Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in American Horror Story PDF Download

Author: Harriet E.H. Earle
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476636826
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The horror anthology TV show American Horror Story first aired on FX Horror in 2011 and has thus far spanned eight seasons. Addressing many areas of cultural concern, the show has tapped in to conversations about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and more. This volume with nine new essays and one reprinted one considers how this series engages with representations of gender, sexuality, queer identities and other LGBTQ issues. The contributors address myriad elements of American Horror Story, from the relationship between gender and nature to contemporary masculinities, offering a sustained analysis of a show that has proven to be central to contemporary genre television.

Author: Richard Hand
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785279351
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Over ten seasons since 2011, the television series American Horror Story (AHS), created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has continued to push the boundaries of the televisual form in new and exciting ways. Emerging in a context which has seen a boom in popularity for horror series on television, AHS has distinguished itself from its ‘rivals’ such as The Walking Dead, Bates Motel or Penny Dreadful through its diverse strategies and storylines which have seen it explore archetypal narratives of horror culture as well as engaging with real historical events. Utilising a repertory company model for its casting, the show has challenged issues around contemporary politics, heteronormativity, violence on the screen, and disability to name but a few. This new collection of essays approaches the AHS anthology series through a variety of critical perspectives within the broader field of television studies and its transections with other disciplines.

Author: Brenda R. Weber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000575055
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Ryan Murphy is a self-described "gay boy from Indiana," who has grown up to forge a media empire. With an extraordinary list of credits and successful television shows, movies, and documentaries to his name, Murphy can now boast one of the broadest and most successful careers in Hollywood. Serving as writer, producer, and director, his creative output includes limited-run dramas (such as Feud, Ratched, and Halston), procedural dramas (such as 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lonestar), anthology series (such as American Crime Story, American Horror Story, and American Horror Stories), sit-coms (such as The New Normal) and long-running serial narratives (such as Glee, Nip/Tuck, and Pose). Each of these is infused in different ways with a distinctive form of queer energy and erotics, animating their narratives with both campy excess and poignant longing and giving new meaning to the American story. This collection takes up Murphy as auteur and showrunner, considering the gendered and sexual politics of Murphy’s wide body of work. Using an intersectional framework throughout, an impressive list of well-known and emerging scholars engages with Murphy’s diverse output, while also making the case for Murphy’s version of a queer sensibility, a revised notion of queer time, cultural memory, and the contributions his own production company makes to a politics of LGBTQ+ representation and evolving gender identities. This book is suitable for students of Gender and Media, LGBTQ+ Studies, Media Studies, and Communication Studies.

Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793643407
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience’s experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively within the genre- women, LGBTQ+, indigenous, and BAME communities - are finally being seen and finding space to speak.

Author: Aaron K.H. Ho
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476642885
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
After Charmed ended in 2006, witches were relegated to sidekicks of televisual vampires or children's programs. But during the mid-2010s they began to resurface as leading characters in shows like the immensely popular The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Charmed reboot, Salem, American Horror Story: Coven, and the British program, A Discovery of Witches. No longer sweet, feminine, domestic, and white, these witches are powerful, diverse, and transgressive, representing an intersectional third-wave feminist vision of the witch. Featuring original essays from noted scholars, this is the first critical collection to examine witches on television from the late 2010s. Situated in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, essays examine the reemergence and shifting identities of TV witches through the perspectives of intersectional gender studies, hauntology, politics, morality, monstrosity, violence, queerness, disabilities, rape, ecofeminism, linguistics, family, and digital humanities.

Author: David Gillota
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978834187
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination. Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Covering everything from the grotesque body in Freaks to the comedy of awkwardness in Midsommar, this book shows how integral humor has been to the development of the American horror film over the past century.

Author: Randy Laist
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476686513
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The 1980s is remembered as a time of big hair, synthetic music, and microwave cookery. It is also remembered as the heyday of conservative politics, socioeconomic inequality, and moral panics. It is dichotomously remembered as either a nostalgic age of innocence or a regressive moral wasteland, depending on who you ask, and when. But, most of all, it is remembered. In retro fashion trends, in '80s-based film and television narratives, and through countless rebooted movies, video games, superheroes, and even political slogans imploring us to Make America Great Again (Again). More than merely a historical period, "the '80s" has grown into a contested myth, ever-evolving through the critical and expressive lens of popular culture. This book explores the many shapes the '80s mythos has taken across a diverse array of media. Essays examine television series such as Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, and POSE, films such as Dallas Buyers Club, Summer of '84, and Chocolate Babies, as well as video games, pop music, and toys. Collectively, these essays explore how representations of the 1980s influence the way we think about our past, our present, and our future.

Author: Rebecca Janicker
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476663521
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Looming onto the television landscape in 2011, American Horror Story gave viewers a weekly dose of psychological unease and gruesome violence. Embracing the familiar horror conventions of spooky settings, unnerving manifestations and terrifying monsters, series co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk combine shocking visual effects with an engaging anthology format to provide a modern take on the horror genre. This collection of new essays examines the series' contribution to television horror, focusing on how the show speaks to social concerns, its use of classic horror tropes and its reinvention of the tale of terror for the 21st century.

Author: Darren Elliott-Smith
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786836270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This anthology comprises essays that study the form, aesthetics and representations of LGBTQ+ identities in an emerging sub-genre of film and television termed ‘New Queer Horror’. This sub-genre designates horror crafted by directors/producers who identify as gay, bi, queer or transgendered, or works like Jeepers Creepers (2001), Let the Right One In (2008), Hannibal (2013–15), or American Horror Story: Coven (2013–14), which feature homoerotic or explicitly homosexual narratives with ‘out’ LGBTQ+ characters. Unlike other studies, this anthology argues that New Queer Horror projects contemporary anxieties within LGBTQ+ subcultures onto its characters and into its narratives, building upon the previously figurative role of Queer monstrosity in the moving image. New Queer Horror thus highlights the limits of a metaphorical understanding of queerness in the horror film, in an age where its presence has become unambiguous. Ultimately, this anthology aims to show that in recent years New Queer Horror has turned the focus of fear on itself, on its own communities and subcultures.

Author: David Greven
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078645458X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Studying the Star Trek myth from the original 1960s series to the 2009 franchise-reboot film, this book challenges frequent accusations that the Star Trek saga refuses to represent queer sexuality. Arguing that Star Trek speaks to queer audiences through subtle yet provocative allegorical narratives, the analysis pays close attention to representations of gender, race, and sexuality to develop an understanding of the franchise’s queer sensibility. Topics include the 1960s original’s deconstruction of the male gaze and the traditional assumptions of male visual mastery; constructions of femininity in Star Trek: Voyager, particularly in the relationship between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine; and the ways in which Star Trek: Enterprise’s adoption of neoconservative politics may have led to its commercial and aesthetic failure.