published
work
“Parenting a New Moral Panic: Anti-Queer Digital Activism and Reactionary Media Ecologies,” Television & New Media (Invited, 2024).
In April 2021, Chaya Raichik’s conservative Twitter account, “Libs of TikTok,” began reposting what Raichik identified as “a daily dose of cringe” using social media postings by U.S. liberals. Decontextualizing video clips to re-frame them through inflammatory rhetoric, the Libs of TikTok account is broadly reflective of an anti-queer moral panic centered around parental rhetoric about children on the global right. While Raichik’s account had been implicated in earlier forms of misinformation from COVID-19 and vaccine denialism to Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, the account found new focus during LGBTQ+-Pride Month in June 2021. Drawing on religious conceptions of parenting and anti-queer tropes of pedophilia, the account’s incendiary rhetoric frequently targets pro-LGBTQ+ politicians, education professionals, and healthcare officials advocating for various forms of gender-affirming care for trans youth. Synthesizing earlier conspiracies about left-wing pedophilia and sexual trafficking, the account has significantly contributed to the development of a defamatory language of “grooming” to target LGBTQ+ cultural and educational activism as predatory towards children. This shift, moreover, is significant for how it gathers many themes of right-wing activism since the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, including local education activism aimed at excising critical accounts of slavery from U.S. history curricula. In this paper, I trace the pre-history of anti-queer digital activism on Twitter to its late-19th-century incarnations and how these earlier moral panics have developed into recent media-networking on the platform. Crucially, this paper provides greater attention to the affective rhetoric of Libs of TikTok’s anti-queer digital activism in how it has stimulated acts of intimidation and violence towards queer nightlife and drag-inclusive events. Reflective of its rising influence, this anti-queer media and affect has received promotion by high-profile media personalities like Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. Demonstrating this platforming across digital journalism, podcasting, and cable television channels, I underscore how this media ecology’s amplification of this “grooming discourse” poses significant lessons for analyzing the current anti-LGBTQ+ reactionary backlash in the global Anglo-sphere. In doing so, this paper challenges misconceptions of cancel culture as a unique feature of digital platforms alone or innately connected to left-wing cultural activism. “Parenting a New Moral Panic,” thus, recovers attention to the flow of anti-queer rhetoric from reactionary digital platforms to broader media ecologies of conservative thought in ways that interrogate this phenomenon’s deeper challenges for multicultural democracies around issues of queerness.Photo of School Board Meeting and Anti-CRT Education Activism / Juan Figueroa, Dallas News Staff Photographer.
“Industrializing Nationalist Dissent: Music Censorship, 2 Live Crew, and the Politics of Performance at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards,” Velvet Light Trap 89 (Spring 2022).
This paper considers how the 1990 Video Music Awards (“VMAs”) served as a central link in the construction of MTV’s cultural brand by fusing debates around nationalism, anti-censorship, and consumer activism through its awards show performances. When rap group 2 Live Crew performed their single “Banned in the USA” at the telecast, the song’s promotional campaign drew upon the group’s experience of arrest after being found to have violated obscenity standards in the state of Florida. At the VMAs, 2 Live Crew drew attention to the ways that rap music was being censored on racial grounds. Such public pressure efforts reflected the appropriation of consumer activism from earlier pressure campaigns by the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) to discipline audience perceptions of the politics of popular music. Embodying this corporate strategy, 2 Live Crew’s public protest was not alone, as other moments in the telecast represented how MTV’s partnerships with music trade organizations and the later Rock the Vote campaign worked to industrialize performances of dissent as part of a broader method of handling political regulatory threats over obscenity in music. Placed within longer histories of free speech rhetoric, the 1990 VMAs telecast can, thus, be read as a form of John Caldwell’s “industrial reflexivity” that worked to brand the consumption of MTV’s youth culture as politically expressive.Photo of 2 Live Crew, Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic, Inc. / Getty Images.
“Racial Affect and “Populist” Epistemologies: Citizens United and the Conservative Media Tradition,”
The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary, eds. Patricia Aufderheide and Joshua Glick (Under Review Oxford UP).
In recent academic literature, studies of conservative nonfiction media and its production have largely centered around the rise of right-wing radio programming, debates over access to broadcast television, and the development of echo chambers via cable networks like Fox News and digital press outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller. Fewer scholars have formally studied how the conservative documentaries regularly screened at the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference produce their own forms of racial affect for political organizing. This essay turns to these documentaries as central to the debates around the objectivity of truth that have marked the Trump era, particularly by looking at issues of racial embodiment, truth, and identity politics that crystallize in two representative documentaries by Citizens United: America at Risk (2010) and Rocky Mountain Heist (2014). By analyzing these two films, I explore how the conservative documentary frames nativist political conspiracies as forms of populist knowledge by fusing elements of white, nationalist, and rural identity politics in their rhetoric against the Obama administration. These documentaries, fomenting fears of white political impotence, assert “populist epistemologies” that are rooted in the agitation of concern about the failures of national media outlets to include the concerns of "everyday white American voices. I trace how this rhetoric is historically situated within the conservative media ecosystem and its privileging of specific forms of authenticity through a rejection of older documentary aesthetics like voice-of-god narration by emphasizing the subjective voice of its on-screen conservative commentators. By noting the mirroring of documentary and news media aesthetics, I argue that the conservative political documentary is a key area of research for racial populism in how it foregrounds the aesthetic relationship between knowledge and the body within this landscape.Photo of CPAC 2014.
“Reimagining the Popular on the Vegas Circuit: Helen Traubel, Diva Populism, and the Labor of Publicity,” The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas, ed. Jake Johnson
(U of Ill. Press, 2023).
In 1953, opera singer Helen Traubel, famed Wagnerian Soprano, left the Metropolitan Opera to pursue opportunities for her career at a variety of nightclubs like New York’s Copacabana, Chez Paree in Chicago, and the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas in addition to minor parts on television shows like The Red Skelton Hour and The Jimmy Durante Show. Knowledge of her departure had reached the general public following the singer’s release of selected excerpts from her correspondence with the opera house’s manager, Rudolf Bing. Within the letters, Traubel took pains to present her decision to snub the prestigious venue as part of a larger discourse on the elitism of its institution, declaring that “to assert that art can be found in the Metropolitan Opera House but not in a night club is a rank snobbery that underrates both the taste of the American public and the talent of its composers.” In this paper, I analyze how musicians like Traubel offer a reconsidered appreciation of publicity as a form of cultural populism within the changing conditions of nightclub performance in the 1950s. Within this defense of popular music, Traubel declared “St. Louis Blues” the folk song of her people, thereby channeling public support for music genres like blues. Here, this sentiment took on distinct racial resonances during the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, particularly as the Metropolitan Opera House didn’t begin casting Black divas on its stage until Marian Anderson’s performance in 1955. While signaling this diva populism, Traubel’s decision to perform on the nightclub circuit in cities like Vegas also reflected the re-evaluation of cultural prestige and economic opportunity within the rise of new mass media forms like television in the postwar moment and Vegas’s strong relationship to new imaginations of popular music. Recognizing this dynamic, I argue that Vegas’s position in a complexifying media industry not only challenged older cultural traditions like opera but also re-invigorated strategies of self-publicization for independent music celebrity in ways that provided new allegiances between social politics and celebrity branding.Photo of Helen Traubel in Chitose Air Base, Takeo Kobayashi/Asahi Shinbun, 1952.
“Unsettling Domesticity: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Madonna, and the Voyeuristic Politics
of MTV Stardom,” The Films of Susan Seidelman, ed. Susan Kerns (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
This essay discusses the relationship of Susan Seidelman’s work in relation to MTV’s depiction of female youth culture in the 1980s through an interrogation of Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). I analyze this history by looking at how music videos with a female address reclaimed images of urban street culture within the context of MTV’s relationship to the coveted rock n’ roll audience. Amidst the masculine bent of rock music criticism, I examine how these new video performers like Pat Benatar, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna worked to challenge these cultural hierarchies through their positioning of personal agency against more Victorian attitudes about white female sexuality. This dimension of female stardom is highlighted in Seidelman’s work through Madonna’s casting in the role of Susan. My work, thus, underscores how the film’s narrative dramatizes aspects of Madonna’s stardom, as reports throughout the 1980s regularly featured commentary on the series of contests and concerts where fans would dress up and impersonate the singer. As Roberta comes to grapple with her suburban domesticity (and, in some sense her privileged experience of whiteness), she echoes this sense of impersonation as she begins to lose herself in the persona of Madonna’s Susan. While narratives about personality swaps and mistaken identity can be observed elsewhere in Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Altman’s Three Women (1977), Susan’s narrative of mistaken identity highlights the ways in which MTV’s female stardom in the 1980s premised itself, partly, on the rejection of gendered cultural hierarchies as it worked to reclaim the possibilities of female autonomy and sexual agency through a voyeuristic engagement with female celebrity. In drawing these aspects out, I argue that Seidelman’s work recovers crucial oppositions forged by music television of the period between female music celebrity and suburban domesticity, thus underscoring how MTV’s programming promised the unsettling of gendered hierarchies as crucial brand aspects to female music stardom in the digital era.Photo of Madonna’s “Into the Groove” Vinyl Jacket Cover.
“Contested Adaptations: Legacies of Orientalism, the She-Hero, and Hollywood’s Diversity Aesthetic,”
Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics, ed. Sandra Cox (London, UK: Routledge, 2021)–w/ Monica Sandler.
In December 2016, comedian Margaret Cho discussed on the podcast TigerBelly an email chain with actress Tilda Swinton about her casting as The Ancient One in Marvel’s Doctor Strange (2016). Swinton contacted Cho after a public controversy following the creative decision to feature a Celtic woman in a role traditionally depicted as a Tibetan male. Outrage over Swinton’s casting crystallized when the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) made a public statement condemning the use of whitewashing in the newly-released film, despite Marvel’s original desire to avoid racial stereotypes. The company’s recent goals of adding diversity to their brand has produced not only the transformation of marginal characters like the Ancient One in the Marvel canon but also yielded large-scale productions like Black Panther (2018) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). This chapter explores how Marvel’s approach through these films reflects their negotiation of the racial and gender divides of the 2010s, as the company has sought to undercut charges of racism and sexism in its original comic books by incorporating elements of gender and race-bending. We consider the relationship of the comic books to identity-bending by placing Doctor Strange’s representation of gender and race in its adaptation to the screen into Marvel’s longer histories of gender-swapping. This chapter traces the development of these bending practices by looking at the history of the “she-hero” figure, a principal way that Marvel attempted to introduce female super-heroes by transforming originally male characters into women. We focus on the invention and phenomenon of the “she-hero” as the clear precedent for not only The Ancient One but the recent Captain Marvel film as necessary industrial contexts for understanding these changes in Marvel’s content strategies. Our essay argues that this “diversity aesthetic” can be studied for how it demonstrates the role of identity-bending to sustain multiple points of identification for an international audience. While casting decisions such as Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange appear to refer back to the shallowness of the she-hero tradition, its relationship to the legacy of the she-hero, we argue, reflects Marvel’s management of multiple constructions of national identity in the global marketplace that present competing visions of social change for how the comic book canon is adapted to the big-screen.Photo Cover of Namora (1948), No. 1, Kevin Bald/Timely Comics.