Queer Popular Culture

THOMAS PEELE is Assistant Professor of English at Boise State University, USA, where he teaches graduate classes in cultural studies and rhetorical theory, and undergraduate classes in non-fiction writing and new media.

• Introduction; T.Peele Reading for It: Lesbian Readers Constructing Culture and Identity through Textual Experience; S.Liming New Queer White Trash Cinema; D.Cunningham Arse Bandits: Exploring Nostalgic Representations of Queerness In Gangster Films; S.Mowlabocus Straight Shooters and Cowboy Codes: the Queer Frontier and American Identity in a Post-Western World; Z.Trodd & C.Le Coney Queering/Quaring Blackness in Noah's Arc; G.A.Yep & J.P.Elia Queer as Folk and the Spectacularisation of Gay Identity; G.Porfido Diva Interventions: Dana International and Israeli Gender Culture; A.Ziv Fashionably Femme: Lesbian Visibility, Style and Politics in The L Word; A.Dove-Viebahn All My (Queer) Children: Disrupting Daytime Desire in Pine Valley; C.Leaker Yaoi; M.McHarry Why (not) Queer?: Ambivalence about 'Politics' and Queer Identification in an Online Community in Taiwan; T.He Reading and Queering Plato in Hedwig and the Angry Inch; W.Hsu Ellen DeGeneres: Public Lesbian Number One; J.Reed Pushing the Boundaries of Basic Writing's Frontier: Using Media Representations of Gay Culture to Teach Basic Writers; L.Gray-Rosendale & K.Birnley From Lavender Jane Loves Women to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: On the Uses of Queer Culture in the Interdisciplinary Classroom; D.DeMuth & S.Barnes

"Queer Popular Culture is a particularly valuable contribution to the dialogue regarding how meaning is made - how the massage of media and popular culture influence, when left unexamined, can shape attitudes for better or worse." - dailykos.com'This isn't your uncle's LGBT studies, and that's a good thing! Thankfully free of turgid prose, these engaging essays range across the landscape of popular culture in the U.S. and beyond. If this is the future of queer cultural studies, we're in good hands.' Larry Gross, Professor and Director, School of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Southern California, USA'These essays show how a new generation of queer scholars are seizing and shaking our prior understandings of the intersection points between popular culture and sexual identities. Productively risky and thoughtfully provocative, exploring cultural spaces from the prime-time sitcom to the British gangster film, this collection shows how vital it is for queer thinkers to engage with popular texts and their implications for audiences of all persuasions.' Andy Medhurst, University of Sussex Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, UK'Performances of queerness in popular practices and commercial media have involved courage and compromise, bold openness and calculated covering, innovation and complex interactions with stereotype. The essays in this book - careful, politically insightful, and vivacious- trace a wide range of recent public negotiations of queerness. The lucid exposition and numerous references to other relevant studies make the book a terrific resource.' Fred Everett Maus, University of Virginia, USA