TV

Convergence , 2024

This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when ... more This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when studying the politics of sexual representation in contemporary television programming. Using a corpus of four LGBTQ+-themed programs that represent queer and trans sexualities and HIV/AIDS, the paper argues that funding mechanisms play a constitutive role in determining the kinds of sexual diversity that can circulate via streaming technologies. Comparing and contrasting content created for SVODs, BVODs, and video-sharing platforms, the essay considers the impact that the economic diversity of television's multiplatform ecology has on the sexual diversity of content that circulates there. Purposefully combining an analysis of online TV with social media entertainment, the essay casts 'streaming television' as a wide, varied category whose relationship to questions of representational diversity is more complex than existing scholarship on these issues sometimes suggests. Situating its analysis in the literatures of platform studies, media industry studies, and television's politics of LGBTQ + representation, the essay shifts the purview of 'diversity' away from representations of identity and toward diversities of funding mechanisms and diversities of sexual acts and practices. The essay argues for the necessity of textual analysis to properly articulate the relationship between platforms and the politics of sexual representation in the content that they circulate.

When mass culture meets high culture: reality television and big data at the art museum

Communication, Culture, and Critique, 2024

This article examines cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media, using a mu... more This article examines cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media, using a museum installation as a point of departure for examining the persistence of particular ideas about taste and aesthetic value as they relate to mass media in a historical moment when audiences are more frequently small and specialized. Its case study is an artwork that creates a data visualization from social media analytics related to American Idol, America's Got Talent, America's Next Top Model, and America's Best Dance Crew. Using discourse analysis, the article unpacks how the installation establishes connections between televised contests, social media activity, and U.S. national identity. The author argues that the installation predicates its critique of reality television and social media on collapsing the differences between disparate programs, animating hierarchies of taste between various publics, and simplifying emergent industry practices related to big data.

I Always Knew I Wasn't Gonna Be Long on This Earth: Pose and the AIDS Crisis

Ryan Murphy's Queer America, 2022

This chapter connects Pose to “the AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” the term that activists and scholar... more This chapter connects Pose to “the AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” the term that activists and scholars use to name the surfeit of representations of HIV/AIDS that has occurred at the start of the twenty-first century. Set in 1980s-era New York City, Pose’s representation of HIV/AIDS is notable for its focus on both structural issues related to the disease, like healthcare access and housing discrimination, as well as the more intimate issues that attend the disease, like shame and depression. Pose’s narration of HIV/AIDS is thus centrifugal and centripetal; moving out from individual characters’ experiences to broader cultural concerns and, simultaneously, narrating the intensely personal experiences of living with the illness. I see this double movement as the means by which Pose constructs empathic spectatorial positions; the program both brings viewer’s close to the experiences of those coping with HIV/AIDS yet keeps them at a remove in ways that foster compassion. In doing so, the program creates a form of cultural memory resonant in its depiction of a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular moment in time – in this case: communities of color during the AIDS crisis in 1980s-era New York. The chapter casts Pose as an instance of popular historiography where the lived, felt experiences of facing HIV/AIDS as a transgender person of color come into focus through formalist characteristics like narration, score, and mise-en-scène.

It's a Sin: AIDS as Incipient Crisis

European Journal of Cultural Studies , 2022

The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic... more The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people's first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community's existence.

Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020

In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in interne... more In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in internet memes in order to illuminate the lived, felt dimensions of progressive politics at a historical moment when those politics seem especially imperiled. The author argues for an understanding of online engagements with politics as being borne of oscillation as users move between platforms as well as affective states. The goal: to underscore how anger and laughter provide progressives with different opportunities to weather, make fun of, and combat the ascendancy of right-wing populism. Rooted in literature on affect and scholarship on internet memes, especially feminist internet memes, the article examines several different memes that circulated between 2016 and 2020, including #pussygrabsback, #neverthelessshepersisted, Prankster Joe Biden memes, and Creepy Joe Biden memes.

The Politics of Merely Following: Witnessing AIDS on Instagram

New Media & Society , 2020

Using an illustrative sample of posts to an Instagram account devoted to commemorating lives lost... more Using an illustrative sample of posts to an Instagram account devoted to commemorating lives lost to AIDS, this article articulates a less-than-intense form of engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) politics on social media. Merely following particular accounts on social media networks enables an encounter with an Other that is shaped by the affordances of digital technologies and the specificities of particular platforms. A site of political engagement that is further contoured by hierarchies of sex, race, and gender, @theaidsmemorial offers evidence of user experiences that are less focused and intentional than those typically associated with progressive sexual politics. Nevertheless, the author argues that they are meaningful because of how they expose users to bodies, lives, and desires they may not encounter if not for social media.

Queer Media Studies

Feminist Media Histories , 2018

The Politics of Sexuality in Mediated Cities

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, 2019

“The Politics of Sexuality in Mediated Cities,” The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Commun... more

Evaluating Television: Affect as a Critical Optic

Cinema Journal, 2017

This article examines the tensions between different schools of thought regarding the evaluation ... more This article examines the tensions between different schools of thought regarding the evaluation of television. Using scholarship on television and affect, I argue that all discussions of the medium involve evaluation, and that those evaluations are always conducted on both aesthetic and ideological terms, at the same time. In doing so, I unpack the challenges that attend evaluation, emphasizing that the variability of viewer experiences with programs complicates some common assumptions about the medium, particularly the aesthetic value of lowbrow texts and the ideological problems associated with the medium's representations of minorities.

"Manufacturing Massness: Aesthetic Form & Industry Practice in the Reality Television Contest"

The Companion to Reality Television, Laurie Ouellette Ed., Jan 2014

“Never, Sometimes, Always: The Multiple Temporalities of ‘Post-Race’ Discourse in Convergence Television Narrative.”

Because convergence is a context in which programs are increasingly dispersed across channels and... more Because convergence is a context in which programs are increasingly dispersed across channels and delivery technologies, attention to the television's multiple temporalities helps parse out differing investments vis-à-vis blackness in the production, distribution, and reception of its content. Programs that center on black characters demonstrate television's temporal pluralities in that they often make blackness a commodity pleasure but only raise issues of power and privilege endemic to racial difference in discrete, bounded ways. At the same time, television's representations of blackness demonstrate how television in the context of convergence enables unique viewing positions for minority audiences. Using Mary Ann Doane's notion of television's multiple temporal orders, I cast blackness as a contradiction throughout the narratives and distribution contexts characteristic of the contemporary medium.

Your Favorite Stars, Live on Our Screens: Media Culture, Queer Publics, and Commercial Space

The Velvet Light Trap, Jan 1, 2008

Hair Metal Redux: Gendering Nostalgia and Revising History on VH1

The cable television network VH1 uses 1980s popular music-heavy metal music, specifically-to targ... more The cable television network VH1 uses 1980s popular music-heavy metal music, specifically-to target audiences from across generations. Whereas older viewers who are familiar with heavy metal music are courted with the many music videos, interviews, and documentary programs that chronicle the genre's performers across VH1's content, younger viewers are courted with tongue-in-cheek modes of address that play on the stylistic and gendered excesses of heavy metal. Moreover, VH1 rearticulates for largely female audiences a genre most closely identified with young men, unsettling some of the subject-object dynamics at work in their repackaging of 1980s popular music. Reading the reality program Rock of Love amidst other elements of VH1's 1980s-themed programming, the author demonstrates how television recalls its own history to court ever-more viewers. In doing this, the network reifies some "old" gender politics in "new" texts. At the same time, the network issues some rejoinders and revisions to these politics. Television's narration of history is thus fragmented and contradictory, offering multiple points of entry to assorted viewerships.

Queerness, the Quality Audience, and Comedy Central's Reno 911!

Television & New Media, Jan 1, 2008

‘Your Mom is So Fat…,’ or Talking Politics on the Internet

Ashley Madison, Rentboy, and Dirty, Dirty Internet Sex

Debbie Downer Has a Facebook Problem: Regulating Affect on Social Media Networks

Television Studies in Queer Times

This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twen... more This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twenty- first century. The complex political, cultural, and economic milieu requires new terms and conceptual frameworks to study television and media through a queer lens. Gathering a range of well-known scholars, the book takes on the relationship between sexual identity, desire, and television, breaking new ground in a context where existing critical vocabularies and research paradigms used to study television no longer hold sway in the ways they used to. The anthology sets out to confound conventional categories used to organize queer television scholarship, like “programming,” “industry,” “audience,” “genre,” and “activism.” Instead, the anthology offers four interpretive frames – historicity, temporal play, ideological limitation and industrial contextualization – in the interest of creating new queer tools for studying digital television in the contemporary age.

Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

"As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passio... more "As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passionate, and lucid. Whether he’s explaining Grindr’s memes or the gayborhoods of Chicago, cable travel programs or online networks, Griffin discovers how it feels to be queer in the digital age." ―Amy Villarejo, Author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire

The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBT media are less "new" than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBT media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences―while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering―are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable.

Doing Bad Film History: Lessons on Archive and Method from John Waters

The Routledge Companion to American Film History , 2025

Director John Waters releases an annual "Top 10" list of what he thinks are the best films releas... more Director John Waters releases an annual "Top 10" list of what he thinks are the best films released in a given year. First published in Artforum and, more recently, released in the online magazine Vulture, Waters' lists are notable for their heterogeneity, surprise inclusions, and notable omissions. In the two decades he has been doing the lists, they have featured the directorial work of arthouse and critical darlings like Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and Catherine Breillat alongside more pointedly mainstream fare. One year, Waters applauded the comic book movie Joker (2019) for being "the first big-budget Hollywood movie to gleefully inspire anarchy." 1 Another year, he championed Blackfish (2013), the activistminded documentary about animal abuse in theme parks, as being "a whale snuff-film documentary that'll make you root for the kidnapped killer mammal and wish he had eaten alive Sea World's evil owners." 2 Moreover, in keeping with his reputation as the "Pope of Trash," other lists champion gross-out movies from the Jackass series, the stoner comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), and the mockumentary Brüno (2009), wherein star Sacha Baron Cohen plays the role of a gay Austrian fashion journalist who, among other things, interviews the families of child models to ask them if their toddlers need liposuction and gets whipped by a dominatrix at a swinger's party. Waters' "Top 10" lists participate in cultural conversations regarding questions of value, aesthetics, and power at work in cinema culture in much the same way that his movies do. I see the lists re-conceptualizing cinema history in a manner that questions conventional notions of good taste. In the process, they reimagine film canons by denaturalizing aesthetic hierarchies. In doing so, Waters offers provocative methods for theorizing and writing cinema history differently than it is typically theorized and written. As many scholars have noted, Waters' investments in cinema history can be seen in all of his work. 3 This essay looks to his recent museum exhibition Indecent Exposure to consider how the visual media he produces for exhibition in museums-specifically his photography and installation art-provides new ways of thinking about film history. Waters "Top 10" lists distill the historical purview seen in his other work rather neatly: droll hostility toward the opinions of the traditional arbiters of good taste, devotion to his own beloved objects from cinema history no matter their place in conventional film canons, and, perhaps above all else, genuine affection for the cultural margins and the people who feel most at home

Sexual diversity and streaming television: Toward a platform studies approach to analyzing LGBTQ+ TV

Convergence , 2024

This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when ... more This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when studying the politics of sexual representation in contemporary television programming. Using a corpus of four LGBTQ+-themed programs that represent queer and trans sexualities and HIV/AIDS, the paper argues that funding mechanisms play a constitutive role in determining the kinds of sexual diversity that can circulate via streaming technologies. Comparing and contrasting content created for SVODs, BVODs, and video-sharing platforms, the essay considers the impact that the economic diversity of television's multiplatform ecology has on the sexual diversity of content that circulates there. Purposefully combining an analysis of online TV with social media entertainment, the essay casts 'streaming television' as a wide, varied category whose relationship to questions of representational diversity is more complex than existing scholarship on these issues sometimes suggests. Situating its analysis in the literatures of platform studies, media industry studies, and television's politics of LGBTQ + representation, the essay shifts the purview of 'diversity' away from representations of identity and toward diversities of funding mechanisms and diversities of sexual acts and practices. The essay argues for the necessity of textual analysis to properly articulate the relationship between platforms and the politics of sexual representation in the content that they circulate.

When mass culture meets high culture: reality television and big data at the art museum

Communication, Culture, and Critique, 2024

This article examines cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media, using a mu... more This article examines cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media, using a museum installation as a point of departure for examining the persistence of particular ideas about taste and aesthetic value as they relate to mass media in a historical moment when audiences are more frequently small and specialized. Its case study is an artwork that creates a data visualization from social media analytics related to American Idol, America's Got Talent, America's Next Top Model, and America's Best Dance Crew. Using discourse analysis, the article unpacks how the installation establishes connections between televised contests, social media activity, and U.S. national identity. The author argues that the installation predicates its critique of reality television and social media on collapsing the differences between disparate programs, animating hierarchies of taste between various publics, and simplifying emergent industry practices related to big data.

I Always Knew I Wasn't Gonna Be Long on This Earth: Pose and the AIDS Crisis

Ryan Murphy's Queer America, 2022

This chapter connects Pose to “the AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” the term that activists and scholar... more This chapter connects Pose to “the AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” the term that activists and scholars use to name the surfeit of representations of HIV/AIDS that has occurred at the start of the twenty-first century. Set in 1980s-era New York City, Pose’s representation of HIV/AIDS is notable for its focus on both structural issues related to the disease, like healthcare access and housing discrimination, as well as the more intimate issues that attend the disease, like shame and depression. Pose’s narration of HIV/AIDS is thus centrifugal and centripetal; moving out from individual characters’ experiences to broader cultural concerns and, simultaneously, narrating the intensely personal experiences of living with the illness. I see this double movement as the means by which Pose constructs empathic spectatorial positions; the program both brings viewer’s close to the experiences of those coping with HIV/AIDS yet keeps them at a remove in ways that foster compassion. In doing so, the program creates a form of cultural memory resonant in its depiction of a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular moment in time – in this case: communities of color during the AIDS crisis in 1980s-era New York. The chapter casts Pose as an instance of popular historiography where the lived, felt experiences of facing HIV/AIDS as a transgender person of color come into focus through formalist characteristics like narration, score, and mise-en-scène.

It's a Sin: AIDS as Incipient Crisis

European Journal of Cultural Studies , 2022

The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic... more The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people's first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community's existence.

Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020

In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in interne... more In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in internet memes in order to illuminate the lived, felt dimensions of progressive politics at a historical moment when those politics seem especially imperiled. The author argues for an understanding of online engagements with politics as being borne of oscillation as users move between platforms as well as affective states. The goal: to underscore how anger and laughter provide progressives with different opportunities to weather, make fun of, and combat the ascendancy of right-wing populism. Rooted in literature on affect and scholarship on internet memes, especially feminist internet memes, the article examines several different memes that circulated between 2016 and 2020, including #pussygrabsback, #neverthelessshepersisted, Prankster Joe Biden memes, and Creepy Joe Biden memes.

The Politics of Merely Following: Witnessing AIDS on Instagram

New Media & Society , 2020

Using an illustrative sample of posts to an Instagram account devoted to commemorating lives lost... more Using an illustrative sample of posts to an Instagram account devoted to commemorating lives lost to AIDS, this article articulates a less-than-intense form of engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) politics on social media. Merely following particular accounts on social media networks enables an encounter with an Other that is shaped by the affordances of digital technologies and the specificities of particular platforms. A site of political engagement that is further contoured by hierarchies of sex, race, and gender, @theaidsmemorial offers evidence of user experiences that are less focused and intentional than those typically associated with progressive sexual politics. Nevertheless, the author argues that they are meaningful because of how they expose users to bodies, lives, and desires they may not encounter if not for social media.

Queer Media Studies

Feminist Media Histories , 2018

The Politics of Sexuality in Mediated Cities

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, 2019

“The Politics of Sexuality in Mediated Cities,” The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Commun... more

Evaluating Television: Affect as a Critical Optic

Cinema Journal, 2017

This article examines the tensions between different schools of thought regarding the evaluation ... more This article examines the tensions between different schools of thought regarding the evaluation of television. Using scholarship on television and affect, I argue that all discussions of the medium involve evaluation, and that those evaluations are always conducted on both aesthetic and ideological terms, at the same time. In doing so, I unpack the challenges that attend evaluation, emphasizing that the variability of viewer experiences with programs complicates some common assumptions about the medium, particularly the aesthetic value of lowbrow texts and the ideological problems associated with the medium's representations of minorities.

"Manufacturing Massness: Aesthetic Form & Industry Practice in the Reality Television Contest"

The Companion to Reality Television, Laurie Ouellette Ed., Jan 2014

“Never, Sometimes, Always: The Multiple Temporalities of ‘Post-Race’ Discourse in Convergence Television Narrative.”

Because convergence is a context in which programs are increasingly dispersed across channels and... more Because convergence is a context in which programs are increasingly dispersed across channels and delivery technologies, attention to the television's multiple temporalities helps parse out differing investments vis-à-vis blackness in the production, distribution, and reception of its content. Programs that center on black characters demonstrate television's temporal pluralities in that they often make blackness a commodity pleasure but only raise issues of power and privilege endemic to racial difference in discrete, bounded ways. At the same time, television's representations of blackness demonstrate how television in the context of convergence enables unique viewing positions for minority audiences. Using Mary Ann Doane's notion of television's multiple temporal orders, I cast blackness as a contradiction throughout the narratives and distribution contexts characteristic of the contemporary medium.

Your Favorite Stars, Live on Our Screens: Media Culture, Queer Publics, and Commercial Space

The Velvet Light Trap, Jan 1, 2008

Hair Metal Redux: Gendering Nostalgia and Revising History on VH1

The cable television network VH1 uses 1980s popular music-heavy metal music, specifically-to targ... more The cable television network VH1 uses 1980s popular music-heavy metal music, specifically-to target audiences from across generations. Whereas older viewers who are familiar with heavy metal music are courted with the many music videos, interviews, and documentary programs that chronicle the genre's performers across VH1's content, younger viewers are courted with tongue-in-cheek modes of address that play on the stylistic and gendered excesses of heavy metal. Moreover, VH1 rearticulates for largely female audiences a genre most closely identified with young men, unsettling some of the subject-object dynamics at work in their repackaging of 1980s popular music. Reading the reality program Rock of Love amidst other elements of VH1's 1980s-themed programming, the author demonstrates how television recalls its own history to court ever-more viewers. In doing this, the network reifies some "old" gender politics in "new" texts. At the same time, the network issues some rejoinders and revisions to these politics. Television's narration of history is thus fragmented and contradictory, offering multiple points of entry to assorted viewerships.

Queerness, the Quality Audience, and Comedy Central's Reno 911!

Television & New Media, Jan 1, 2008

‘Your Mom is So Fat…,’ or Talking Politics on the Internet

Ashley Madison, Rentboy, and Dirty, Dirty Internet Sex

Debbie Downer Has a Facebook Problem: Regulating Affect on Social Media Networks

Le Petit Mort: Toddlers and Tiaras and Economic Decline

Johnny Weir, Vladimir Putin, and the Sexual Politics of the Sochi Olympics

'Visible: Out on TV' Roundtable

by Maria San Filippo, Beck Banks, and Hollis Griffin

Los Angeles Review of Books , 2020