Introduction: What is Representation?
Welcome! This is our series on representations in media, highlighting how portrayals of various communities have been handled in the past and present, and where we hope to move in the future. On this page you will find features highlighting the portrayal of Asian American communities, Queer communities, and Animal/non-human species in film and television. These features contain resources for further research along with information on some of the common stereotypes/tropes associated with portrayals of these groups. We will continue to add new features periodically. This box serves as an introduction to the concept of representation in media featuring academic texts and scholarly articles on the topic.
In the broadest stokes, representation refers to the portrayal of people, groups, and communities in the media (including television, film, and books). Recently, audiences have asked for increased representation of underrepresented groups in media including of women, people of color, the queer community, transgender/nonbinary people, disabled people, and others. Audiences have also called for a greater diversity of religions, body types, nationality, and more to be portrayed on screen.
In trying to increase representation, however characters and plot lines can often fall into stereotypical depictions or tired tropes, especially when stories and characters are written or portrayed by members who are not part of a given group. According to Maja Hardikar, "the line between stereotype and representation is thin...it may be tempting to view the difference between “stereotype” and “representation” as the simple difference between good and bad; “representation” is when we see ourselves reflected up onscreen and feel empowered, “stereotype” is when the representation fails to represent us" (6). The features on this page discuss the histories of various stereotypes, which often originated from the first appearances members of a said group on screen (take, for example, The Dragon Lady or The Gay Best Friend).
Though representation might seem trivial, studies have shown that in some instances, the dissemination of diverse media is actually a transformative action. For example, a 2015 study found that when straight people are more exposed to gay characters on TV they become more accepting of gay equality, with a 2020 survey by GLAAD and P&G finding that queer representation increased queer acceptance by up to 45% (Bond and Compton; GLAAD).
Representation is only the beginning of a more equitable world for people whose identities do not afford them safety in the societies in which they live. Systemic, liberatory change requires deeper, more sustained movement, political activism, and community building. It is important to remember, however, that diverse representation can have dramatic, empowering, and beneficial effects on people's lives, especially when those representations depict complex characters in robust, nuanced stories.
Sources: Bond, B. J., & Compton, B. L. (2015). Gay On-Screen: The Relationship Between Exposure to Gay Characters on Television and Heterosexual Audiences’ Endorsement of Gay Equality. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(4), 717–732. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1093485; GLAAD. (2020, May 27). Procter & Gamble and GLAAD Study: Exposure to LGBTQ Representation in Media and Advertising Leads to Greater Acceptance of the LGBTQ Community. https://glaad.org/releases/procter-gamble-and-glaad-study-exposure-lgbtq-representation-media-and-advertising-leads/; Hardikar, M. (2023). A Real Gay Person: Representation and Stereotypes in Queer Romantic Comedies. Georgetown University.
How Television Shapes Our Worldview by ISBN: 9780739187043Publication Date: 2014-05-15Over the last half of the twentieth century, television has become the predominant medium through which the public accesses information about the world. Through the news, situation comedies, police dramas, and commercials, we learn about the world around us, and our role within it. These genres, narratives, and cultural forms are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that show the world as we might never see it in real life. How Television Shapes Our Worldview brings together a diverse set of scholars, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of the outside world. The essays include advertising and public relations analyses, audience interviews, and case studies that touch on genres ranging from science fiction in the 1970s to current "reality" television. Television truly provides a powerful influence over how we learn about the world around us and understand its social processes.
The Matter of Images: Essays on representations by ISBN: 0415254949Publication Date: 2002-07-11Now published in a revised second edition, The Matter of Images searches through the resonances of the term 'representation', analysing images in terms of why they matter, what they are made of, and the material realities they refer to. Richard Dyer's analyses consider representations of 'out' groups and traditionally dominant groups alike, and encompass the eclectic texts of contemporary culture, from queers to straights, political correctness, representations of Empire and films including Gilda, Papillon and The Night of the Living Dead. Essays new to the second edition discuss Lillian Gish as the ultimate white movie star, the representation of whiteness in the South in Birth of a Nation, and society's fascination with serial killers. The Matter of Images is distinctive in its commitment to writing politically about contemporary culture, while insisting on the importance of understanding the formal qualities and complexity of the images it investigates.
Representation by ISBN: 9781138020719Publication Date: 2015-11-04Written especially for undergraduate students, Representation synthesises and updates our understandings of representation - and the tools for its analysis - for use in the new mediascape. Jenny Kidd uses an engaging range of current examples and a lively style to explore a number of key questions reflecting existing and contemporary debates about representation. These key questions include: Who 'owns' and manages representations? Whose realities are foregrounded, and whose are consigned to invisibility? To what extent are increased opportunities for self-representation altering the landscape? And what happens to representation within the noisy, playful and often subversive communications of the Internet? Kidd considers the political, social and cultural importance of representation across a broad spectrum of cultural and creative industries.
Media Representation and the Global Imagination by ISBN: 9780745643809Publication Date: 2012-10-15This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others' lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing 'mediated intimacy' and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives. Orgad examines five sites of media representation - the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others.
Media Discourse: Representation and interaction by ISBN: 9780748623471Publication Date: 2007-09-15This lively and accessible study of media and discourse combines theoretical reflection with empirical engagement, and brings together insights from a range of disciplines. Within media and cultural studies, the study of media texts is dominated by an exclusive focus on representation. This book adds long overdue attention to social interaction.The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines key theoretical issues and concepts, including informalisation, genre hybridisation, positioning, dialogism and discourse. The second is a sustained interrogation of social interaction in and around media. Re-examining issues of representation and interaction, it critically assesses work on the para-social and broadcast sociability, then explores distinct sites of interaction: production communities, audience communities and 'interactivity' with audiences.
Television and the Self: Knowledge, identity, and media representation by ISBN: 9780739179574Publication Date: 2013-04-05Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television's prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection's rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly "very special" episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.
Picturing the Beast: Animals, identity, and representation by ISBN: 0252070305Publication Date: 2001-10-16From Mickey Mouse to the teddy bear, from the Republican elephant to the use of "jackass" as an all-purpose insult, images of animals play a central role in politics, entertainment, and social interactions. In this penetrating look at how Western culture pictures the beast, Steve Baker examines how such images--sometimes affectionate, sometimes derogatory, always distorting--affect how real animals are perceived and treated. Baker provides an animated discussion of how animals enter into the iconography of power through wartime depictions of the enemy, political cartoons, and sports symbolism.
- Cross-cultural representation of ‘otherness’ in media discourseCaldas-Coulthard, C. R. (2003). Cross-cultural representation of ‘otherness’ in media discourse. In Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity (pp. 272-296). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
- Gender, race, and media representationBrooks, D. E., & Hébert, L. P. (2006). Gender, race, and media representation. Handbook of gender and communication, 16, 297-317.
- Media and the representation of OthersFürsich, E. (2010). Media and the representation of Others. International social science journal, 61(199), 113-130.
- Diaspora in the digital era: Minorities and media representationGeorgiou, M. (2013). Diaspora in the digital era: Minorities and media representation. Jemie, 12, 80.
- Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicityDixon, T. L., Weeks, K. R., & Smith, M. A. (2019). Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity. In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication.
- Media beyond representationAngus, I. H. (2022). Media beyond representation. In Cultural politics in contemporary America (pp. 333-346). Routledge.
Asian American Representation in the Media
Content Warning: This guide contains depictions and descriptions of yellowface, whitewashing, orientalism, and racism again Asian people.
Images: Films (from left to right), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Bitter Melon (2018), PEN15 (2019-), Minari (2020).
Welcome to the Asian American Representation in the Media LibGuide. This guide will discuss the history of Asian American representation in the media—primarily in Hollywood—and examine some common tropes/stereotypes applied to Asian characters in film and television. Here, you will find brief discussions of the Model Minority Myth, the Dragon Lady trope, techno-orientalism, and whitewashing/yellowface, along with a selections of books and films written/created by Asian Americans featuring nuanced characters and portrayals of Asian experiences, including the movies and films in the above images.
In a recent study, “I Am Not a Fetish or Model Minority” (2021) from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, researchers found that Asian and Pacific Islanders (API) actors made up only 4.5% of leads or co-leads in the top 10 grossing domestic films from 2010-2019. In films featuring API characters in the main cast, about a third of API characters "embody at least one common API trope or stereotype (35.2%)" such as the “Martial Artist,” the “Model Minority,” or the “Exotic Woman.” There is a long and continuing history of the whitewashing and stereotyping of Asian characters in Hollywood films. In 1935, MGM refused to consider Anna May Wong for the leading role O-Lan in the The Good Earth—instead casting Luise Rainer to play O-Lan in yellowface. In the 2023 biography Tetris, Taron Egerton, a Welsh actor was been cast to play video game publisher Henk Rogers, who is Dutch-Indonesian.
The guide serves only as an introduction and highlights texts in our collection that focus on Asian American representation in the media. For more information, see our companion guides including our Feminist Media Studies guide which features brief explanations of stereotypes inflicted on women in the media:
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (Media Studies)
- Asian American Representation in the Media (Media Studies)
- Korea Remixed (Media Studies)
- Spotlight on Queer & Trans* Asian Literature and Poetics (Gender Studies)
- Asian American and Pacific Islander Philosophies (Philosophy)
- Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Media Resources (Media Services)
- Asian American Artists, Architects, and Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- AAPI Identity - Recommended Reads from the Children's Collection (Education Library)
Video: The History of Asian Representation in Film. VICE News (2021).
Citations: Almost Half of All Asian Roles Serve as a Punchline, Study Finds. Sakshi Venkatraman, NBC News, 5 Aug. 2021.
Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) by Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) explores all aspects of Asian American experiences through original articles detailing new theoretical developments, research results, methodological innovations, public policy concerns, and pedagogical issues. The Journal also publishes book, media, and exhibition reviews. As a much-needed outlet for the increasing volume of scholarship in the field, JAAS provides an avenue for a quick and lively exchange of ideas. Journal of Asian American Studies is the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).
Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction by ISBN: 9781503604018Publication Date: 2018-07-17Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by ISBN: 9781478016359Publication Date: 2022-11-18In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity.
Asian American Media Activism by ISBN: 9781479878192Publication Date: 2016-05-17Among the most well-known YouTubers are a cadre of talented Asian American performers, including comedian Ryan Higa and makeup artist Michelle Phan. Yet beneath the sheen of these online success stories lies a problem—Asian Americans remain sorely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. When they do appear on screen, they are often relegated to demeaning stereotypes such as the comical foreigner, the sexy girlfriend, or the martial arts villain. The story that remains untold is that as long as these inequities have existed, Asian Americans have been fighting back—joining together to protest offensive imagery, support Asian American actors and industry workers, and make their voices heard. Providing a cultural history and ethnography, Asian American Media Activism assesses everything from grassroots collectives in the 1970s up to contemporary engagements by fan groups, advertising agencies, and users on YouTube and Twitter. In linking these different forms of activism, Lori Kido Lopez investigates how Asian American media activism takes place and evaluates what kinds of interventions are most effective. Ultimately, Lopez finds that activists must be understood as fighting for cultural citizenship, a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance within a nation that has long rejected them.
The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media by ISBN: 9781317540847Publication Date: 2017-02-24The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media. Contributor essays focus on new approaches to the study of Asian American media including explorations of transnational and diasporic media, studies of intersectional identities encompassed by queer or mixed race Asian Americans, and examinations of new media practices that challenge notions of representation, participation, and community. Expertly organized to represent work across disciplines, this companion is an essential reference for the study of Asian American media and cultural studies.
Asians Loving Asians by ISBN: 9781433183058Publication Date: 2022-01-11Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics examines media representations and everyday interpersonal intercultural negotiations of vernacular discourses around sticky rice—an "Asian" man building sexual and romantic relationships with other "Asian" men. Specifically, Eguchi interrogates the following elements of sticky rice: the way sticky rice recycles, rethinks, and shifts the settler colonialist logics of whiteness that sustain ongoing histories of anti-Asian racism; the way sticky rice resists and reifies the mundane operation and execution of whiteness that organizes gay sexual cultures; the way sticky rice reproduces, reconstitutes, and challenges intra-regional political rivalries, economic hierarchies, and historical tensions in and across Asia and Asian diasporas; and the way sticky rice suggests alternative mappings of queer sex, desire, intimacy, and relationality. By taking further steps to unpack the complexities and contradictions of sticky rice as a gay vernacular, Eguchi offers an additional and alternative space to question and critique "Asians loving Asians."
A View from the Bottom by ISBN: 9780822376606Publication Date: 2014-07-29A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.
Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora by ISBN: 9781978823341Publication Date: 2021-08-13With the rise of digital tools used for media entrepreneurship, media outlets staffed by only one or two individuals and targeted to niche and super-niche audiences are developing across a wide range of platforms. Minority communities such as immigrants and refugees have long been pioneers in this space, operating ethnic media outlets with limited staff and funding to produce content that is relevant and accessible to their specific community. Micro Media Industries explores the specific case of Hmong American media, showing how an extremely small population can maintain a robust and thriving media ecology in spite of resource limitations and an inability to scale up. Based on six years of fieldwork in Hmong American communities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, it analyzes the unique opportunities and challenges facing Hmong newspapers, radio, television, podcasts, YouTube, social media, and other emerging platforms. It argues that micro media industries, rather than being dismissed or trivialized, ought to be held up as models of media innovation that can counter the increasing power of mainstream media.
Making Asian American Film and Video: Histories, Institutions, Movements by ISBN: 9780813565019Publication Date: 2015-03-06The words "Asian American film" might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses.
Whitewashing the Movies: Asian erasure and white subjectivity in US film culture by ISBN: 9781978808621Publication Date: 2021-10-15Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of "whitewashing" in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.
Asian Americans and the Media by ISBN: 9780745642734Publication Date: 2009-01-20Asian Americans and the Media provides a concise, thoughtful, critical and cultural studies analysis of U.S. media representations of Asian Americans. The book also explores ways Asian Americans have resisted, responded to, and conceptualized the terrain of challenge and resistance to those representations, often through their own media productions. In this engaging and accessible book, Ono and Pham summarize key scholarship on Asian American media, as well as lay theoretical groundwork to help students, scholars and other interested readers understand historical and contemporary media representations of Asian Americans in traditional media, including print, film, music, radio, and television, as well as in newer media, primarily internet-situated. Since Asian Americans had little control over their representation in early U.S. media, historically dominant white society largely constructed Asian American media representations. In this context, the book draws attention to recurring patterns in media representation, as well as responses by Asian America. Today, Asian Americans are creating complex, sophisticated, and imaginative self-portraits within U.S. media, often equipped with powerful information and education about Asian Americans.
Video: Why Do We Call Asian Americans The Model Minority? AJ+ (2017).
The Model Minority Myth
The Model Minority Myth is a stereotype of certain minority groups, particularly Asian Americans, as successful, well-adjusted, and therefore requiring little or no social and economic assistance. The phrase "model minority" originated in a 1966 New York Times article by William Peterson who used the phrase to describe the economic prosperity of Japanese Americans after WWII. Since then, the term has been applied to many other groups including Chinese Americans, Indian Americans, and Korean Americans. The model minority stereotype is not only harmful to Asian Americans because it groups them into a monolith but also in that it perpetuates the idea that other minority groups should be able to achieve model minority status not through the removal of systemic barriers but through hard work alone. This stereotype can be found in media, journalism, academia, popular culture, and more. For example, in 1987 TIME published their magazine with a cover photo of "Those Asian-American Whiz Kids."
Images: (Left) Success Story, Japanese-American Style: Success Story, Japanese-American Style. William Peterson, New York Times, (1966). (Right) Those Asian-American Whiz Kids. TIME Magazine (1987).
The Term "Asian American"
Scholars and activists have long critiqued the terms AAPI and Asian American as "masking differences in histories and needs among communities, as well as supporting the myth that Asian Americans are a monolithic group" (Connie Hanzhang Jin, 2021). This monolithic mindset contributes society often overlooking diversity in the Asian American community in terms of ethnic groups, experience, immigration status, and economic circumstances. In fact, contrary to the Model Minority Myth which states that Asian Americans are an economically prosperous demographic that does not require financial assistance or investment, Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group in America:
Graph: Key disparities in income and education among Asian American groups. Connie Hanzhang Jin, NPR (2021).
The perception of Asian Americans being economically and academically successful hides the fact that many Asian American communities experience high rates of poverty and Asian American students often feel intense academic pressure which leads to heightened rates of anxiety and stress. While the release of films and shows such as "Crazy Rich Asians" (the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993) and Netflix's "Bling Empire" have undoubtedly increased Asian American representation in Hollywood, it is important to note that these films do play into stereotypes about the prevalence of extremely rich and successful Asian Americans. Of course, if there were more representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood, this would not be a concern—all communities deserve to be represented in a multitude of nuanced ways—but it is important to consider which portrayals of Asian Americans receive studio/Hollywood funding, win prestigious awards, and draw large audiences.
Video: The Complicated Discussion Surrounding Crazy Rich Asians. Quality Culture (2022).
The model minority myth manifests in television and film characters who are portrayed as one-dimensional nerds, high-achievers, and stoic, diligent workers. To keep learning about this myth, explore some the resources listed below:
- Video: Adam Ruins Everything—How America Created the “Model Minority” Myth (truTV)
- Video: Asian Americans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
- Video: The Model Minority Trope, Explained (The Take)
- Video: The Origins of the Model Minority Myth (Project Lotus)
- Website: Deconstructing the Model Minority at UM (University of Michigan)
- Confronting Asian-American Stereotypes (Adeel Hassan, The New York Times)
The Color of Success by ISBN: 9780691157825Publication Date: 2013-11-24The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"—peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values—in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity by ISBN: 9780197557488Publication Date: 2022-04-26There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the "model minority." While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists are quick to disprove the model minority as "myth," author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather thandisproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered subjectivities in relation to the model minority relation that Rivera terms "model minority masochism." With specific attention to hegemonic masculine Asian American culturalproduction, Rivera details two complementary forms of contemporary racial masochism: a self-subjugating masochism which embraces the model minority, and its opposite, a self-flagellating masochism that punishes oneself for having been associated with the model minority at all.
Citations:
Peterson, W. "Success Story, Japanese-American Style: Success Story, Japanese-American Style." New York Times (1923-), Jan 09, 1966, pp. 180. ProQuest.
“TIME Magazine Cover: Asian-American Whiz Kids - Aug. 31, 1987.” TIME.Com. Accessed 10 May 2023.
The Dragon Lady is a stereotype of Asian women, particularly East Asian women, as strong, deceitful, domineering, mysterious, and sexually alluring. The Dragon Lady might be seen wearing 'traditional' dress when no one else around her is, speaking in cryptic/flowery metaphors, or utilizing Asian fighting styles. The term comes from the U.S. comic strip "Terry and the Pirates," which featured a character called Dragon Lady, also known as Madam Deal.
Image: Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady. Milton Caniff (1975). Featuring the Dragon Lady, a character based on Lai Choi San, a 1900s Chinese pirate.
Inspired by the characters played by actress Anna May Wong, the term is often applied in opposition to the "Lotus Blossom" stereotype of an overly submissive and hyper-sexualized Asian woman. The Dragon Lady has often been used to refer to powerful Asian women—such as Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) and Devika Rani—in a derogatory fashion. The term dragon lady is applied to Asian women and not to their non-Asian counterparts as Lucy Liu highlights in her discussion of Kill Bill: Volume I:
"Kill Bill' features three other female professional killers in addition to Ishii. Why not call Uma Thurman, Vivica A. Fox or Daryl Hannah a dragon lady? I can only conclude that it's because they are not Asian, I could have been wearing a tuxedo and a blond wig, but I still would have been labeled a dragon lady because of my ethnicity.
"Kill Bill," includes many female assassins but shows Liu's character committing her assassinations in traditional Japanese costume.
Images: Poster for Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Anna May Wong as Princess Ling Moy.
The Dragon Lady trope has its roots in the Page Act of 1875, a United States law which prohibited the immigration of “Oriental” laborers brought against their will or for “lewd and immoral purposes.” In practice, this law banned all East Asian women from entering the US. On the perception of Asian women during this time, Nancy Wang Yuen states: “They were characterized as potentially carrying sexual diseases. They were also characterized as being temptations for white men” (qtd. in Pham 2021). The Dragon Lady is a result of centuries of Anti-Asian bias, yellow peril, and racist assumptions about Asian women. It is important to note that until recently, these were some of the only roles that Asian women in Hollywood were allowed to play—actors needed to take these positions lest they not be cast at all. The problem with the Dragon Lady stereotype is not that it depicts Asian women as strong, attractive, and mysterious, but that media would often refuse to show Asian women as anything else (Pham, 2021). For more on the nuanced reality of this stereotype see Sarah Kuhn's article "Enter the Dragon Lady" and explore the resources listed below:
- Hollywood Played a Role in Hypersexualizing Asian Women (India Roby, Teen Vogue)
- Here's how pop culture has perpetuated harmful stereotypes of Asian women (Elise Pham, Today.com)
- Twitter thread (CAPE—Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment)
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene by ISBN: 9780822340331Publication Date: 2007-07-30In The Hypersexuality of Race, Celine Parreñas Shimizu urges a shift in thinking about sexualized depictions of Asian/American women in film, video, and theatrical productions. Shimizu advocates moving beyond denunciations of sexualized representations of Asian/American women as necessarily demeaning or negative. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the mysterious mix of pleasure, pain, and power in performances of sexuality, she advances a theory of "productive perversity," a theory which allows Asian/American women—and by extension other women of color—to lay claim to their own sexuality and desires as actors, producers, critics, and spectators. She looks at how three Hollywood Asian/American femme fatales—Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu—negotiate representations of their sexuality; analyzes 1920s and 1930s stag films in which white women perform as sexualized Asian characters; and considers Asian/American women's performances in films ranging from the stag pornography of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. In her examination of films and videos made by Asian/American feminists, Shimizu describes how female characters in their works reject normative definitions of race, gender, and sexuality, thereby expanding our definitions of racialized sexualities in representation.
Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism by ISBN: 9780813586304Publication Date: 2016-12-12When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence? Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. The book charts how white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed nearly a hundred working actors and drew on published interviews with celebrities, such as Viola Davis, Chris Rock, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Liu, and Ken Jeong, to explore how racial stereotypes categorize and constrain actors. Their stories reveal the day-to-day racism actors of color experience in talent agents' offices, at auditions, and on sets. Yuen also exposes sexist hiring and programming practices, highlighting the structural inequalities that actors of color, particularly women, continue to face in Hollywood.
Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words by Publication Date: 2011Anna May Wong knew she wanted to be a movie star from the time she was a young girl—and by 17 she became one. A third generation Chinese-American, she went on to make dozens of films in Hollywood and Europe. She was one of the few actors to successfully transition from silent to sound cinema, co-starring with Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks along the way. She was glamorous, talented and cosmopolitan—yet she spent most of her career typecast either as a painted doll or a scheming dragon lady. For years, older generations of Chinese-Americans frowned upon the types of roles she played; but today a younger generation of Asian Americans sees her as a pioneering artist, who succeeded in a hostile environment that hasn't altogether changed. Yunah Hong's engrossing documentary is an entertaining and imaginative survey of Wong's career, exploring the impact Wong had on images of Asian American women in Hollywood, both then and now. Excerpts from Wong's films, archival photographs and interviews enhance this richly detailed picture of a woman and her extraordinary life.
Slaying the Dragon by Publication Date: 1987, 2011Describes racial and gender stereotyping of Asian women in U.S. motion pictures as well as other filmic media, with "Reloaded" updating the original documentary by noting the effects of globalization and a changing population within the past 25 years. Includes interviews with actresses and other Asian American women who describe their experiences of such stereotyping.
Video: Virtually Asian (English subtitles). Astria Suparak, Berkeley Art Center (2021).
In 2020, Astria Suparak launched the "Asian futures, without Asians" series, a "a visual analysis of over half a century of American science fiction cinema. A multipart research project, it draws from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry." In this series, Suparak analyzes how science fiction utilizes stereotypical Asian signifiers that serve as the backdrop for an almost exclusively white cast.
“The piece is part of a larger project examining 40 years of sci-fi films and how white filmmakers envision a future that is inflected by Asian culture but devoid of actual Asian people."
—Astria Suparak qtd, in "Asian-American Artists, Now Activists, Push Back Against Hate"
Learn more about Suparak's ongoing project and explore additional resources below:
- How Sci-Fi Films Use Asian Characters to Telegraph the Future While Also Dehumanizing Them (Evan Nicole Brown, The Hollywood Reporter).
- Orientalism, Cyberpunk 2077, and Yellow Peril in Science Fiction (George Yang, Wired). Cyberpunk as a genre, and Cyberpunk 2077 the game, are both rooted in a type of other-ization that can’t be ignored—but it can be examined.
- After Yang (Anna Maitland)
- Video: Techno-Orientalism with Dr. Terry K. Park (IU East)
Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema by ISBN: 9780816649792Publication Date: 2010-10-05Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style. Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility. Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.
Techno-Orientalism by ISBN: 9780813570631Publication Date: 2015-04-17What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection's fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly. Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia.
Video: Yellowface is a bad look, Hollywood. Vox (2016).
Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. Yellowface is a form of whitewashing where non-Asian actors are cast to play Asian characters. The practice of yellowface extends from the beginning of Hollywood to today. Famous early examples include Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan in "Charlie Chan Carries On" (1931) and Dr. Fu Manchu in "The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu" (1929). In the 1960s, Mickey Rooney wore yellowface to portray I. Y. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961). More recently, you might recall Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, and Michael Pitt playing Japanese animated characters in "Ghost in the Shell" (2017), Emma Stone as Allison Ng in "Aloha" (2015), and white actors playing Asian and Inuit characters in the film adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Images: (Left to right) Scarlett Johansson in "Ghost in a Shell", Emma Stone in "Aloha", and the cast of "The Last Airbender"
Whitewashing is prominent in Hollywood for Asian characters as well as any non-white characters. For an extensive list, check out this Wikipedia page. Many directors and producers are pressured by Hollywood executives to cast non-Asian actors in Asian roles. For example. Lulu Wang, the director of The Farewell (a film about here Chinese American family), has stated that many American financiers wanted to include a "prominent white character into the narrative, and punch up the nuanced drama to turn it into a broad comedy."
To learn more about the history of whitewashing and yellowface, explore the resources below:
- Is a Disappointing Ghost in the Shell the Nail in the Coffin of Hollywood Whitewashing? (Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair)
- When white actors play other races (Tom Brook, BBC)
- Yellowface, Whitewashing, and the History of White People Playing Asian Characters (Jenn Fang, TeenVogue)
- Video: The History of Yellowface (Teen Vogue)
Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood by
The history of Asian American roles and the casting of those roles in Hollywood are documented through archival footage and interviews with contemporary critics.
Project Yellow by Publication Date: 2015A documentary by an Asian guy about Asian guys and the stigma they often face. Yellow is a documentary about the Asian male phenomena perceived in the media and gay culture and how it reflects from their childhood.
Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era by ISBN: 9780472055432Publication Date: 2022-07-11Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862-1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century.
Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American culture by ISBN: 9781501352201Publication Date: 2019-11-14How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later.
Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance, 1850s-1920s by ISBN: 0813535069Publication Date: 2005-01-31Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The following are films by and featuring Asian directors, writers, and actors. For additional lists, see below:
- 11 Films by Asian American and Pacific Islander Directors to Fill Your May Days (Sundance Institute)
- Five AAPI Directors Who Are Refiguring American Cinema (Focus Features)
- 57 Asian Actors and Actresses in Hollywood You Should Know (Isis Briones, Tommy Taso, Kristi Kellogg, and Sara Li, Teen Vogue)
Saving Face by
Publication Date: 2004Wilhelmina is a Chinese-American lesbian and a young surgeon who has kept her sexual orientation secret from her conservative Chinese community in New York. But when her widowed mother becomes pregnant and is kicked out by her own parents, Wil suddenly has to juggle her mother's secrets with her own.
The Namesake by Publication Date: 2007After moving from Calcutta to New York, members of the Ganguli family maintain a delicate balancing act between honoring the traditions of their native India and blending into American culture. Although parents Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) are proud of the sacrifices they make to give their offspring opportunities, their son Gogol (Kal Penn) strives to forge his own identity without forgetting his heritage.Bitter Melon by
Publication Date: 2018The story of a Filipino-American family who reunites for a Christmas party at the family home in San Francisco only to find out that Troy, the second oldest child, has been ruling the house with fear.Every Day in Kaimuki by
Publication Date: 2022A young man is determined to give his life meaning outside of Kaimuki, the small Hawaiian town where he grew up, even if it means leaving everything he's ever known and loved behind.
Everything Everywhere All At Once by Publication Date: 2022When an interdimensional rupture unravels reality, an unlikely hero must channel her newfound powers to fight bizarre and bewildering dangers from the multiverse as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.Blue Bayou by
Publication Date: 2021As a Korean-American man raised in the Louisiana bayou works hard to make a life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past as he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.
Minari by Publication Date: 2021A tender and sweeping story about what roots people that follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, this film shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
Better Luck Tomorrow by ISBN: 9780792194019Publication Date: 2003A group of seemingly "perfect" high-school buddies lead double lives. They fly high in a world of petty crime and material excess - a free-wheeling lifestyle that soon takes a downward spiral, leading to an unexpected, violent end.
Performing Girl by Publication Date: 2013A look at the early life of D'Lo: a queer, transgender, Tamil Sir Lankan American writer, actor, director, comedian, activist and music producer who grew up in Lancaster, CA. This film is available to rent on Prime Video.
The Joy Luck Club by Publication Date: 1993In San Francisco, a group of aging Chinese women (Kiều Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, Lisa Lu) meet regularly to trade familial stories while playing Mahjong. In a series of sixteen vignettes that spans generations and continents, this adaptation of Amy Tan's bestselling novel explores cultural conflict and the often-turbulent relationships between four first-generation Chinese-American women (Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao) and their mothers.American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by
Publication Date: 2013"What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American writer, activist, and philosopher in Detroit. Rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America's past and its potentially radical future.The Grace Lee Project by
Publication Date: 2005Pursuing the moving target of Asian-American female identity, filmmaker Grace Lee, in a clever, highly unscientific investigation visits with Asian American women named "Grace Lee," from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school. With wit and charm, the film puts a hilarious spin on the eternal question "What's in a name?"
Content Warning: Gore
Video: Happy (Official Music Video). Mitski (2016).
Asian Americans have been exploring media representation through their writing, music, cinema, and essays. Below is a small selection of books written by Asian Americans about the Asian American experience.
Interior Chinatown by ISBN: 9780307907196Publication Date: 2020-01-28Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by ISBN: 9781984820372Publication Date: 2020-02-25Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.Bin ding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Disorientation by ISBN: 9780593298350Publication Date: 2022-03-22A Taiwanese American woman's coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel. Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about "Chinese-y" things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, she convinces herself it's her ticket out of academic hell. But Ingrid's in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note's message lead to an explosive discovery, upending not only her sheltered life within academia but her entire world beyond it. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. For readers of Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, this uproarious and bighearted satire is a blistering send-up of privilege and power in America, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage.
Yellowface by ISBN: 9780063250833Publication Date: 2023-05-16Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Stay True by ISBN: 9780385547772Publication Date: 2022-09-27In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
Sigh, Gone: A misfit's memoir of great books, punk rock, and the fight to fit in by ISBN: 9781250194718Publication Date: 2020-04-21In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man's bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the '80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.
Sour Heart by ISBN: 9780399589386Publication Date: 2017-08-01A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.
A Burning by ISBN: 9780525658696Publication Date: 2020-06-02Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning is an electrifying debut.
The Making of Asian America: A History by ISBN: 9781476739403Publication Date: 2015-09-01The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States.
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences to the broadest audience possible. We do this by funding, producing, distributing and exhibiting works in film, television and digital media. For 40 years, CAAM has exposed audiences to new voices and communities, advancing our collective understanding of the American experience through programs specifically designed to engage the Asian American community and the public at large. CAAM has put together a collection titled "Memories to Light," a project to collect and digitize home movies and to share them–and the stories they tell—to a broad public.
Video: Memories to Light 2.0: The Bohulano Family. CAAMChannel (2014).
Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ)
"Asian Americans have been part of the American story since its earliest days, and are now the U.S.'s fastest-growing racial group with the potential and power to shape our nation and the policies that affect us. Our mission is to advance civil and human rights for Asian Americans and to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all." Explore their Media Diversity Page.
Asian Film Archive: The Asian Film Archive was founded in January 2005 as a non-profit organisation to preserve the rich film heritage of Singapore and Asian Cinema, to encourage scholarly research on film, and to promote a wider critical appreciation of this art form.
Human/Non-Human Relationships in Media
Introduction
During April, we celebrate both Earth Month and Earth Day (April 26th). Earth Day has been celebrated since 1970 and marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement. In celebration of this month and day, we have developed a guide focusing on human relationships with the non-human world. This feature will center on representation of animals in the media, literature, and culture. You will find poetry, nonfiction, and novels that allow you to witness how writers and creatives are thinking, and have been thinking, about human/non-human relations.
Image: Still from Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (1988).
If you are looking to learn more about the history of a specific animal, look into The Animal Series from Reaktion Books which explores the natural history of animals alongside their historical and cultural impact on humankind. Each short book is a wonderful introduction to an animal with which you are probably familiar and maybe even encounter daily!
Image: The Animal Series from Reaktion Books. Moth, Hare, Nightingale, Lizard.
Next Steps
Check out our companion feature in the Philosophy guide for more information on the scholarly fields of Animal Studies and Critical Animal Studies, as well as other philosophies of the non-human.
If you'd like to explore more thematic content relevant to climate change, environmental justice, and nature, try the Environmental Justice & Earth Day feature, which includes music, novels, feature films, and documentaries on these topics, and the highlight on Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics at the Philosophy Research Guide.
The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies by ISBN: 9780199927142Publication Date: 2017-03-01Intellectual struggles with the "animal question"—how humans can rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals—first began to take hold in the 1970s. Over the next forty years, scholars from a wide range of fields would make sweeping reevaluations of the relationship between humans and other animals. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies brings these diverse evaluations together for the first time, paying special attention to the commodification of animals, the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction, and the increasing need for humans to coexist with other animals in urban, rural and natural contexts. Linda Kalof maps these themes into the five major categories that structure this volume: Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics and Public Policy; Animal Intentionality, Agency and Reflexive Thinking; Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle and Sport; Animals in Cultural Representations; and Animals in Ecosystems. Written by international scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy, the thirty chapters in this handbook investigate key issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.
Critical Terms for Animal Studies by ISBN: 9780226355399Publication Date: 2018-10-23Animal Studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and other animals. Scholarship in Animal Studies draws on a variety of methodologies to explore these multi-faceted relationships in order to help us understand the ways in which other animals figure in our lives and we in theirs. Bringing together the work of a group of internationally distinguished scholars, the contribution in Critical Terms for Animal Studies offers distinct voices and diverse perspectives, exploring significant concepts and asking important questions. How do we take non-human animals seriously, not simply as metaphors for human endeavors, but as subjects themselves? What do we mean by anthropocentrism, captivity, empathy, sanctuary, and vulnerability, and what work do these and other critical terms do in Animal Studies? Sure to become an indispensable reference for the field, Critical Terms for Animal Studies not only provides a framework for thinking about animals as subjects of their own experiences, but also serves as a touchstone to help us think differently about our conceptions of what it means to be human, and the impact human activities have on the more than human world.
Animal Liberation by ISBN: 0380713330Publication Date: 1991-04-01The Australian philosopher Peter Singer's 1975 work, Animal Liberation, is often cited as a founding document in animal studies. Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the shocking abuse of animals everywhere—inspiring a worldwide movement to eliminate much of the cruel and unnecessary laboratory animal experimentation of years past. In this newly revised and expanded edition, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory forms" and product-testing procedures—offering sound, humane solutions to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency and justice, Animal Liberation is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike.
Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence by ISBN: 9781440838354Publication Date: 2017-01-26There is an urgent need to understand human-animal interactions and relations as we become increasingly aware of our devastating impact on the natural resources needed for the survival of all animal species. This timely reference explores such topics as climate change and biodiversity, the impact of animal domestication and industrial farming on local and global ecosystems, and the impact of human consumption of wild species for food, entertainment, medicine, and social status. This volume also explores the role of pets in our lives, advocacy movements on behalf of animals, and the role of animals in art and media culture. Authors Julie Urbanik and Connie L. Johnston introduce the concept of animal geography, present different aspects of human-animal relationships worldwide, and highlight the importance of examining these interconnections.
Anthropocentrism by ISBN: 9789004187948Publication Date: 2011-07-14Anthropocentrism is a charge of human chauvinism and an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans' understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. This collection explores the assumptions behind the label 'anthropocentrism', critically enquiring into the meaning of 'human'. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, questioning whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, it examines the potential scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or 'other' views that trump anthropocentrism. With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the environment and the social, the essays ultimately cohere around the question of the non-human, be it animal, ecosystem, god, or machine.
Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice by ISBN: 9783631845011Publication Date: 2023-03-16Through the burgeoning fields of Posthumanities and Environmental Humanities, this edition examines the changing conception of human subjectivity, agency, and citizenship as shaped by the dynamic interplays between nature, technology, science, and culture. The proposed 'symbiotic turn', (the awareness of the multitude of interactions and mutual interdependencies among humans, non-humans and their environment) aspires to explore the complex recompositions of the "human" in the 21st century. By organizing and promoting interdisciplinary dialogue at multiple levels, both in theory and practice, Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies is suggested as a new narrative about the biosphere and technosphere, which is embodied literarily, philosophically, and artistically.
Animal Studies: An Introduction by ISBN: 9780199968398Publication Date: 2013-01-01Animal studies is a growing interdisciplinary field that incorporates scholarship from public policy, sociology, religion, philosophy, and many other areas. In essence, it seeks to understand how humans study and conceive of other-than-human animals, and how these conceptions have changed over time, across cultures, and across different ways of thinking. This interdisciplinary introduction to the field boldly and creatively foregrounds the realities of nonhuman animals, as well as the imaginative and ethical faculties that humans must engage to consider our intersection with living beings outside of our species. It also compellingly demonstrates that the breadth and depth of thinking and humility needed to grasp the human-nonhuman intersection has the potential to expand the dualism that currently divides the sciences and humanities.As the first holistic survey of the field, Animal Studies is essential reading for any student of human-animal relationships and for all people who care about the role nonhuman animals play in our society.
Introduction
From Winnie the Pooh to Moby Dick, animals can be found in a wide variety of novels, children's stories, folktales, and other writings from the medieval to contemporary eras. Literary animal studies explores the figurative significance of animals in literature, offering critical insight into the portrayal of animals in literature. Scholars discuss how writers represent animal experience in human language, whether it is truly possible to develop a non-anthropocentric mode of writing, and how representations of nonhuman subjects might affect our perception of certain species.
When exploring literary animal studies in IUCAT, try looking under the following subject headings: "Human animal relationships in literature" and "Animals in literature." See also: "Palgrave studies in animals and literature" series.
Images: (Left) The Cricket in Times Square. George Selden (1960). (Right): Author: Zakariya ibn Muhammad Qazwini (ca. 1203-1283), Scribe: Muhammad ibn Muhammad Shakir Ruzmah-'i Nathani. Illustration: A Wild Cat and an Animal Called Sirayis. 1121 AH/AD 1717 (Ottoman). Artstor.
Books
The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature by ISBN: 9783030397722Publication Date: 2020-11-26This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field's conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern by ISBN: 9781138093782Publication Date: 2019-09-18Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.
Animals, Animality, and Literature by ISBN: 9781108429825Publication Date: 2018-09-20Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.
Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction by ISBN: 9781648430206Publication Date: 2022-10-11As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is "a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world...one of the oldest continuous human traditions." Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Cullen Gruesser's edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent literary scholars that showcase natural history and the multifaceted role of animals in well-known works of fiction, from Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century to Cormac McCarthy in the late twentieth century, and including short stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Harper Lee. As an introduction to or a new way of thinking about some of the best-known and most beloved literary texts this nation has produced, Animals in the American Classics considers fundamental questions of ethics and animal intelligence as well as similarities among racism, ageism, misogyny, and speciesism. With their awareness of Poe's "more-than-casual knowledge of natural science," Mark Twain's proto-animal rights sensibilities, and Hurston's training as an anthropologist, the contributors show that by drawing attention to and thinking like an animal, fiction tests the limits of humanity.
Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal by ISBN: 9780231145060Publication Date: 2008-11-05Human and animal subjectivity converge in a historically unprecedented way within modernism, as evolutionary theory, imperialism, antirationalism, and psychoanalysis all grapple with the place of the human in relation to the animal. Drawing on the thought of Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, Carrie Rohman outlines the complex philosophical and ethical stakes involved in theorizing the animal in humanism, including the difficulty in determining an ontological place for the animal, the question of animal consciousness and language, and the paradoxical status of the human as both a primate body and a "human" mind abstracting itself from the physical and material world. Rohman then turns to the work of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes, authors who were deeply invested in the relationship between animality and identity. The Island of Dr. Moreau embodies a Darwinian nightmare of the evolutionary continuum; The Croquet Player thematizes the dialectic between evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis; and Women in Love, St. Mawr, and Nightwood all refuse to project animality onto others, inverting the traditional humanist position by valuing animal consciousness. A novel treatment of the animal in literature, Stalking the Subject provides vital perspective on modernism's most compelling intellectual and philosophical issues.
Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture by ISBN: 9780754655114Publication Date: 2007-09-26The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.
Writing on Sheep: Ecology, the animal turn and sheep in poetry by ISBN: 9781526156570Publication Date: 2021-05-25Sheep are marginalised in literary criticism and in discussion of pastoral literature. This book brings an animal studies approach to poetry about sheep that allows for the agency of these sentient beings, that have been associated for humans over ten thousand years. This approach highlights the distinction between wild and domesticated species and the moral dilemma between the goals of animal welfare and those of saving species from extinction. Discussion of mostly contemporary poetry follows a new reading of works from the pastoral and georgic canon. Allowing for the sentience and sociality of this species makes it easier to imagine a natureculture within which to make kin across the species boundary. Reading poetry about sheep has the power to make new meanings as we try to adapt to an increasingly complex and problematic environment.
Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies by ISBN: 9781138673007Publication Date: 2017-08-10This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures' minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes' ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare's and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.
Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals by ISBN: 9783030761585Publication Date: 2021-09-12This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "animal turn" in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics.
Classical Literature and Posthumanism by ISBN: 9781350069503Publication Date: 2019-11-14The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.
Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film by ISBN: 9780231147866Publication Date: 2011-04-07Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence," establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body's significance, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh" and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil's elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.
Explore the following subject headings in IUCAT to learn more about animals and animal representation in the media:
- "Animals in motion pictures"
- "Animal films--History and criticism"
- "Animals in mass media"
- "Human animal relationships in mass media"
Image: Hachicko Statue in Tokyo, Japan. Go Tokyo.
Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater by ISBN: 9780271078342Publication Date: 2017-09-07From bears on the Renaissance stage to the equine pageantry of the nineteenth-century hunt, animals have been used in human-orchestrated entertainments throughout history. The essays in this volume present an array of case studies that inspire new ways of interpreting animal performance and the role of animal agency in the performing relationship. In exploring the human-animal relationship from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, Performing Animals questions what it means for an animal to "perform," examines how conceptions of this relationship have evolved over time, and explores whether and how human understanding of performance is changed by an animal's presence. The contributors discuss the role of animals in venues as varied as medieval plays, natural histories, dissections, and banquets, and they raise provocative questions about animals' agency. In so doing, they demonstrate the innovative potential of thinking beyond the boundaries of the present in order to dismantle the barriers that have traditionally divided human from animal. From fleas to warhorses to animals that "perform" even after death, this delightfully varied volume brings together examples of animals made to "act" in ways that challenge obvious notions of performance. The result is an eye-opening exploration of human-animal relationships and identity that will appeal greatly to scholars and students of animal studies, performance studies, and posthuman studies.
Screening the Nonhuman: Representations of Animal Others in the Media by ISBN: 9781498513746Publication Date: 2016-04-27Screening the Nonhuman draws connections between how animals represented on screen translate into reality. In doing so, the book demonstrates that consuming media is not a neutral act but rather a political one. The images humans consume have real world consequences for how animals are treated as actors, as pets, and in nature. The contributors propose that altering the representations of animals can change the way humans relate to non/humans. Our hope is for humans to generate more ethical relationships with non/humans, ultimately mediating reality both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. To achieve this end, film, television, advertisements, and social media are analyzed through an intersectional lens. But the book doesn t stop here. Each author creates counter-representational strategies that promise to unweave the assumptions that have led to the mistreatment of humans and non/humans alike."
Animal Life and the Moving Image by ISBN: 9781844578993Publication Date: 2015-12-28From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked. Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporaryuser-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.
Animals on Television: The cultural making of the non-human by ISBN: 9781137516824Publication Date: 2017-11-20This book is the first in-depth study of the representation of animals on television. It explores the variety of ways animals are represented in audio-visual media, including wildlife documentaries and children's animated series, and the consequences these representations have for those species. Brett Mills discusses key ideas and approaches essential for thinking about animals drawing on relevant debates in philosophy, politics, gender studies, humanism and posthumanism, and ethics. The chapters examine different animal representations, focusing on zoos, pets, wildlife and meat. They present case studies, including discussions of Peppa Pig, The Hunt and The Dog Whisperer. This book will be of interest to readers exploring media studies, contemporary television, animal studies, and debates about representation.
The Disneyfication of Animals by ISBN: 9783030493158Publication Date: 2020-09-18This book critically examines how Walt Disney Animation Studios has depicted—and sometimes failed to depict—different forms of harming and objectifying non-human animals in their films. Each chapter addresses a different form of animal harm and objectification through the theories of speciesism, romanticism, and the 'collapse of compassion' effect, from farming, hunting and fishing, to clothing, work, and entertainment. Stanton lucidly presents the dichotomy between depictions of higher order, anthropomorphised and neotonised animal characters and that of lower-order species, showing furthermore how these depictions are closely linked to changing social attitudes about acceptable forms of animal harm. An engaging and novel contribution to the field of Critical Animal Studies, this book explores the use of animals not only in Disney's best known animated films such as 101 Dalmatians, but also lesser known features including Home on the Range. A quantitative appendix supplying data on how often each animal species appears and the amount of times animal harm or objectification is depicted in over fifty films provides an invaluable resource and addition to scholars working in both Disney and animal studies.
Regarding Life: Animals and the documentary moving image by ISBN: 9781438462493Publication Date: 2016-10-14As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc. , the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.
Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies by ISBN: 9781438476612Publication Date: 2019-11-01It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema's many bad beasts.
Critical Animal and Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy by ISBN: 9781138842267Publication Date: 2015-11-03This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches' application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.
The Hurting Kind by ISBN: 9781639550494Publication Date: 2022-05-10An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. "I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"? With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive."
Edges and Fray: On language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures by ISBN: 9780819579225Publication Date: 2019-12-20Poetry, prose, and photographs, explore the edges of language. Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds' nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to suggest how writing, and the book, can serve as a site of radical transformation. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Finding its strength in fragility, Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.
Personhood by ISBN: 9780811229739Publication Date: 2021-05-04Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.
Red Bird by ISBN: 9780807068922Publication Date: 2008-04-01Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart." This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.
Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness by ISBN: 9781940696010Publication Date: 2014-09-09CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which they pushes their political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics.
Silk Poems by ISBN: 9781937658724Publication Date: 2017-10-03In conjunction with Tufts University's Silk Lab's cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.
Garments Against Women by ISBN: 9781934103593Publication Date: 2015-03-15Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It's a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival's requisite thoughts.
The Friend by ISBN: 9780735219441Publication Date: 2018-02-06When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatised by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
What We Fed to the Manticore by ISBN: 9781953534415Publication Date: 2022-09-06Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri's debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri's pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey's loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend. In striking, immersive detail against the backdrop of an ever-changing international landscape, What We Fed to the Manticore speaks to the fears and joys of the creatures we share our world with, and ultimately places the reader under the rich canopy of the tree of life.
I Am a Cat by ISBN: 9780804832656Publication Date: 2001-09-01Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.
A Cat, a Man & Two Women by ISBN: 9780811224499Publication Date: 2015-08-27The three pieces in this collection—the novella "A Cat, A Man, and Two Women" and two shorter pieces "The Little Kingdom" and "Professor Rado"—are lighthearted and entertaining variations on one of Tanizaki's favorite preoccupations: dominance and submission in relationships, complicated even further here by customs, public opinion, and comic grotesqueries. In the title piece, the bumbling Shozo is caught in the middle of an ongoing struggle between his ex-wife and her younger successor. Shozo would prefer to stay out of it and be peacefully left alone with his elegant tortoiseshell cat Lily, but he keeps getting dragged back into the battles and arguments. The result is an oddball love triangle centered around Lily, the only true object of Shozo's affections—"one of the finest pieces of literature concerning cats ever written."
If Cats Disappeared From The World by ISBN: 1509889175Our narrator's days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week...Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself—and his beloved cat—to the brink.
Watership Down by ISBN: 9780380002931Publication Date: 1976-01-01One of the most beloved novels of our time, Richard Adams's Watership Down takes us to a world we have never truly seen: to the remarkable life that teems in the fields, forests and riverbanks far beyond our cities and towns. It is a powerful saga of courage, leadership and survival; an epic tale of a hardy band of adventurers forced to flee the destruction of their fragile community...and their trials and triumphs in the face of extraordinary adversity as they pursue a glorious dream called "home." Watership Down is a remarkable tale of exile and survival, of heroism and leadership...the epic novel of a group of adventurers who desert their doomed city, and venture forth against all odds on a quest for a new home, a sturdier future.
The Wind in the Willows by ISBN: 9781789504767Publication Date: 2019-09-15This edition contains the original, unabridged text. Arthur Rackham's beautiful illustrations bring Kenneth Grahame's enchanting world to life.
Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by ISBN: 9780679407287Publication Date: 2006-02-07Few writers have attempted to explore the natural history of a particular animal by adopting the animal's own sensibility. But Verlyn Klinkenborg with his deeply empathetic relation to the world around him has done just that, and done it brilliantly, in Timothy. This is the story of a tortoise whose real life was observed by the eighteenth-century English curate Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne. For thirteen years, Timothy lived in White's garden making an occasional appearance in his journals. Now Klinkenborg gives the tortoise an unforgettable voice and powers of observation as keen as those of any bipedal naturalist. The happy result: Timothy regales us with an account of a gracefully paced (no unseemly hurry!) eight-day adventure outside the gate.
Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990 by ISBN: 9780399165979Publication Date: 2013-09-26Edward is a hamster—yet he contains multitudes. Trapped in a cage with a wheel that taunts him with its meaninglessness, Edward records the existential ennui that is the sum of his short life. His diary is an extraordinary work, filled with profound meditations on the nature of captivity, the emptiness of life, and the irrational will to live. This dark, pithy, irresistibly witty diary, with illustrations by acclaimed artist Miriam Elia, makes the perfect gift for anyone on your holiday list. It won't take long before readers recognize that Edward is not just a hamster—he is a state of mind.
A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There by ISBN: 0195007778Publication Date: 1968-12-31First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa,Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by ISBN: 9780374718794Publication Date: 2020-11-24The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats—the animal that has most captured our imagination—than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.
The Rabbit Between Us by ISBN: 9780857427977Publication Date: 2021-11-17One morning as they parted, Victor Menza's daughter handed him a bunny postcard. This gift made him wonder why rabbits had been their symbol of visitation: "How did this kind of creature become such a powerful way of feeling your presence?" Through philosophy, history, education, art, and personal musing on everyday uncanny experiences, Menza reveals why people have long found rabbits our special kin and emblems of love. Menza considers human nature and how we are undone by separation—both from each other and from our childhood selves. Surprising allies in these non-traditional philosophical wanderings include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Murray, and Beatrix Potter. Menza examines what symbols are and how they work, the value of dialect, and the subversive lesson of animal fables, alongside his thoughts on language learning, memory, and slavery. Only now did he see that he'd taken to Brer Rabbit early on. Just as the Uncle Remus tales displayed the small hero's virtues in warm dialogues, The Rabbit Between Us shows we abound in talents and moves when we "lean like Socrates did to the Aesop in us." Gentle and political at once, this unique book will appeal to any intellectually curious reader.
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by ISBN: 0971757585Publication Date: 2003-04-01The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."
Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by ISBN: 9781635574944Publication Date: 2021-09-30From an acclaimed environmental writer, a groundbreaking and provocative new vision for our relationships with—and responsibilities toward—the planet's wild animals. Protecting wild animals and preserving the environment are two ideals so seemingly compatible as to be almost inseparable. But in fact, between animal welfare and conservation science there exists a space of underexamined and unresolved tension: wildness itself. When is it right to capture or feed wild animals for the good of their species? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? Can hunting be ecological? Are any animals truly wild on a planet that humans have so thoroughly changed? No clear guidelines yet exist to help us resolve such questions. Transporting readers into the field with scientists tackling these profound challenges, Emma Marris tells the affecting and inspiring stories of animals around the globe—from Peruvian monkeys to Australian bilbies, rare Hawai'ian birds to majestic Oregon wolves. And she offers a companionable tour of the philosophical ideas that may steer our search for sustainability and justice in the non-human world. Revealing just how intertwined animal life and human life really are, Wild Souls will change the way we think about nature—and our place within it.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by ISBN: 9781681370408Publication Date: 2016-10-04The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy remembers from his boyhood when moths "would pack a car's headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard," is a distant memory. Wildlife is being lost, not only in the wholesale extinctions of species but also in the dwindling of those species that still exist. The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author's first love: nature. McCarthy traces his adoration of the natural world to when he was seven, when the discovery of butterflies and birds brought sudden joy to a boy whose mother had just been hospitalized and whose family life was deteriorating. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature's abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world. Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love. An award-winning environmental journalist, McCarthy presents a clear, well-documented picture of what he calls "the great thinning" around the world, while interweaving the story of his own early discovery of the wilderness and a childhood saved by nature. Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author's long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.
With Dogs at the Edge of Life by ISBN: 9780231167123Publication Date: 2015-12-08In this original and provocative book, Colin Dayan tackles head-on the inexhaustible world, at once tender and fierce, of dogs and humans. We follow the tracks of dogs in the bayous of Louisiana, the streets of Istanbul, and the humane societies of the United States, and in the memories and myths of the humans who love them. Dayan reorients our ethical and political assumptions through a trans-species engagement that risks as much as it promises. She makes a powerful case for questioning what we think of as our deepest-held beliefs and, with dogs in the lead, unsettles the dubious promises of liberal humanism. Moving seamlessly between memoir, case law, and film, Dayan takes politics and animal studies in a new direction—one that gives us glimpses of how we can think beyond ourselves and with other beings. Her unconventional perspective raises hard questions and renews what it means for any animal or human to live in the twenty-first century. Nothing less than a challenge for us to confront violence and suffering even in the privileged precincts of modernity, this searing and lyrical book calls for another way to think the world. Theoretically sophisticated yet aimed at a broad readership, With Dogs at the Edge of Life illuminates how dogs—and their struggles—take us beyond sentimentality and into a form of thought that can make a difference to our lives.
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And other excursions to Iceland's most unusual museums by ISBN: 9780143135463Publication Date: 2020-05-12Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects—a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams—can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders," she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open."
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by ISBN: 9780316540537Publication Date: 2022-12-06A fascinating tour of creatures from the surface to the deepest ocean floor, inviting us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live. A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature, including: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre, predatory Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena), the common goldfish that flourishes in the wild, and more. Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea, from gelatinous chains that are both individual organisms and colonies of clones to deep-sea crabs that have no need for the sun, nourished instead by the chemicals and heat throbbing from the core of the Earth. Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, How Far the Light Reaches is a shimmering, otherworldly debut that attunes us to new visions of our world and its miracles.
Music
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Images: Album covers, clockwise from left to right: Alex G God Save the Animals; Ia Clua & Jordi Batiste Chichonera’s Cat; The Birdsong Project For The Birds: Vol. 1; Fiona Apple Fetch the Boltcutters; Nyokabi Kariũki peace places: kenyan memories; Pink Floyd Animals.
About the Playlist
The nonhuman world, including animals, have long captured the cultural and musical imaginations of people. In this playlist, we have curated a selection of songs about, referring to, or in any way inspired by our fellow critters, whether literally or symbolically. To learn more about the music we've included, the history of nonhuman animal references in music, and animals' own relationships with music, consult some of the resources below:
- "How Birds and Animals Have Inspired Classical Music" (BBC Music)
- "The Specialist's Guide to Animals in Music" (Gramophone)
- "Animals in Music" Playlist (Naxos)
- "Readers Recommend: Songs About Animals" (The Guardian)
- "Zoomusicology" (Wikipedia)
- "Are Humans the Only Music Species?" (MIT Press Reader)
- "Do Any Other Animals Play Music?" (BBC Science Focus)
- "7 Scientific Studies About How Animals React to Music" (Mental Floss)
Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.
Podcasts
This American Life
- The Feather Heist A flute player breaks into a British museum and makes off with a million dollars worth of dead birds.
- Spark Bird Stories about birds and the hearts they sway, the havoc they wreak, the lives they change.
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In Dog We Trust Exactly how much are the animals that live in our homes caught up in our everyday family dynamics?
Ologies with Alie Ward
- Chickenology (Hens & Roosters) Part 1 with Tove Danovich
- Diplopodology (Millipedes & Centipedes) with Dr. Derek Hennen
- Carnivore Ecology (Lions, Tigers, & Bears) with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant
The Ezra Klein Show
- Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything The acclaimed food writer offers a sweeping indictment of our modern food system.
- The Hidden Costs of Cheap Meat The animal rights activist Leah Garcés discusses how modern meat production harms animals, people and the environment.
- A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems The award-winning poet shares how she stays open to wonder and beauty in a difficult world.
Articles
- For ‘Gender’, See ‘Turtles’: Experiments in Empathetic Biology (Callum Angus)
- excerpts from "every dog i pet in 2016" (joseph parker okay)
- Why I Write About Animals, or, My Body Is the Animal I Write About (Hannah Gamble)
Miscellany
Modern Animal by isolarii: Isolarii is a pocket-sized magazine that conceives of every issue as a kind of ‘island’; new space from which to view the world. Authored by the Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets, issue five is entitled ‘Modern Animal’ and is conceived as a series of lectures on the modern lives of animals.
The Institute of Queer Ecology is an ever-evolving collaborative organism that seeks to bring peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but unified and grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality.
The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is a critical-poetic platform for making and studying operating primarily out of Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI. The OPR works through writing, visual art, group discussion, and performative events to explore ideas—materially and generatively—across disciplines, e.g. “science,” “philosophy,” “history,” or “painting,” “poetry,” “music,” etc. OPR projects take a number of forms: readings, seminars, installations, books, digital residency projects on our website, and Pelt, a sporadically published (in print and online) magazine organized around an invented concept that is further articulated through the collective work of the issue.
There are many ways to get involved with Animal Rights and Environmental movements right here in and around Bloomington. From incorporating animal studies into your scholarship to donating money and participating in direct action campaigns, see the following list for organizations supporting animals and the environment in the Bloomington area:
- Bloomington Animal Shelter Run by Bloomington Animal Care and Control, whose mission is to address and respond to all animal needs in the community through education, enforcement and support in order to build a community where animals are valued and treated with kindness and respect. The Animal Shelter is accepting donations and foster applications.
- Monroe County Humane Association (MCHA) "Dedicated to promoting the welfare of animals, strengthening the human-animal bond, and providing access to veterinary care & humane education across our community."
- Sunrise Bloomington "We are a group of undergrads, grads, faculty, high schoolers and Bloomington community members who are dedicated to bringing about positive changes towards climate justice initiative through grassroots movement building!"
- IU Student Animal Legal Defense Fund The Student Animal Legal Defense Fund was established at IU Maurer School of Law in 2010 to provide a forum for education, advocacy, and scholarship aimed at improving the lives of animals and advancing their interests through the legal system.
- BloomingVeg "An all-ages social and advocacy group for vegetarians, vegans, and veggie-lovers alike in Bloomington, Indiana."
- Indy VegFest A "nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase the public’s acceptance of the compassionate, environmental, and health facets of a vegan lifestyle through an annual event and year-round outreach and education opportunities."
- Rainbow Bakery Vegan bakery in Bloomington, IN.
- Vegan, Vegetarian & Gluten-Free Restaurants in Bloomington (Visit Bloomington)
- Uplands PEAK Sanctuary Indiana's first farmed animal sanctuary, providing lifelong care to their residents, educational tours, and volunteer opportunities.
The following are national organizations fighting for animal rights, liberation, and environmental justice. For more information on the impact of a few of the organizations listed below, check out Animal Charity Evaluators, which researches animal welfare organizations.
- Native American Humane Society "Shares our expertise to help tribal communities learn how to humanely manage and care for the animal populations in their own communities. NAHS connects tribal communities and animal welfare service providers, NGOs, foundations, and other agencies to assist tribal communities in resolving their challenges with animals through regular animal care, population management, and community activities."
- The Humane League "We exist to end the abuse of animals raised for food by influencing the policies of the world’s biggest companies, demanding legislation, and empowering others to take action and leave animals off their plates."
- Good Food Institute "A nonprofit think tank working to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals. Alongside scientists, businesses, and policymakers, GFI’s teams focus on making plant-based and cultivated meat delicious, affordable, and accessible."
- The Green New Deal Network "A coalition of grassroots organizations, labor, and climate and environmental justice organizations growing a movement to pass local, state, and national policies that create millions of family-sustaining union jobs, ensure racial and gender equity, and take action on climate at the scale and scope the crisis demands."
- Indigenous Environmental Network "IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities."
Queer Representation in Media
Welcome! In this feature, we will explore the representation of queer people in media, particularly in film and television. We will explore some common tropes/stereotypes, consider the use of representation as a concept, and track where queer representation has been and where it is going. The representation of queer people falls into categories: negative representation (harmful stereotypes that vilify and misrepresent the lives and motivations of queer folks), no representation (complete exclusion of queer people), token representation (virtue signalling through the placement of a queer character), queerbaiting (the inclusion of scenes that suggest a character might be LGBTQ+, while maintaining a distinct lack of evidence in the story to confirm or deny it), retroactive representation (when creators explicitly (and retroactively) claim that certain characters are LGBTQ+), idealistic representation (a depiction set in a world where queerness isn’t stigmatized or discriminated against), and complex representation (a nuanced, compelling depiction of queer characters that addresses the intersectional nature many queer folk's lived experiences). This feature considers a few of these representations and provides a selection of academic texts that may be helpful to your research on this or related topics.
In this feature, will highlight common tropes like The Gay Best Friend, Bury Your Gays, and Queerbaiting. Alongside these tropes, however, we highlight media that depicts nuanced and complex queer characters and reflections on queerness in the media (you will find these under the non-fiction, film, and television tabs).
For a brief history of queer cinema, check out the "Queer Film Classics" series by Arsenal Pulp Press. See a selection here:
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From left to right: Winter Kept Us Warm, Paris is Burning, Anders Als Die Andern, Fire, and Midnight Cowboy
Further reading
- Queer representation in media: the good, the bad, and the ugly (
- Revision as Resistance: Fanfiction as an Empowering Community for Female and Queer Fans (Diana Koehm, UConn Honors thesis)
- A Real Gay Person: Representation and Stereotypes in Queer Romantic Comedies (Maja Hardikar, Georgetown University Master's Theses)
- Gaysploitation Upends the Stereotypes That Make Us Wince (Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times)
- A History of Queerness in Cinema with Alonso Duralde (Bulls Eye with Jesse Thorn, NPR)
- Placing the Queer Audience: Literature on Gender & Sexual Diversity in Film and TV Reception (Rob Cover & Duc Dau, Mai Feminism)
- After Decades In The Background, Queer Characters Step To The Front In Kids' Media (Victoria Whitley-Berry, NPR)
To get started with your research, explore the "Sexual minorities in mass media," "Homosexuality in motion pictures," and "Lesbianism in motion pictures" subject headings in IUCAT. If there is a book you are particularly interested in, scroll down on its catalog record to find its subject headings. You can then browse by subject heading and find books similar to the one that you have already identified.
Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the movies by ISBN: 0030865832Publication Date: 1972-01-01Parker Tyler (1904-1974) was a noted American film critic, and this text is regarded as his most significant work. Devoted to homosexuality in films, it aims to look beyond the obvious and to observe the psychology of sex roles, at the same time recognising film as the realm of contemporary mythology. Tyler was once described as one of the most consistently interesting and provocative writers on film that America has produced, "well-informed and free of cant".
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by ISBN: 0060961325Publication Date: 1987-09-20Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "an impressive study" and written with incisive wit and searing perception—the definitive, highly acclaimed landmark work on the portrayal of homosexuality in film.- The Matter of Images: Essays on representations by ISBN: 0415254949Publication Date: 2002-07-11Now published in a revised second edition, The Matter of Images searches through the resonances of the term 'representation', analysing images in terms of why they matter, what they are made of, and the material realities they refer to. Richard Dyer's analyses consider representations of 'out' groups and traditionally dominant groups alike, and encompass the eclectic texts of contemporary culture, from queers to straights, political correctness, representations of Empire and films including Gilda, Papillon and The Night of the Living Dead. Essays new to the second edition discuss Lillian Gish as the ultimate white movie star, the representation of whiteness in the South in Birth of a Nation, and society's fascination with serial killers. The Matter of Images is distinctive in its commitment to writing politically about contemporary culture, while insisting on the importance of understanding the formal qualities and complexity of the images it investigates.
Media Queered: Visibility and its discontents by ISBN: 9780820495323Publication Date: 2007-07-30Media Queered is a groundbreaking assessment of minorities and the media. Authorities including Larry Gross, Edward Alwood, Lisa Henderson, and Marguerite Moritz join several new scholars to examine four aspects of visibility: history, expertise, popularity, and technology. To supplement this research, media practitioners including journalists working in the gay and mainstream press contribute a unique series of interludes. The first is by Studs Terkel, who interviewed founders of the U.S. homophile movement. Written for scholars, students, and instructors of media and gender studies, Media Queered is also accessible for general readers intrigued by the recent flowering of queer characters, themes, and images in popular culture.
Queer Media Images by ISBN: 9780739180280Publication Date: 2013-05-16Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives presents fifteen chapters that address how the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities are depicted in the media. This collection focuses on how the LGBT community has been silenced or given voice through the media. Through a study of queer media images, this book scrutinizes LGBT media representations and how these representations contribute to a dialogue about civil rights for this marginalized community. While the communication discipline has been open to the LGBT community, there has been an absence of published research and a marginalizing or tokenizing of the queer voice. Through a study of media representations, this unique collection provides a snapshot into the issues surrounding LGBT identity during a time when the Defense of Marriage Act is called into question and explores what it means to study images through a queer lens.
Sexual Identities and the Media by ISBN: 9780415532969Publication Date: 2015-03-31Sexual Identities and the Media encourages students to examine media as a site of negotiation for how people make sense of their own and others' sexual identities. Taking a critical/cultural approach, Wendy Hilton-Morrow and Kathleen Battles weave together theory, synthesis of existing research, and original analysis of contemporary media examples in order to explore key areas of debate, including: an historical context for contemporary GLBTQ representations; the advantages and limitations of media visibility, including a discussion of the strengths and limitations of stereotype research and the quest for "positive" representations; the role of consumer culture in constructing GLBTQ identities; strategies of mainstream media resistance by GLBTQ community members, including oppositional/queer reading strategies and the production of media products by and for the GLBTQ community; the complexities of comedy as a popular narrative device in GLBTQ portrayals; the closet as a structuring metaphor in both GLBTQ identities and engagement with media; media representations of GLBTQ bodies as sites of non-normative desires and gender identities.
Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television by ISBN: 9780415894142Publication Date: 2015-12-02This book traces the uneven history of queer media visibility through crucial turning points including the Hollywood Production Code era, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television during the1990s, and the re-imagination of queer representations on TV after the events of 9/11. Kohnen intervenes in previous academic and popular accounts that paint the increase in queer visibility over the past four decades as a largely progressive development. She examines how and why a limited and limiting concept of queer visibility structured around white gay and lesbian characters in committed relationships has become the embodiment of progressive LGBT media representations. Across all chapters, narratives and arguments emerge that demonstrate how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and imagined geographies, histories, and people of the American nation.
Locating Queerness in the Media by ISBN: 9781498549059Publication Date: 2017-07-25Locating Queerness in the Media: A New Look examines how media images of the LGBTQ community create a universal consciousness about the existence of queer people, ranging from tragic and villainous to upbeat and courageous. In this book, contributors explore how our media world invites a tension that marginalizes the LGBTQ community. It examines what a queer sensibility means and how the queer community is creating new ways to study itself. Throughout the book, contributors explore specific media images that resonate throughout the media, casting the community in a particular manner.
The Queer Encyclopedia of Film and Television by ISBN: 9781573442091Publication Date: 2005-12-23How did Liberace's costumes kill him? Which lesbian comedian spent her high school years as 'the best white cheerleader in Detroit'? For these answers and many more, fans can dip into this book. Drawn from the fascinating online encyclopaedia of queer arts and culture - www.glbtq.com - this is the only reference book in which RuPaul and Jean Cocteau jostle for space. From the porn industry to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, from body building to Dorothy Arzner, this is an indispensable guide: readable, authoritative and concise.
Transmedia and Public Representation by ISBN: 9781433170324Publication Date: 2021-11-19Is media changing the way we see transgender people or is it the other way around? In the past twenty to thirty years, transgender people have gradually appeared in films and television shows with more and more frequency. However, more visibility does not always translate to a higher degree of acceptance of trans people. Authors in this book studied the most popular programs and movies of all times to see how much (and how little) media portrayals have changed when it comes down to trans folks. Although in recent years openly transgender celebrities and fictional characters have broken into the mainstream to challenge hegemonic understandings of this population, productions such as Transparent and Orange Is the New Black fall victim to commonplace portrayals, repeating the negative tropes they were trying to resist. Nevertheless, nuanced interpretations and thorough analyses from this collection show evidence that movies and programs with transgender people make progress from total erasure or invisibility.
Queer Representations in Chinese-Language Film and the Cultural Landscape by ISBN: 9789048540075Publication Date: 2020-09-15This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary.
Queer Horror Film and Television by ISBN: 9781784536862Publication Date: 2016-11-30In recent years, the representation of alternative sexuality in the horror film and television has "outed" itself from the shadows from which it once lurked, via the embrace of an outrageously queer horror aesthetic where homosexuality is often unequivocally referenced. In this book, Darren Elliott-Smith departs from the analysis of the monster as a symbol of heterosexual anxiety and fear, and moves to focus instead on queer fears and anxieties within gay male subcultures. Furthermore, he examines the works of significant queer horror film, television producers, and directors to reveal gay men's anxieties about: acceptance and assimilation into Western culture, the perpetuation of self-loathing and gay shame, and further anxieties associations shameful femininity. This book focuses mainly on representations of masculinity, and gay male spectatorship in queer horror films and television post-2000. Moving from the margins to the mainstream, via the application of psychoanalytic theory, critical and cultural interpretation, interviews with key directors and close readings of classic, cult and modern horror, this book will be invaluable to students and researchers of gender and sexuality in horror film and television.
Queer Youth and Media Cultures by ISBN: 9781137383549Publication Date: 2014-10-03This collection explores the representation and performance of queer youth in media cultures, primarily examining TV, film and online new media. Specific themes of investigation include the context of queer youth suicide and educational strategies to avert this within online new media, and the significance of coming out videos produced online.
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by ISBN: 9781952177798Publication Date: 2022-10-04Through the lens of horror--from Halloween to Hereditary--queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes--such as the circumspect and resilient "final girl," body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet--spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer's Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.
The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by ISBN: 9781250760142Publication Date: 2021-06-01From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman. Today's gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan's fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl," country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell. Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.
We See Each Other: A Black, trans journey through TV and film by ISBN: 9781368081733Publication Date: 2023-05-09A groundbreaking look at the history of transgender representation in TV and film, by an of-the-moment and in-demand culture reporter. We See Each Other is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation. The films and television shows that Tre'vell covers include- Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Psycho, Holiday Heart, Boy's Don't Cry, America's Next Top Model, Some Like It Hot, Survivor, Tangerine, Pose, RuPaul's Drag Raceand much more. Though there have been trans memoirs and histories, there has never been a book quite like this, nor is anyone more suited to write it than Tre'vell. "I don't remember exactly when I was taught to hate myself," says Tre'vell Anderson in We See Each Other's introduction. As the narrative unfolds, Tre'vell knits together the history of trans people on screen with stories of their life growing up and their formative experiences as a Black, trans journalist.
Girls Can Kiss Now by ISBN: 9781982158507Publication Date: 2022-03-08Jill Gutowitz's life--for better and worse--has always been on a collision course with pop culture. There's the time the FBI showed up at her door because of something she tweeted about Game of Thrones. The pop songs that have been the soundtrack to the worst moments of her life. And of course, the pivotal day when Orange Is the New Black hit the airwaves and broke down the door to Jill's own sexuality. In these honest examinations of identity, desire, and self-worth, Jill explores perhaps the most monumental cultural shift of our lifetimes: the mainstreaming of lesbian culture. Dusting off her own personal traumas and artifacts of her not-so-distant youth she examines how pop culture acts as a fun house mirror reflecting and refracting our values--always teaching, distracting, disappointing, and revealing us. Girls Can Kiss Now is a fresh and intoxicating blend of personal stories, sharp observations, and laugh-out-loud humor. This timely collection of essays helps us make sense of our collective pop-culture past even as it points the way toward a joyous, uproarious, near--and very queer--future.
Queer Little Nightmares by ISBN: 9781551529011Publication Date: 2022-10-04The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons. In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems--the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past--relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster?
Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by ISBN: 9781637743010Publication Date: 2023-05-23Behind the scenes of the most popular sitcoms of the 20th century, a revolution was brewing. For decades, amidst the bright lights, studio-audience laughs, and absurdly large apartment sets, the real-life story of American LGBTQ+ liberation unfolded in plain sight in front of millions of viewers, most of whom were laughing too hard to mind. From flamboyant relatives on Bewitched to closely-guarded secrets on All in the Family, from network-censor fights over Soap to behind-the-scenes activism on the set of The Golden Girls, from Ellen's culture clash and Will & Grace's mixed reception to Modern Family's primetime power-couple, Hi Honey, I'm Homo! is the story not only of how subversive queer comedy transformed the American sitcom, from its inception through today, but how our favorite sitcoms transformed, and continue to transform, America. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, Hi Honey, I'm Homo! features commentary and interviews from celebrities, behind-the-scenes creators, and more.
The Male Gazed: On hunks, heartthrobs, and what pop culture taught me about (desiring) men by ISBN: 9781646221462Publication Date: 2023-05-30Featuring deep dives into thirst traps, drag queens, Antonio Banderas, and telenovelas--all in the service of helping us reframe how we talk about (desiring) men--this insightful memoir-in-essays is as much a coming of age as a coming out book. Manuel Betancourt has long lustfully coveted masculinity--in part because he so lacked it. As a child in Bogotá, Colombia, he grew up with the social pressure to appear strong, manly, and, ultimately, straight. And yet in the films and television he avidly watched, Betancourt saw glimmers of different possibilities. From the stars of telenovelas and the princes of Disney films to pop sensation Ricky Martin and teen heartthrobs in shows like Saved By the Bell, he continually found himself asking: Do I want him or do I want to be him? The Male Gazed grapples with the thrall of masculinity, examining its frailty and its attendant anxieties even as it focuses on its erotic potential. Masculinity, Betancourt suggests, isn't suddenly ripe for deconstruction--or even outright destruction--amid so much talk about its inherent toxicity. Looking back over decades' worth of pop culture's attempts to codify and reframe what men can be, wear, do, and desire, this book establishes that to gaze at men is still a subversive act.
For more films, see the following lists:
- 40 Essential LGBTQ+ Documentaries (Manuel Betancourt, Rotten Tomatoes)
- Pride Month Movie Guide: 30 Films By, For and About the LGBTQ+ Community (A.Frame)
- The 60 Best Queer Movies of All Time (Marley Marius, Liam Hess, Lisa Wong Macabasco, Emma Specter, Gia Yetikyel &Taylor Antrim, Vogue)
- The Trans Horror Masterlist (ashley, Letterboxd)
- Queer Films Everyone Must See (Zā, Letterboxd)
- A history of LGBTQ+ representation in film (Stacker)
Films
My Beautiful Laundrette by Publication Date: 1985My Beautiful Laundrette is a 1985 British romantic comedy-drama film directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. The film was one of the first films released by Working Title Films. The film is set in London during the Thatcher years, as reflected in the complex, and often comical, relationships between members of the Pakistani and English communities. The story focuses on Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke), a young Pakistani man living in London, and his reunion and eventual romance with his childhood friend Johnny (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), now a street punk. The two become the caretakers and business managers of a launderette originally owned by Omar's uncle Nasser.The Watermelon Woman by
Publication Date: 1997-03-05An aspiring black lesbian filmmaker researches an obscure 1940s black actress billed as the Watermelon Woman.
Velvet Goldmine by Publication Date: 1998In 1984, British journalist Arthur Stuart investigates the career of 1970s glam superstar Brian Slade, who was heavily influenced in his early years by hard-living and rebellious American singer Curt Wild.Tangerine by
Publication Date: 2015After hearing that her boyfriend/pimp cheated on her while she was in jail, a transgender sex worker and her best friend set out to find him and teach him and his new lover a lesson.
I Saw the TV Glow by Publication Date: 2024Teenager Owen (Justice Smith) is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack. A once-in-a-generation horror from Jane Schoenbrun.
Documentaries
The Celluloid Closet by Publication Date: 1996Assembles footage from over 120 films showing the changing face of cinema homosexuality from cruel stereotypes to covert love to the activist cinema of the 1990s. Many actors, writers and commentators provide anecdotes regarding the history of the role of gay men and lesbians on the silver screen. The film is based on Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, and on lecture and film clip presentations he gave from 1972 to 1982.
Vito: The life of gay rights activist Vito Russo by Publication Date: 2011The story of Vito Russo, founding father of the gay liberation movement, author of "The Celluloid Closet," and vociferous AIDS activist in the 1980s.
Milind Soman Made Me Gay by Publication Date: 2007A conceptual documentary about desire and notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. The film employs a unique mix of visual elements along with voice over narration to juxtapose memories of the filmmaker’s past against stories of three gay South Asian men living in the diaspora. Overshadowing these nostalgic explorations of life ‘back home,’ are harsh realities of homophobia and racism in America and an on-going struggle to find a place of belonging.
Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood by Publication Date: 2017"Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood" is the deliciously scandalous story of Scotty Bowers, a handsome ex-Marine who landed in Hollywood after World War II and became confidante, aide-de-camp and lover to many of Hollywood's greatest male--and female--stars.
Circus of Books by Publication Date: 2019In 1976, Karen and Barry Mason had fallen on hard times and were looking for a way to support their young family when they answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times. Larry Flynt was seeking distributors for Hustler Magazine. What was expected to be a brief sideline led to their becoming fully immersed in the LGBT community as they took over a local store, Circus of Books. A decade later, they had become the biggest distributors of gay porn in the US. The film focuses on the double life they led, trying to maintain the balance of being parents at a time when LGBT culture was not yet accepted. Circus of Books offers a rare glimpse into an untold chapter of queer history, and it is told through the lens of the owners' own daughter, Rachel Mason. Available to stream on Netflix.
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen by Examining Hollywood's depiction of transgender people and the impact it's left on both the transgender community and American culture. Available to stream on Netflix.
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado by Publication Date: 2020Every day for decades, Walter Mercado — the iconic, gender non-conforming astrologer — mesmerized 120 million Latino viewers with his extravagance and positivity.
Books
The Queer Film Guide: 100 great movies that tell LGBTQIA+ stories by ISBN: 9781922754295Publication Date: 2023-05-16Beginning with early trailblazers like Different from the Others, Kyle Turner has selected 100 of cinema's greatest queer films to guide you through the eras. From Hitchcock's Rope and cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show through the New Queer Cinema movement of the 90s to the present day, where LGBTQIA+ narratives have increasingly made their way into the mainstream and dominated award seasons with films like Carol, Tangerine, and Moonlight. From scrappy auteurs to Academy Award winners, The Queer Film Guide celebrates LGBTQIA+ stories and artists, offering a fresh take on what defines great cinema, and lending a voice to the diverse creators and characters who have shaped the artform.
The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema by ISBN: 9780190877996Publication Date: 2021-11-26The term "queer cinema" is often used to name at least three cultural events: 1) an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; 2) a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; 3) a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception, and the past twenty-five years have seen the idea of "queer cinema" expand further as a descriptor for a global arts practice. As the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema treats these three currents as art and critical practice, bringing the canon of queer cinema together with a new generation of makers and scholars.
The Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film by ISBN: 9781538153901Publication Date: 2022-10-15The depictions of LGBTQIA+ characters in film have always varied immensely. However, the negative depictions often seem to outweigh the positive, perhaps because of the hurt they inspire or perhaps because they regrettably outnumber the positive films. The Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film explores works from the past fifty years in order to not only discuss how LGBTQIA+ characters are portrayed in American film, but also how these portrayals affect viewers. Contributors to this valuable reference include film and media scholars, gender studies scholars, journalists, LGBTQIA+ advocates, and more, representing countries from around the world. This rich array of perspectives provide careful and critical examinations of more than 100 films, ranging from the ethical and compassionate to the deliberately cruel and destructive.This extensive volume informs and educates scholars and general readers alike, guiding them to see injustice more clearly and inspiring future generations to create art that is both inclusive and thoughtful.
Now You See It: Studies in Lesibian and Gay Film by ISBN: 0415254981Publication Date: 2002-12-13Revised for this second edition, Now You See It, Richard Dyer's groundbreaking study of films by and about lesbians and gay men, now includes an outline of developments in queer cinema since 1990. Placing the book within lesbian and gay film history, Dyer examines familiar titles such as Girls in Uniform, Un Chant D'Amour and Word is Out in their lesbian/gay context, as well as bringing to light many other forgotten, but remarkable films. Each film is examined in detail in relation to both film type and tradition, and the sexual subculture in which it was made. Now featuring a brand new introduction by Juliane Pidduck, this will be an excellent aid to cinema and film studies courses.
For more shows, see the following lists:
- The 28 Best LGBTQ+ TV Shows to Stream Right Now (Tyler Breitfeller, Vanity Fair)
- The 25 Most Essential LGBTQ TV Shows of the 21st Century (Wilson Chapman, IndieWire)
- 39 binge-worthy LGBTQ TV shows to watch this Pride (Alison Foreman & Oliver Whitney, Mashable)
Shows
The L Word by Publication Date: 2004-2009Follows the lives and loves of a small, close-knit group of lesbian and bisexual women living in Los Angeles as well as the friends and family members around them. Also available to stream on Hulu.
Steven Universe by Publication Date: 2013-2019A team of intergalactic warriors fights to protect the Earth, but the combination of three highly trained beings and one quirky young boy leaves the team struggling to overcome the dangerous scenarios that are put in front of them. Available to stream on Hulu.
PosePublication Date: 2018-2021In the New York of the late '80s and early '90s, this is a story of ball culture and the gay and trans community, the raging AIDS crisis, and capitalism. Available to stream on Netflix.Feel Good by
Publication Date: 2020-2021A semi-autobiographical comedy series from comedian Mae Martin, Feel Good is a deeply personal and poignant story about the unique pressures of navigating the modern-day landscape of gender and sexuality. It follows recovering addict and comedian Mae, who attempts to control the addictive behaviors and intense romanticism that permeate every facet of her life. Things become even more complicated for her, as she gets into an all-consuming relationship with her new girlfriend, George. Available on Netflix.
Work in Progress by Publication Date: 2019-Abby is a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke whose misfortune and despair unexpectedly lead her to a vibrantly transformative relationship. Chicago improv mainstay Abby McEnany co-created and stars in this uniquely human comedy series. Available on Fubo.
Los Espookys by A group of friends turns their love for horror into a peculiar business, providing horror to those who need it in a dreamy Latin American country where the strange and eerie are just part of daily life. Available to stream on Max.
Books
Reality TV and Queer Identities by ISBN: 9783030142148Publication Date: 2019-05-08This book examines queer visibility in reality television, which is arguably the most prolific space of gay, lesbian, transgender and otherwise queer media representation. It explores almost two decades of reality programming, from Big Brother to I Am Cait, American Idol to RuPaul's Drag Race, arguing that the specific conventions of reality TV--its intimacy and emotion, its investments in celebrity and the ideal of authenticity--have inextricably shaped the ways in which queer people have become visible in reality shows. Across all chapters, this book investigates how reality TV's celebration of 'compulsory authenticity' has circulated 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' ways of being queer, demonstrating how possibilities for queer visibility are shaped by broader anxieties and around selfhood, identity and the real in contemporary cultural life.
The New Gay for Pay: The sexual politics of American television production by ISBN: 9781477313596Publication Date: 2018-01-13Television conveys powerful messages about sexual identities, and popular shows are often credited with building support for gay rights, including marriage equality. At the same time, however, many dismiss TV's portrayal of LGBT characters and issues as "gay for pay"--that is, apolitical and exploitative programming created simply for profit. In The New Gay for Pay, Julia Himberg moves beyond both of these positions to investigate the complex and multifaceted ways that television production participates in constructing sexuality, sexual identities and communities, and sexual politics. Himberg interviews workers whose views are rarely heard, including market researchers, public relations experts, media advocacy workers, political campaigners designing strategies for TV messaging, and corporate social responsibility department officers, as well as network executives and producers. Thoroughly analyzing their comments in the light of four key issues--visibility, advocacy, diversity, and equality--Himberg reveals how the practices and belief systems of industry workers generate the conceptions of LGBT sexuality and political change that are portrayed on television.
Camp TV by ISBN: 9781478001850Publication Date: 2019-05-06Sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are widely considered conformist in their depictions of gender roles and sexual attitudes. In Camp TV Quinlan Miller offers a new account of the history of American television that explains what campy meant in practical sitcom terms in shows as iconic as The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as in more obscure fare, such as The Ugliest Girl in Town. Situating his analysis within the era's shifts in the television industry and the coalescence of straightness and whiteness that came with the decline of vaudevillian camp, Miller shows how the sitcoms of this era overflowed with important queer representation and gender nonconformity. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations.
Lesbians on Television by ISBN: 9781789382808Publication Date: 2020-11-29The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. In Lesbians on Television, Kate McNicholas Smith maps concurrent contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media, focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America. Central to these shifts has been a re-imagining of queer lives--or a "new queer visibility"--as LGBTQ+ characters have become increasingly visible within popular culture. Kate McNicholas Smith explores this increased visibility through the lens of television, and in doing so, she identifies a "new lesbian normal"--a normalization of lesbian subjects that both helps and hinders those it represents. Structured around five central case studies of popular British and American television shows featuring lesbian, bisexual, and queer women characters--The L Word, Skins, Glee, Coronation Street, and The Fosters--the book develops a detailed analysis of the shaping of a new "lesbian normal" through representations of LGBTQ+ figures, and examines their televisual representation and reception.
Televising Queer Women by ISBN: 9780230600805Publication Date: 2008-05-12This timely collection provides high-quality interdisciplinary essays which address lesbian and bisexual representation in popular television shows such as The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, E.R., Queer as Folk, Sex and the City, The L Word and The O.C.
Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media by ISBN: 9781137555977Publication Date: 2016-04-29This book takes up the queer girl as a represented and rhetorical figure within film, television and video. In 1987, Canada's Degrassi Junior High featured one of TV's first queer teen storylines. Contained to a single episode, it was promptly forgotten within both the series and popular culture more generally. Cut to 2016 - queer girls are now major characters in films and television series around the globe. No longer represented as subsidiary characters within forgettable storylines, queer girls are a regular feature of contemporary screen media. Analysing the terms of this newfound visibility, Whitney Monaghan provides a critical perspective on this, arguing that a temporal logic underpins many representations of queer girlhood. Examining an archive of screen texts that includes teen television series and teenpics, art-house, queer and independent cinemas as well as new forms of digital video, she expands current discourse on both queer representation and girls' studies bylooking at sexuality through themes of temporality.
Queer TV: Theories, histories, politics by ISBN: 9780415450454Publication Date: 2008-12-03How can we queerly theorise and understand television? How can the realms of television studies and queer theory be brought together, in a manner beneficial and productive for both? Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics is the first book to explore television in all its scope and complexity - its industry, production, texts, audiences, pleasures and politics - in relation to queerness. With contributions from distinguished authors working in film/television studies and the study of gender/sexuality, it offers a unique contribution to both disciplines. Individual essays examine the relationships between queers, queerness, and television across the multiple sites of production, consumption, reception, interpretation and theorisation, as well as the textual and aesthetic dimensions of television and the televisual. The book crucially moves beyond lesbian and gay textual analyses of specific TV shows that have often focussed on evaluations of positive/negative representations and identities. Rather, the essays in Queer TV theorise not just the queerness in/on television (the production personnel, the representations it offers) but also the queerness of television as a distinct medium.
The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom by ISBN: 9780813591728Publication Date: 2018-02-27The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.
Queerbaiting is a (marketing) technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but do not depict, queer romance or other LGBTQ+ representation. Queerbaiting attracts a queer/straight ally audience without isolation viewers who are opposed to seeing queer people in media. Some prominent characters that were used to queerbait fans include Dumbledore from Harry Potter, Finn and Poe from Star Wars, Holmes and Watson from Sherlock, numerous characters from the Marvel franchise, and Dean and Castiel from Supernatural. Subtext in general became popular in film in the 1930s when the Hays Code (guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States) limited what could be shown on screen. Today, queerbaiting is a way to keep media viewership up without actually representing queer people on screen, contribution to further marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community.
Further Reading
- The Problem With the Internet’s Obsession With Queerbaiting (James Factora, them)
- Queerbaiting: The (Mis)representation Of The Queer Community (Natalie Biele, odyssey)
- Is Celebrity ‘Queer Baiting’ Really Such a Crime? (Mark Harris, T Magazine)
- Is it ever OK to use the term queerbaiting? (Katie Baskerville, Mashable)
- How Do We Solve A Problem Like “Queerbaiting”?: On TV’s Not-So-Subtle Gay Subtext (rose, Autostraddle)
- 'Killing Eve', 'Dead to Me', and The Confusing State of Queerbaiting on TV (Jill Gutowitz, Cosmopolitan)
- Harry Potter and the History of Queerbaiting (Ellen Ricks, The Mary Sue)
- Is Disney continuing to queerbait fans with The Rise of Skywalker press tour? (Molly Catherine Turner, Culturess)
- Avengers: Endgame's Gay Representation Is Bullshit (Charles Pulliam-Moore, Gizmodo)
- Netflix’s Wednesday series sparks debate with LGBTQ+ viewers: ‘A metaphor for people in the closet’ (Asyia Iftikhar, PinkNews)
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“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” Called Out for Erasing Queer Dialogue (Sara Li, Teen Vogue)
Video: The Evolution Of Queerbaiting: From Queercoding to Queercatching. Rowan Ellis (2019).
Queerbaiting and Fandom: Teasing fans through homoerotic possibilities by ISBN: 9781609386719Publication Date: 2019-12-01In this first-ever comprehensive examination of queerbaiting, fan studies scholar Joseph Brennan and his contributors examine cases that shed light on the sometimes exploitative industry practice of teasing homoerotic possibilities that, while hinted at, never materialize in the program narratives. Through a nuanced approach that accounts for both the history of queer representation and older fan traditions, these essayists examine the phenomenon of queerbaiting across popular TV, video games, and more.
The Gay Best Friend is a trope where a gay male friend of the main character (often a straight woman) "exists mostly to add variety, funny mannerisms, and cheap laughs to an otherwise all-straight story" ("Gay Best Friend," TV Tropes). Though the Gay Best Friend is often a stereotypical depiction of a gay man, the first Gay Best Friends were positive developments in queer representation, depicting queer people on screen at a time when representation was completely absent.
Video: The Gay Best Friend - How It Became a Stereotype. The Take (2021).
The Advocate writes, "often an important first step in introducing queer storylines to mainstream audiences, the GBF trope had a tendency to reinforce stereotypes about gay men: that their only interests are makeovers, shopping and drama, that their struggles and relationships fade into the background unless they're supporting a straight person's story, and that they only exist to be wise oracles about love and romance. In early film, the trope of the Sissy emerged as a way for filmmakers to code a character as queer (by depicting them as effeminate and outside of conventional masculinity) without explicitly stating the character's sexuality."
From more stereotypical depictions of effeminate white men, the gay best friend evolved to include characters of diverse identities and with deeper interior lives. For example, Wilson Cruz (right) played the character Rickie Vasquez in My So-Called Life. Cruz was the first openly gay actor to play an openly gay character in a leading role in an American television show.
Further Reading
- A History of the Gay Best Friend in Film and TV (Advocate)
- Missing the Gay Best Friend (
- The Evolution Of The “Gay Best Friend,” From Harmful Trope To TV Gold (Dylan Kickham, Elite Daily)
- Rethinking the ‘gay best friend’ (Caroline O’Donoghue, The Guardian)
Gay Man Talking: All the conversations we never had by ISBN: 9781839970948Publication Date: 2022-09-21For many gay men, the relationships they have with other people are coloured by stereotypes, shame, and internalised beliefs that are often left unchallenged. Is being the 'gay best friend' really as fun and inclusive as people think? Sure, coming out to your parents is the hard part, but what happens next? And what if you're not the sexually promiscuous party boy everyone assumes you to be? Through candid and humorous conversations with those closest to him, Daniel Harding unpacks modern gay relationships - from parents, siblings and friends, through to lovers, enemies, technology and ourselves - to explore how it's the relationships around us, breaking us down and making us back up, that are our defining moments. Combining poignant and entertaining anecdotes with powerful interviews with other gay men and influential figures, alongside valuable insight from behavioural expert Judi James, this wise and witty book will help you to challenge the relationships you have with others - and yourself - allowing you to be truly proud of who you are.
The Gay Best Friend by ISBN: 9781728270296Publication Date: 2023-05-30He's always been the token gay best friend. Now, stuck between a warring bride and groom hurtling toward their one perfect day, he's finally ready to focus on something new- himself. Domenic Marino has become an expert at code-switching between the hypermasculine and ultrafeminine worlds of his two soon-to-be-wed best friends. But this summer-reeling from his own failed engagement and tasked with attending their bachelor and bachelorette parties-he's anxious over having to play both sides. The pressure is on. The bride wants Dom to keep things clean. The groom wants Dom to "let loose" with the guys. And Dom just wants to get out of this whole mess with his friendships intact. But once the rowdy groomsmen show up at the beach house-including a surprise visit from the groom's old frat brother, handsome and charming PGA star Bucky Graham-chaos (and unexpected romance) quickly ensues. By the time Dom returns for the bachelorette party, he's accumulated a laundry list of secrets that threaten to destroy everything-from the wedding, to Bucky's career, to the one thing Dom hasn't been paying nearly enough attention to lately- his own life.
The Bury Your Gays trope refers to the presentation of excessive deaths of LGBTQ+ characters, depicting these characters as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts. This trope is related to the sad gay movie (which depicts queer characters in extremely traumatic situations, heartbreaking coming out stories, general suffering, etc.).
Video: The "Bury Your Gays" Trope, Explained. The Take (2020).
Studies have show that, in aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters. "Indeed, it may be because they seem to have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death" (Bury your gays, TV tropes). "Though the term has been widely attributed to any queer character that meets a tragic fate in media, the history it stems from is one where the characters are punished and killed specifically for the sin of being gay on screen" (Hardikar 4-5). This trope is so prevalent that the website "Does an LGBT Person Die" warns viewers of when a queer person will die in a film or television show.
Further Reading
- Queer women have been killed on television for decades. Now The 100's fans are fighting back (Caroline Framke, Vox)
- All 235 Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters On TV, And How They Died (Riese, Autostraddle)
- 'Bury Your Gays': Why Are So Many Lesbian TV Characters Dying Off? (Alamin Yohannes, NBC News)
- 15 Recent, Especially Brutal, Examples of the Bury Your Gays Trope (Mey Rude, Out)
- Hollywood's "Bury Your Gays" Trope Explained: History & Controversy (Emily Clute, Screen Rant)
- Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and ContextHulan, Haley (2017) "Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context," McNair Scholars Journal: Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair/vol21/iss1/6
- The “Bury Your Gays” Trope in Contemporary Television: Generational Shifts in Production Responses to Audience DissentCover, Rob; Milne, Cassandra. 2023. The “Bury Your Gays” Trope in Contemporary Television: Generational Shifts in Production Responses to Audience Dissent.” The Journal of Popular Culture 56 (5-6): 810–823. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13255.
Source: Hardikar, M. (2023). A Real Gay Person: Representation and Stereotypes in Queer Romantic Comedies. Georgetown University.