Duke University Press Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (Console-ing Passions)

Sitcoms 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. Whether through regular supporting performances (Ann B. Davis's Schultzy in The Bob Cummings Show), guest appearances by Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, or scripted dialogue and situations, industry processes of casting and production routinely esteemed a camp aesthetic that renders all gender expression queer. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations. Review "A revelatory historical reassessment of US network sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s.... Miller combines scholarly rigor with the engaged, politicized vivacity of a subversive connoisseur and the banter of a raconteur in order to rewrite dominant histories of the sitcom, camp, and LGBTQIA+ media representation.... A tour de force abounding with compelling and witty textual analyses fueled by painstaking archival research."--Ken Feil "Journal of Cinema and Media Studies" (1/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) " Camp TV offers us theoretical and methodological challenges to presumptions and argumentations common in queer media histories...hence the usefulness here of a new terminology entirely. What the book also offers, however, is an impressive model of full-scale approach to queer media histories."--Taylor Cole Miller "New Review of Film and Television Studies" (9/19/2019 12:00:00 AM) "A detailed picture of the production and cultural contexts of queer gender appearance in sitcoms, ranging from non-conforming dress and gestures to critiques of heterosexual marriage."--Katharine Mussellam "Jump Cut" (4/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) Review “ Camp TV is a powerful study of the camp currents of 1950s' and 1960s' American television comedy. Quinlan Miller argues passionately for a corrective account of the multiple gendered and erotic sounds and images that constituted the key evolutionary moment in the form of the sitcom.” Author: Amy Villarejo, author of Source: Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire From the Author Quinlan Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon. About the Author Quinlan Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.