Abstract
Reviewed by: Kate McNicholas Smith, Lancaster University, UK
In Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire, Amy Villarejo develops a nuanced theoretical account of queer television. The text both offers new reflections on a historical archive of queer material and poses new questions about the future of television analysis. This provocative account brings new perspectives to the project of queer media theory.
One of the central concerns of the book is to develop analyses that move away from the ‘discussions of representational justice, identification and recognition’ (p. 5) that, Villarejo argues, dominate the field. Citing other work on LGBTQ television, Villarejo argues that such studies simplify the complexities of the queer television archive. Villarejo questions the value of analytical frameworks that consider queer representation only in terms of in/visibility, marginalisation and stereotypes. She challenges the tendency to posit the 1990s as signifying a shift in queer representation, and rejects any simple conflation of visibility and social change. Rather, she proposes that we consider a more ‘robust and rich sense of the queer archive’ (p. 5). Drawing together strands of queer theory, critical theory, feminist theory and television studies, Villarejo examines what she describes as ‘the complicated and sophisticated temporal and spatial system that is television’ (p. 6). Temporality is central to this account, as Villarejo asks how queer time and space both shape and are shaped by television’s changing time.
Villarejo draws on the work of Theodor Adorno, examining, in particular, his 1954 article ‘How to Look at Television’. Chapter 1 develops Adorno’s account of gender, sexuality and television, arguing that Adorno offers a perceptive frame for critical analysis. Contextualising the emergence of his critique, Villarejo develops Adorno’s accounts of television, the gendered viewer and the domestic. Considering Adorno’s term ‘pseudorealism’, Villarejo extends Adorno’s investigations of the social functions of mass culture.
Bringing a developed critique linked to Adorno’s theories to debates around realism and representation, Villarejo proposes alternative frames for queer media studies. Drawing on these concerns throughout the book, she develops complex and layered accounts of television as, and in relation to, time, space, cities and the family. Her analysis provides persuasive reflections on various television programmes such as Starsky and Hutch, An American Family and the television adaption of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. In moving between genres and generations, the text constructs a lively narrative about queer television and lives from the 1950s onwards. Her analysis, which is interspersed with personal reflection and biographic detail, weaves various strands of time and space through these diverse examples. Mobilising her interdisciplinary resources, Villarejo draws an economic analysis through a queer frame. Ultimately the book pushes us to consider the potentiality of television: Villarejo asks, ‘what may it enable us to become?’ (p. 153).
This book suggests distinctive ways of understanding television. Villarejo makes a timely contribution as television theorists develop new accounts of the changing medium of digital television and new media technologies. Thus, for example, her discussion of a YouTube video reworking selected scenes of the film Losing Chase to the Whitney Houston song I Have Nothing captures the dynamic and unstable possibilities of contemporary television. Her analysis challenges television studies to develop in ways that are attuned to these possibilities. Critically, this book brings queer theory to the investigation of these shifts in television, foregrounding gender and sexuality and drawing on a wide range of perspectives to develop its theoretical framework.
Whilst Villarejo’s is a theoretically thorough and thought-provoking account, its complexity may alienate some readers. The book proposes new approaches, but it is perhaps unnecessarily dismissive in its rejections of others. Although Villarejo makes a convincing case for more nuanced readings of television media, I am not entirely convinced by her negative accounts of other studies of queer representation. Furthermore, the examples considered in her text are, as the author suggests, ‘archival’. What of more contemporary examples? Whilst Villarejo highlights the shifts in media production, ultimately she gives little attention to more recent developments. I am left wondering whether there are ways in which we need to pay attention to the specificities of what current trends in queer media ‘enable us to become’, with all their complexities and paradoxes.