An irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer
viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This
Is Us After personal loss, political upheaval, and the devastation
of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us craved a return to business as
usual, the mundane, the middlebrow. We turned to TV to find these
things. For nearly forty years, network television has produced a
constant stream of “cry-along” sentimental-realist dramedies
designed to appeal to liberal, heterosexual, white America. But
what makes us keep watching, even though these TV series inevitably
fail to reflect who we are? Revisiting soothing network dramedies
like Parenthood,Gilmore Girls, This Is Us, and their late-80s
precursor, thirtysomething, Normporn mines the nuanced pleasures
and attraction-repulsion queer viewers experience watching liberal
family-centric shows. Karen Tongson reflects on how queer cultural
observers work through repeated declarations of a “new normal”
and flash lifestyle trends like “normcore,” even as the
absurdity, aberrance, and violence of our culture intensifies.
Normporn allows us to process how the intimate traumas of everyday
life depicted on certain TV shows—of love, life, death, and
loss—are linked to the collective and historical traumas of their
contemporary moments, from financial recessions and political
crises to the pandemic. Normporn asks, what are queers to do—what
is anyone to do, really—when we are forced to confront the fact
of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained?
The fantasies, the utopian impulses, and (paradoxically) the
unreality of sentimental realist TV drama creates a productive
tension that queer spectators in particular take pleasure in, even
as—or precisely because—it lulls us into a sense of boredom and
stability that we never thought we could want or have. .
General
| Imprint: |
New York University Press
|
| Country of origin: |
United States |
| Series: |
Postmillennial Pop |
| Release date: |
November 2023 |
| Authors: |
Karen Tongson
|
| Dimensions: |
203 x 127mm (L x W) |
| Pages: |
224 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-1-4798-4192-9 |
| Categories: |
Books
Promotions
|
| LSN: |
1-4798-4192-7 |
| Barcode: |
9781479841929 |
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