Description
Book SynopsisQuinlan Miller reframes American television history by tracing a camp aesthetic and the common appearance of trans queer gender characters in both iconic and lesser known sitcoms throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Trade Review"
Camp TV offers us theoretical and methodological challenges to presumptions and argumentations common in queer media histories…hence the usefulness here of a new terminology entirely. What the book also offers, however, is an impressive model of full-scale approach to queer media histories." -- Taylor Cole Miller * New Review of Film and Television Studies *
"A revelatory historical reassessment of US network sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s.… Miller combines scholarly rigor with the engaged, politicized vivacity of a subversive connoisseur and the banter of a raconteur in order to rewrite dominant histories of the sitcom, camp, and LGBTQIA+ media representation.… A tour de force abounding with compelling and witty textual analyses fueled by painstaking archival research."
-- Ken Feil * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *
"A detailed picture of the production and cultural contexts of queer gender appearance in sitcoms, ranging from non-conforming dress and gestures to critiques of heterosexual marriage." -- Katharine Mussellam * Jump Cut *
"[
Camp TV] is impressive and provides a necessary re-reading of neglected and devalued texts that cast our present studies of contemporary queerness into provocative question. . . . This book will be a valuable contribution to courses in television history, queer studies and, especially, studies of the queer in popular culture, and will be an antidote to institutional narratives that have solidified unproductively around the ‘newness’ of queer TV." -- Judith Fathallah * Critical Studies in Television *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Trans Gender Queer: New Terms for TV History 1
1. Camp TV and Queer Gender: Sitcom History 27
2. Queer Gender and
Bob Cummings: Hollywood Camp TV 55
3. Marriage Schmarriage: Sex and the Single Person 88
4. Trans Camp TV: Methods for
Girl History 131
Conclusion. Around-the-Clock Queer Gender: Digital Camp TV 155
Notes 165
Bibliography 197
Index 211
