Books by Kate McNicholas Smith
Lesbians On TV: New Queer Visibility and The Lesbian Normal explores the mediation of contemporar... more Lesbians On TV: New Queer Visibility and The Lesbian Normal explores the mediation of contemporary LGBTQ+ inclusion in British and North American television culture. Recent years have seen notable shifts towards an increased visibility of LGBTQ+ representation, or a ‘new queer visibility’. Meanwhile, this period has seen significant social shifts in LGBTQ+ rights, epitomised in same sex-marriage legislation, alongside new forms of backlash and a rise in right wing political rhetoric. Popular culture is a critical site of the mediation of, and sometimes intervention in, the shifts and tensions of this period. Notably, as same-sex marriage took centre stage in LGBTQ+ rights, media representations imagined lesbian brides. Representations thus functioned as a site of imaging what such changes might look like, whilst mobilising contemporary figurations of queer subjectivity. Lesbians on TV develops a queer feminist analysis of the limits and possibilities of this new queer visibility in popular culture, tracking contemporary figurations of lesbian, bisexual and queer women across televisual media. Using a series of televisual case studies, Lesbians on TV follows the contemporary lesbian figure across multiple sites: from teen dramas to soap operas, into Tumblr pages and fanfiction stories, and across news and magazine media. The contemporary lesbian figure is found to be constituted through complex convergences of feminist, LGBTQ+ and queer politics, as well as hetero-patriarchal, classed and racialised limits. In the repetition of particular visual and narrative codes, however, a new 'lesbian normal' becomes recognisable. At the same time, representations move into fandoms, where they are attached to, engaged with, critiqued and re-made. Lesbians on TV draws on fan media and interviews with fanfiction writers to explore the significance of new queer visibility to queer audiences, and the broader sites of intimacy and connectivity it might facilitate. Thus, Lesbians on TV maps this period of social change, examining the ways in which forms of intimacy, identity and inclusion are opened up, and simultaneously closed down, in the contemporary mediation of 'the lesbian normal'.
Papers by Kate McNicholas Smith
Feminist Theory, 2017
Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular ... more Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular culture. Evoking concerns around young women and ‘sexualisation’, Cyrus emerges as a convergent signifier of sexualised media content and the girl-at-risk. As Cyrus is repeatedly invoked in these debates, she comes to function as the bad object of young femininity. Arguing, however, that Cyrus troubles the sexualisation thesis in the provocations of her creative practice, I suggest that this contested media figure exceeds the frames through which she is read. Thus, I ask: what kinds of insights might be possible if we were to transform the terms on which we approach this figure? Considering a selection of the images and performances that constitute the Cyrus archive, this article proposes a reading of Cyrus as performative provocation. Mobilising an existing sensibility of queer feminist struggle, Cyrus emerges as a disruptive, albeit contradictory, figure. Questions of privilege, limit ...
Feminist Media Studies, 2017
Feminist Theory, 2017
Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular ... more Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular culture. Evoking concerns around young women and ‘sexualisation’, Cyrus emerges as a convergent signifier of sexualised media content and the girl-at-risk. As Cyrus is repeatedly invoked in these debates, she comes to function as the bad object of young femininity. Arguing, however, that Cyrus troubles the sexualisation thesis in the provocations of her creative practice, I suggest that this contested media figure exceeds the frames through which she is read. Thus, I ask: what kinds of insights might be possible if we were to transform the terms on which we approach this figure? Considering a selection of the images and performances that constitute the Cyrus archive, this article proposes a reading of Cyrus as performative provocation. Mobilising an existing sensibility of queer feminist struggle, Cyrus emerges as a disruptive, albeit contradictory, figure. Questions of privilege, limit and possibility emerge in this discussion, as well as what constitutes feminist struggle.
Feminist Media Studies, 2017
The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North Am... more The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of “positive” and “ordinary” representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture often affirm ideals of hetero-patriarchal, white femininity. Focusing on the visual and narrative registers within which lesbian romances are mediated within television drama, this article examines the emergence of what we describe as “the lesbian normal.” Tracking the ways in which the lesbian normal is anchored in a longer history of “the normal gay,” it argues that the lesbian normal is indicative of the emergence of a broader post-feminist and post-queer popular culture, in which feminist and queer struggles are imagined as completed and belonging to the past. Post-queer popular culture is depoliticising in its effects, diminishing the critical potential of feminist and queer politics, and silencing the actually existing conditions of inequality, prejudice, and stigma that continue to shape lesbian lives.
Book chapters by Kate McNicholas Smith
Something Old, Something New: the Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Cultures, 2019
On 26th June 2015, a Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage legal across the United States. ... more On 26th June 2015, a Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage legal across the United States. The previous decade had seen the campaign for same-sex marriage legislation become a defining issue for contemporary LGBTQ+ politics, and the introduction of this legislation marked a significant social shift. Four months earlier, on 20th February 2015, US television network Fox’s hit teen musical comedy-drama, Glee, included in its final season a double same-sex wedding. This spectacular televisual imagining of a queer wedding is one example of the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ wedding imagery within popular culture, and the shifting mediations of gender and sexuality of this era. In Glee and other examples, same-sex marriage is mobilised as symbol of queer progress, in ways that both open up and close down possibilities of queer futurity. This chapter develops a queer feminist analysis of Glee’s multiple evocations of same-sex marriage: from the show’s romantic resolve to the more unruly spectacle of a same-self wedding, to the re-mediations of fan media.
Book Reviews by Kate McNicholas Smith
Blogs by Kate McNicholas Smith
Rapid response piece for the Sociological Review on the election of Donald Trump as US president.
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Books by Kate McNicholas Smith
Papers by Kate McNicholas Smith
Book chapters by Kate McNicholas Smith
Book Reviews by Kate McNicholas Smith
Blogs by Kate McNicholas Smith