Visibility and Its Discontents: Queer Television Studies

This review essay considers three recent publications that collectively demonstrate developments in queer television studies. According to the author, these works provide circumspect progress narratives, tempered by awareness that LGBTQ visibility does not exist in any historical congruity with LGBTQ social and political realities. Taken together, these publications suggest that LGBTQ studies and television studies can make odd bedmates, as scholars negotiate between queer theory’s postidentity politics and a marked nostalgia for a politics of visibility—the emboldening, visceral pleasures of watching and seeing queers on TV, and believing that it matters.