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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Panel Abstract: Ryan Murphy is, along with other legendary television creator-producers like Shonda Rhimes, a highly productive showrunner who specifically positions his work as politically resistant in its foregrounding of underrepresented identities both before the camera and behind the scenes. With over twenty different programs from police and medical procedurals to limited-series historical reconsiderations, from network blockbusters to quirky independent niche content, Ryan Murphy’s Queer America contains multitudes, and that is a statement not only about sensibility but expressed intent. In interviews about his creative work, Murphy articulates a committed effort to speak to and portray underrepresented voices. Murphy’s self-appointed role as an interventionist in Hollywood’s historical lack of non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-cisgender representation finds a litmus test in his and Ian Brennan’s 2020 Netflix limited series Hollywood, which imagines alternative histories for troubled, neglected, or disenfranchised stars such as Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Hattie McDaniel. With the FX series Pose (2018-21), about the transgender ballroom scene of the 1980s and ‘90s, Murphy has made it clear that his show will reflect not only a queer but also a race- and trans-centered sensibility. Given the mixed response to these productions, Murphy’s results both court and create controversy. As the essays in this panel suggest, queerness can only be understood as a crisscrossing set of concerns, each with their own urgent momentum, a new moment of queer, trans, and anti-racist positions intersecting, diverging, directing. Even if Murphy’s work sometimes fails to realize its own potentialities, queer and otherwise, it does influence what counts as “diversity” in representation. And representation is important, since it solidifies cultural norms and values. Opines television scholar Jason Mittell, “Representations of identity help define what a culture thinks is normal for a particular group, how behaviors and traits fit into a society’s shared common sense. Such representations also directly impact how we think about ourselves: when television constructs norms for a group we belong to, we might compare our own behavior to that representation; when it represents a group different from ourselves, television can shape how we view other people.” Given the enormous power that television in its rapidly changing forms, platforms, venues, modalities, and audience saturation continues to wield, Murphy’s work demands analysis for its determination and ability to make the work of representation newly visible as an object of study.
Title: The Weight of Queer Emptiness: “The Politician and Twenty-First Century Queerness”
Abstract: Critics have described The Politician as “the Rosetta stone we need for [Ryan Murphy’s] work.” Indeed, the show’s aesthetic, themes, and sensibility bring together much of what Murphy is known for in television. In particular, the show’s use of queer identities and queerness is emblematic of his commentary on cultural life in the twenty-first century. Since The Politician’s release in 2019, reviews have been mixed on the effectiveness of the show’s commentary on politics and queerness. One common observation made by critics is that the show represents a certain “emptiness.” As a point of convergence emptiness stands for something that should be there but that is not. Emptiness is, though, never empty; rather than a vacuum, there is in fact meaningful space. What fills out and gives weight to this space, to The Politician’s queer emptiness is the show’s contrasting uses of LGBTQ identities (where sexual and gender identities define an individual) and post-queer lives (where identities are unremarked and irrelevant to one’s life) that occur at the intersections of authenticity, politics, and social class.
Casting Queerness: Showrunning Advocacy and Ryan Murphy’s Television Histories
Abstract: In June 2019, Netflix announced that it made a three-year multimillion-dollar deal with Pose (FX, 2018-2021) director, producer, and writer Janet Mock. The first transgender person to land full creative control with a major content company, Mock will continue to write, produce, and direct for Ryan Murphy, but also become a TV showrunner for future Netflix series and feature film projects. As the creator of Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003-2010), Glee (Fox, 2009-2015), American Horror Story (FX, 2011-present), American Crime Story (FX, 2016-present), The Politician (Netflix, 2019), and Hollywood (Netflix, 2020), Murphy has been using “showrunning as advocacy” to create LGBTQIA-positive series that are inclusive not only of the queer community, but also women and people of color, hiring 60% women directors and famously casting five transgender women of color to star in Pose. This essay will focus on the showrunning of Murphy on series such as Pose, American Crime Story, and Hollywood as a means of examining how the embodiment, presence, and visibility of queer people and queer people of color in media representation and media production can be seen as advocacy. Using media industry and production studies approaches, I will be analyzing the ways in which casting queer people and queer people of color enables new possibilities for understanding the intersections between media production, media representation, and the material conditions of labor within the television industry.
Since debuting his first show in 1999, mega-producer Ryan Murphy has made an indelible mark on television. He owes much of his success to his synergistic relationship with one of his best-known collaborators, actress and producer Sarah Paulson. In this paper I argue that Paulson is Murphy’s “fused muse”: someone who both inspires and whose talent makes possible the work of the artist. By examining their ongoing professional relationship, I catalogue how Paulson, as Murphy’s fused muse, both enables and embodies Murphy’s four tactics for disrupting the Hollywood status quo to make the entertainment industries more equitable and inclusive. I identify the four tactics championed by Murphy—a combination of priorities he has expressed publicly and patterns that emerge throughout his work—as follows: (1)reimaging and rewriting history through television series or episodes; (2) reorienting the female star trajectory; (3) striving for a more equitable Hollywood through his Half Initiative; and (4) prioritizing collaboration in the age of the television auteur. I demonstrate that Paulson has played an integral role in realizing each of the aforementioned tactics, and in doing so functions as both source of inspiration and an active participant in realizing Murphy’s creative worldview.
This paper considers the Ryan Murphy first responder procedural drama 9-1-1 (2018 – present) for how its dramatized rescues of fetuses/children allay anxieties over the end of the Anthropocene. Amidst a series of interlocking storylines that drive the procedural format and heighten anxieties about global warming and natural disasters,
9-1-1 returns again and again to scenes of birth both symbolic and actual. Securing such "fetal futures" at the culmination of most episodes issues a rebuke of the "queer time" of pregnancy and birth in favor of what feminist philosopher Elizabeth Freeman terms “chromo-normativity,” or those devices that measure time to regulate bodies and behaviors. On 9-1-1, bio-rescues often require the narrative elimination of the natal body. Indeed, bio-mothers are put under erasure across every season of 9-1-1, in such a way as to call the full heroic function of the masculinized white father into action. Despite the ostensible liberalism of its casting, 9-1-1 offers a version of "fetal futures" achievable only through patriarchal intercession into, and marginalization of, the maternal body. Through the figure of the child in general and the fetus in particular as both innocent victims of inferior maternity and autonomous future citizens needing rescue from the abject maternal, 9-1-1 assures us of a safer world to come, particularly if patriarchal intercession arrives “on time.” Trapped in wombs or captive to the unregulated vagaries of their bio-mothers, the show promises that repro-futurity is not just for white heterosexuals anymore, as governmental infrastructure (the police, the fire department, the hospital) “saves” us from the very same death-drive-jouissance articulated in the antinominalist discourses of theories of “queer time. The show's edge-of-your-seat rescues of fetuses and children ultimately hews closely to ideals of chrono-normative emergency requiring management by the State and its representatives, even if such state representatives have been “updated” to include queers and people of color.
Ryan Murphy's Queer America
Panel Abstract: Ryan Murphy is, along with other legendary television creator-producers like Shonda Rhimes, a highly productive showrunner who specifically positions his work as politically resistant in its foregrounding of underrepresented identities both before the camera and behind the scenes. With over twenty different programs from police and medical procedurals to limited-series historical reconsiderations, from network blockbusters to quirky independent niche content, Ryan Murphy’s Queer America contains multitudes, and that is a statement not only about sensibility but expressed intent. In interviews about his creative work, Murphy articulates a committed effort to speak to and portray underrepresented voices. Murphy’s self-appointed role as an interventionist in Hollywood’s historical lack of non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-cisgender representation finds a litmus test in his and Ian Brennan’s 2020 Netflix limited series Hollywood, which imagines alternative histories for troubled, neglected, or disenfranchised stars such as Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Hattie McDaniel. With the FX series Pose (2018-21), about the transgender ballroom scene of the 1980s and ‘90s, Murphy has made it clear that his show will reflect not only a queer but also a race- and trans-centered sensibility. Given the mixed response to these productions, Murphy’s results both court and create controversy. As the essays in this panel suggest, queerness can only be understood as a crisscrossing set of concerns, each with their own urgent momentum, a new moment of queer, trans, and anti-racist positions intersecting, diverging, directing. Even if Murphy’s work sometimes fails to realize its own potentialities, queer and otherwise, it does influence what counts as “diversity” in representation. And representation is important, since it solidifies cultural norms and values. Opines television scholar Jason Mittell, “Representations of identity help define what a culture thinks is normal for a particular group, how behaviors and traits fit into a society’s shared common sense. Such representations also directly impact how we think about ourselves: when television constructs norms for a group we belong to, we might compare our own behavior to that representation; when it represents a group different from ourselves, television can shape how we view other people.” Given the enormous power that television in its rapidly changing forms, platforms, venues, modalities, and audience saturation continues to wield, Murphy’s work demands analysis for its determination and ability to make the work of representation newly visible as an object of study.
Title: The Weight of Queer Emptiness: “The Politician and Twenty-First Century Queerness”
Abstract: Critics have described The Politician as “the Rosetta stone we need for [Ryan Murphy’s] work.” Indeed, the show’s aesthetic, themes, and sensibility bring together much of what Murphy is known for in television. In particular, the show’s use of queer identities and queerness is emblematic of his commentary on cultural life in the twenty-first century. Since The Politician’s release in 2019, reviews have been mixed on the effectiveness of the show’s commentary on politics and queerness. One common observation made by critics is that the show represents a certain “emptiness.” As a point of convergence emptiness stands for something that should be there but that is not. Emptiness is, though, never empty; rather than a vacuum, there is in fact meaningful space. What fills out and gives weight to this space, to The Politician’s queer emptiness is the show’s contrasting uses of LGBTQ identities (where sexual and gender identities define an individual) and post-queer lives (where identities are unremarked and irrelevant to one’s life) that occur at the intersections of authenticity, politics, and social class.
Casting Queerness: Showrunning Advocacy and Ryan Murphy’s Television Histories
Abstract: In June 2019, Netflix announced that it made a three-year multimillion-dollar deal with Pose (FX, 2018-2021) director, producer, and writer Janet Mock. The first transgender person to land full creative control with a major content company, Mock will continue to write, produce, and direct for Ryan Murphy, but also become a TV showrunner for future Netflix series and feature film projects. As the creator of Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003-2010), Glee (Fox, 2009-2015), American Horror Story (FX, 2011-present), American Crime Story (FX, 2016-present), The Politician (Netflix, 2019), and Hollywood (Netflix, 2020), Murphy has been using “showrunning as advocacy” to create LGBTQIA-positive series that are inclusive not only of the queer community, but also women and people of color, hiring 60% women directors and famously casting five transgender women of color to star in Pose. This essay will focus on the showrunning of Murphy on series such as Pose, American Crime Story, and Hollywood as a means of examining how the embodiment, presence, and visibility of queer people and queer people of color in media representation and media production can be seen as advocacy. Using media industry and production studies approaches, I will be analyzing the ways in which casting queer people and queer people of color enables new possibilities for understanding the intersections between media production, media representation, and the material conditions of labor within the television industry.
Since debuting his first show in 1999, mega-producer Ryan Murphy has made an indelible mark on television. He owes much of his success to his synergistic relationship with one of his best-known collaborators, actress and producer Sarah Paulson. In this paper I argue that Paulson is Murphy’s “fused muse”: someone who both inspires and whose talent makes possible the work of the artist. By examining their ongoing professional relationship, I catalogue how Paulson, as Murphy’s fused muse, both enables and embodies Murphy’s four tactics for disrupting the Hollywood status quo to make the entertainment industries more equitable and inclusive. I identify the four tactics championed by Murphy—a combination of priorities he has expressed publicly and patterns that emerge throughout his work—as follows: (1)reimaging and rewriting history through television series or episodes; (2) reorienting the female star trajectory; (3) striving for a more equitable Hollywood through his Half Initiative; and (4) prioritizing collaboration in the age of the television auteur. I demonstrate that Paulson has played an integral role in realizing each of the aforementioned tactics, and in doing so functions as both source of inspiration and an active participant in realizing Murphy’s creative worldview.
This paper considers the Ryan Murphy first responder procedural drama 9-1-1 (2018 – present) for how its dramatized rescues of fetuses/children allay anxieties over the end of the Anthropocene. Amidst a series of interlocking storylines that drive the procedural format and heighten anxieties about global warming and natural disasters,
9-1-1 returns again and again to scenes of birth both symbolic and actual. Securing such "fetal futures" at the culmination of most episodes issues a rebuke of the "queer time" of pregnancy and birth in favor of what feminist philosopher Elizabeth Freeman terms “chromo-normativity,” or those devices that measure time to regulate bodies and behaviors. On 9-1-1, bio-rescues often require the narrative elimination of the natal body. Indeed, bio-mothers are put under erasure across every season of 9-1-1, in such a way as to call the full heroic function of the masculinized white father into action. Despite the ostensible liberalism of its casting, 9-1-1 offers a version of "fetal futures" achievable only through patriarchal intercession into, and marginalization of, the maternal body. Through the figure of the child in general and the fetus in particular as both innocent victims of inferior maternity and autonomous future citizens needing rescue from the abject maternal, 9-1-1 assures us of a safer world to come, particularly if patriarchal intercession arrives “on time.” Trapped in wombs or captive to the unregulated vagaries of their bio-mothers, the show promises that repro-futurity is not just for white heterosexuals anymore, as governmental infrastructure (the police, the fire department, the hospital) “saves” us from the very same death-drive-jouissance articulated in the antinominalist discourses of theories of “queer time. The show's edge-of-your-seat rescues of fetuses and children ultimately hews closely to ideals of chrono-normative emergency requiring management by the State and its representatives, even if such state representatives have been “updated” to include queers and people of color.
Bio
Chairs: Brenda Weber and Lee Weeks
Brenda R. Weber is Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar in Gender Studies at Indiana University. She publishes widely on gender, sexuality, media, and the body, including her most-recent book, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism (Duke 2019). With David Greven, she is the co-editor of Ryan Murphy’s Queer America (forthcoming Routledge).
Lee Yun Sok Weeks, Jr. is a doctoral student in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. He is interested in the facets of culture that are taken for granted as repugnant or abject, those topics and behavior that are necessarily contextualized and conformed by (other) embedded differences like sexuality, race, gender, class, and ability.
Participants:
Julia Himberg is Director and Associate professor of Film & Media Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production. Her work has appeared in journals such as Communication, Culture, & Critique, Television & New Media, and JCMS. She is currently the Special Features Editor for JCMS.
Sarah E. S. Sinwell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah. She has published essays on Green Porno, BoJack Horseman, and Dexter in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Jump Cut, and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. Her book, Indie Cinema Online (Rutgers University Press, 2020), examines shifting modes of independent film distribution and exhibition on YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and SundanceTV as a means of redefining independent cinema in an era of media convergence.
Lauren Savit is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research examines how media texts and industries circulate normative and transgressive ideologies about gender, race, and power. Her publications include “Examining the Fan Labor of TV Podcast Hosts” in the media and fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cutlures (2020).
Jennifer Maher is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies. Her most recent work focuses on representations of reproductive technology in popular culture. She has also published fiction and memoir in a variety of venues and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Literature. At Indiana University, Dr. Maher's areas of expertise cover gender and popular culture; second and third wave feminism; gender and modern memoir, feminist history/theory, and the politics of reproduction.