Reconciling Queer Disappearance

Representation has for some time been the bad object of queer theory: the entity that contains a slew of anxieties surrounding the continuance, crystallization, and confirmation of “queer” as a generic code, as an intelligible sign that can be deployed (paradoxically) as an antigrammar, as a discipline that cannot exist. Queer is the vestibule for nothing and everything, and thus much of the work on media that has arisen out of queer theory has invested less political energy in the potentials of identity than its inevitable limitations and foreclosures. Media figured queerly is intangible, contingent, and prone to obsolescence, its absence as such placed affectively in line (ironically, straightly) with the negative, the unproductive, the fleeting, the relationally obscure. The necessity to contest the normalizing principles of identification (especially for queer folks outside the mainstream reach) becomes its own normalizing principle,¹ a dogmatic restructuring wherein queer must strive for a status of nonexistence, of failure, of semiascetic removal from cultural life, often in a manner that arguably reinforces masculinist models of critique predicated on distanciation, isolation, and destruction. Queer is separate from intimacy, queer is outside social affirmation, and queer must constantly eulogize its own death.

At its most provocative, Amy Villarejo’s Ethereal Queer functions as a renegotiation of these terms of engagement. Her book is simultaneously a phenomenology of televisual signals as queer non-objects and a reminder that television² is a crucible for identity’s persistence, what she calls “the modern implantation of gendered and sexualized social time” (7). Villarejo’s thesis thus requires a genealogical assertion of queer presence across many historical periods,³ but she is careful to delineate between relational queerness (her preferred mode) and ontological queerness of either the oppositional or incorporative varieties. She is, for instance, suspicious of the progressive argument that twenty-first-century television is somehow “more queer” than its past iterations simply by the fact that characters are “permitted” to be out in a self-identified manner, and she consistently critiques the facile mimeticism of GLAAD enumerative polls. However, she is equally unwilling to abandon representation altogether and is particularly attentive to the means through which pop media express the desire for queer commonality, less as a definitive affirmation and more as a form (like analogue signals) that never translates perfectly into a substantiated object. In this sense, Villarejo urges media scholars to turn their attention back toward television itself,⁴ examining its fundamental ephemerality and the consequences this poses for its figuration as a sexual hermeneutic or, perhaps more important in her terms, an apparatus that encloses public, retrospective temporality. Thus, her proposal of queer as an ethereal figure, simultaneously present and absent, elucidates both her political commitment to ambivalence and her intervention into television studies: in particular a careful, empathetic parsing of representations deemed retrograde or insufficiently complex.

Due to the fact that Villarejo is invested in this sort of macro-criticism, it can sometimes feel as though her conceptual scope is too wide, producing excursions that are as oblique as they are illuminating. The best of these occurs in chapter 3, titled “Television Ate My Family,” wherein a careful examination of Lance Loud’s repeated “coming outs” on An American Family is proceeded by a close analysis of All in the Family’s Christmas-centric “Edith’s Crisis of Faith.” The episode concerns the emotional fallout of family friend (and drag queen) Beverly’s murder, whereas Villarejo’s privileged moment in the Loud saga details an attempt (partially recognized) at transgenerational queer enunciation between a distanced mother and her (purposefully) presentational son. In both instances, Villarejo does not pose the unspeakable irruption of queerness in opposition to family seriality but instead interprets its appearance as an inevitable reconfiguration of kinship: one resulting from lives lived (and extinguished) through TV as the domestic object. In this sense, she extends the mechanism of televisual liveness⁵—of simultaneous production and exhibition within the home—to establish the means through which queerness is not...