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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
As a decade, the 1980s is often characterized through its excesses and the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots. In television discourse, these excesses were exemplified in series like Dynasty while Blackness and the realization of the American Dream was most regularly mediated through the fantasies of The Cosby Show. However, in reality, for many queer and Black communities, the decade represented the traumas of the HIV/AIDS and crack epidemics. And for women, the decade ended with the 1989 Supreme Court affirmation that states could deny public funding for abortions. Concomitantly, one of the slogans for Ronald Reagan’s successful run for president was “Let’s make America great again,” harkening to a nostalgia of and for the “good old days” – a wistfulness reignited in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president. This panel uses the juncture between excess, trauma and nostalgia to examine race, gender and sexuality in 1980s television. The presentations re-assess media in and of the 1980s—both within its 1980s cultural context and as a remediation of the decade.
Taylor Cole Miller begins by examining how the cultural, regulatory, political and industrial circumstances of the 1980s engendered an environment for queer articulations of syndicated programming that subverted the conservative politics of the decade. Eleanor Patterson follows with an examination of how American 1980s excess was exported to Britain. Using British fanzines, Patterson details how British female Miami Vice fans created a participatory culture in which they not only shared fandom around Miami Vice, but mobilized against the BBC’s cancelation of Miami Vice’s syndication contract. Third, Alfred Martin examines contemporary Black fandom around The Golden Girls to understand how the series, which emerged out of a painful political period for many Black people, has provided comfort in a different painful political and social epoch. Finally, Elizabth Nathanson and Hollis Griffin explore the television series Physical as an affective re-mediation of the 1980s excesses and white suburban life. Taken together, the presentations on this panel coalesce to illuminate the contradictions of the mediated and re-mediated 1980s—a decade often understood through its turn to conservatism.
Latchkey TV: The Small Queer Wonders of 1980s Television Syndication
Taylor Cole Miller, University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse
As strict policies from the 1970s crumbled under the weight of President Reagan at the same time that the revolution of cable splintered the audience, stiff competition for viewers created a wild west culture in television broadcasting. The proliferation of new channels, the FCC’s deregulatory philosophies, uncertainty in ownership structures, and the functional demise of the television code resulted in a broadcasting landscape brimming with salaciousness, sleaze, camp, and innovation as television used syndication to experiment with its identity. First-run syndication in the 1980s was rife with trashy talk shows such as The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show and Geraldo; zany sitcoms like Small Wonder and She’s the Sheriff; zombie series risen from the networks’ graveyard such as Mama’s Family and Charles in Charge; cartoons featuring rippling muscled characters like He-Man and Masters of the Universe; alongside the spandex-clad American Gladiators and the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
All these bizarre and terrific mutants of traditional television produced for first-run syndication – with their campy, glittery, muscled aesthetics and provocative nature – often blended, subverted, or were openly hostile to long-entrenched genre conventions of most television and provided opportunities for queer voices and queer concerns to find new and receptive audiences especially for a generation of latchkey kids. In this presentation, I explore syndicated shows in the 1980s that often relied on queer programming practices to reach young audiences and conduct interviews with former latchkey kids about how this period of experimental television helped with their own identity work.
Miami Vice and Transnational Feminized Distributive Labor in the 1980s
Eleanor Patterson, Auburn University
This paper examines the historical formation of a British fan culture devoted to the United States television show Miami Vice (NBC, 1984 – 90). Scholars have studied Miami Vice’s aesthetics and its contribution to televisual form, noting its distinctive cinematic style. Drawing on archived British Miami Vice fanzines, this essay considers the material ways in which audiences in the UK engaged with and made sense of Miami Vice in the 1980s. A community of female fans came together to trade video tape recordings, share fannish creations, like fiction, poetry and art, and mobilize a campaign to get the BBC to air episodes after they cancelled their syndication contract in 1986. This study intervenes in our understanding of television history by examining the development of a female-centered participatory culture in the mid-1980s, and pushes us to account for the invisible and feminized labor of television redistribution outside the US.
Where My Girls At?: Comfort and Black Golden Girls Fandom
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., University of Iowa
The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985-1992) rarely featured Black characters within its narrative universe. Yet, after sending out a Tweet asking for if there were any Black Golden Girls fans, 246 retweets, 362 likes, and 26 quoted tweets later, I had an inbox filled with Black people professing their love for Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia. This presentation engages Black fandoms of Golden Girls alongside the ways Black fans discuss the series as being like comfort food for them (particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic when these interviews were conducted). Using 30 interviews with Black Golden Girls fans, this presentation discusses the affective attachment Black fans have to something that does not feature Black bodies. Exploring comfort as a Black fan response, particularly in an era when saying “Black Lives Matter” is construed as controversial in some circles, carries particular import because Golden Girls offers a space in which these Black fans can celebrate joy and largely leave behind idea(l)s about the politics of “positive” representation.
Fungible Femininity: Physical, Self-Determination, and Home Video
Elizabeth Nathanson, Muhlenberg College and Hollis Griffin, University of Michigan
In the Apple TV series Physical (2021-present), Rose Byrne plays Sheila Rubin, a frustrated housewife living in 1980s-era Southern California. While episodes allude to her past in the 1960s-era counterculture, the program situates Sheila in the bland spaces and endless repetition of white, middle-class suburban domesticity. Married to a feckless academic turned politician, the character’s joylessness and self-hatred are made manifest in an acute case of body dysmorphia. Episodes are punctuated by jarring scenes of binge eating and purging, a disorder that wreaks havoc on the protagonist’s body and mind as well as the financial well-being of her family. Sheila finds relief by attending aerobics classes, and identifies a route to financial independence when she begins selling VHS recordings of her workouts. Sheila’s circumstances require that she become fungible: contorting, reshaping, and, crucially, recording herself in a historical moment characterized by the waning of second-wave feminism, the birth of the self-care movement, and the rise of home video technology.
In this presentation, we use a discourse analysis of Physical and its reception among critics to highlight how the program entangles an ethos of self-care with the rise of neoliberalism. Rather than dismiss the program as another example of how capitalism has infiltrated Western notions of well-being, we underline how the program casts economic self-determination as a form of intimate self-care. The program’s structures of affect foster a difficult spectatorial empathy for Sheila, one where viewers are not asked to overlook the character’s flaws but are invited to consider the question: if Sheila isn’t going to take care of Sheila, who will?
Welcome (Back) to the 80s: (Re)Viewing Intersectional 1980s Media Culture
As a decade, the 1980s is often characterized through its excesses and the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots. In television discourse, these excesses were exemplified in series like Dynasty while Blackness and the realization of the American Dream was most regularly mediated through the fantasies of The Cosby Show. However, in reality, for many queer and Black communities, the decade represented the traumas of the HIV/AIDS and crack epidemics. And for women, the decade ended with the 1989 Supreme Court affirmation that states could deny public funding for abortions. Concomitantly, one of the slogans for Ronald Reagan’s successful run for president was “Let’s make America great again,” harkening to a nostalgia of and for the “good old days” – a wistfulness reignited in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president. This panel uses the juncture between excess, trauma and nostalgia to examine race, gender and sexuality in 1980s television. The presentations re-assess media in and of the 1980s—both within its 1980s cultural context and as a remediation of the decade.
Taylor Cole Miller begins by examining how the cultural, regulatory, political and industrial circumstances of the 1980s engendered an environment for queer articulations of syndicated programming that subverted the conservative politics of the decade. Eleanor Patterson follows with an examination of how American 1980s excess was exported to Britain. Using British fanzines, Patterson details how British female Miami Vice fans created a participatory culture in which they not only shared fandom around Miami Vice, but mobilized against the BBC’s cancelation of Miami Vice’s syndication contract. Third, Alfred Martin examines contemporary Black fandom around The Golden Girls to understand how the series, which emerged out of a painful political period for many Black people, has provided comfort in a different painful political and social epoch. Finally, Elizabth Nathanson and Hollis Griffin explore the television series Physical as an affective re-mediation of the 1980s excesses and white suburban life. Taken together, the presentations on this panel coalesce to illuminate the contradictions of the mediated and re-mediated 1980s—a decade often understood through its turn to conservatism.
Latchkey TV: The Small Queer Wonders of 1980s Television Syndication
Taylor Cole Miller, University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse
As strict policies from the 1970s crumbled under the weight of President Reagan at the same time that the revolution of cable splintered the audience, stiff competition for viewers created a wild west culture in television broadcasting. The proliferation of new channels, the FCC’s deregulatory philosophies, uncertainty in ownership structures, and the functional demise of the television code resulted in a broadcasting landscape brimming with salaciousness, sleaze, camp, and innovation as television used syndication to experiment with its identity. First-run syndication in the 1980s was rife with trashy talk shows such as The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show and Geraldo; zany sitcoms like Small Wonder and She’s the Sheriff; zombie series risen from the networks’ graveyard such as Mama’s Family and Charles in Charge; cartoons featuring rippling muscled characters like He-Man and Masters of the Universe; alongside the spandex-clad American Gladiators and the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
All these bizarre and terrific mutants of traditional television produced for first-run syndication – with their campy, glittery, muscled aesthetics and provocative nature – often blended, subverted, or were openly hostile to long-entrenched genre conventions of most television and provided opportunities for queer voices and queer concerns to find new and receptive audiences especially for a generation of latchkey kids. In this presentation, I explore syndicated shows in the 1980s that often relied on queer programming practices to reach young audiences and conduct interviews with former latchkey kids about how this period of experimental television helped with their own identity work.
Miami Vice and Transnational Feminized Distributive Labor in the 1980s
Eleanor Patterson, Auburn University
This paper examines the historical formation of a British fan culture devoted to the United States television show Miami Vice (NBC, 1984 – 90). Scholars have studied Miami Vice’s aesthetics and its contribution to televisual form, noting its distinctive cinematic style. Drawing on archived British Miami Vice fanzines, this essay considers the material ways in which audiences in the UK engaged with and made sense of Miami Vice in the 1980s. A community of female fans came together to trade video tape recordings, share fannish creations, like fiction, poetry and art, and mobilize a campaign to get the BBC to air episodes after they cancelled their syndication contract in 1986. This study intervenes in our understanding of television history by examining the development of a female-centered participatory culture in the mid-1980s, and pushes us to account for the invisible and feminized labor of television redistribution outside the US.
Where My Girls At?: Comfort and Black Golden Girls Fandom
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., University of Iowa
The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985-1992) rarely featured Black characters within its narrative universe. Yet, after sending out a Tweet asking for if there were any Black Golden Girls fans, 246 retweets, 362 likes, and 26 quoted tweets later, I had an inbox filled with Black people professing their love for Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia. This presentation engages Black fandoms of Golden Girls alongside the ways Black fans discuss the series as being like comfort food for them (particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic when these interviews were conducted). Using 30 interviews with Black Golden Girls fans, this presentation discusses the affective attachment Black fans have to something that does not feature Black bodies. Exploring comfort as a Black fan response, particularly in an era when saying “Black Lives Matter” is construed as controversial in some circles, carries particular import because Golden Girls offers a space in which these Black fans can celebrate joy and largely leave behind idea(l)s about the politics of “positive” representation.
Fungible Femininity: Physical, Self-Determination, and Home Video
Elizabeth Nathanson, Muhlenberg College and Hollis Griffin, University of Michigan
In the Apple TV series Physical (2021-present), Rose Byrne plays Sheila Rubin, a frustrated housewife living in 1980s-era Southern California. While episodes allude to her past in the 1960s-era counterculture, the program situates Sheila in the bland spaces and endless repetition of white, middle-class suburban domesticity. Married to a feckless academic turned politician, the character’s joylessness and self-hatred are made manifest in an acute case of body dysmorphia. Episodes are punctuated by jarring scenes of binge eating and purging, a disorder that wreaks havoc on the protagonist’s body and mind as well as the financial well-being of her family. Sheila finds relief by attending aerobics classes, and identifies a route to financial independence when she begins selling VHS recordings of her workouts. Sheila’s circumstances require that she become fungible: contorting, reshaping, and, crucially, recording herself in a historical moment characterized by the waning of second-wave feminism, the birth of the self-care movement, and the rise of home video technology.
In this presentation, we use a discourse analysis of Physical and its reception among critics to highlight how the program entangles an ethos of self-care with the rise of neoliberalism. Rather than dismiss the program as another example of how capitalism has infiltrated Western notions of well-being, we underline how the program casts economic self-determination as a form of intimate self-care. The program’s structures of affect foster a difficult spectatorial empathy for Sheila, one where viewers are not asked to overlook the character’s flaws but are invited to consider the question: if Sheila isn’t going to take care of Sheila, who will?
Bio
Taylor Cole Miller is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. His research focuses on television histories, syndication, and queer media studies such as his recent piece “Rewitched: Retextuality and the Queering of Bewitched” recently published in Camera Obscura. His current book project, Queer and Repeat, is about the queer legacy of television syndication.
Eleanor Patterson is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. Her research focuses on broadcasting history and distribution cultures from a cultural studies perspective. Eleanor’s work has appeared in publications like The Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Television and New Media, and others. Her book Bootlegging the Airwaves is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press.
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at University of Iowa. He is author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom. He has published essays in leading media studies and communication journals including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Elizabeth Nathanson is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College. She is the author of Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother (Routledge, 2013). Her scholarship on postfeminism, “women’s work,” and popular American media has appeared in journals including Celebrity Studies and Television and New Media, in anthologies, and in online publications such as Docologue, Flow and Cinema Journal/Teaching Media.
Hollis Griffin is Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age (Indiana, 2017), which was named an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2017 by CHOICE. His scholarship has also appeared in New Media and Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Television and New Media, and a number of other journals.