Feeling Normal Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age [Paperback]

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 experienceswhile not universally accessible, nor necessarily empoweringare often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable.

Altogether, Griffins analysis provides a pathway for understanding how gay and lesbian media, including films likeElena Undone, can make LGBTQ people feel normal. Furthermore, he underlines the importance of these feelings for identifying medias discursive role in constructing the boundaries of gay and lesbian citizenship.

As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passionate, and lucid. Whether hes explaining Grindrs memes or the gayborhoods of Chicago, cable travel programs or online networks, Griffin discovers how it feels to be queer in the digital age.

Overall,Feeling Normalprovides an important addition to the existing scholarship in the field. This book will serve those interested in cultural studies, media studies, and LGBTQ studies well.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Cities as Affective Convergences
2. The Aesthetics of Banality After New Queer Cinema
3. Commodity Activism and Corporate Synergy on Cable TV
4. Toward an Actually Queer Criticism of Television
5. Wal36