Pink 2.0

Noah A. Tsika

Description

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In an era where digital media converges with new technologies that allow for cropping, remixing, extracting, and pirating, a second life for traditional media appears via the internet and emerging platforms. Pink 2.0 examines the mechanisms through which the internet and associated technologies both produce and limit the intelligibility of contemporary queer cinema. Challenging conventional conceptions of the internet as an exceptionally queer medium, Noah A. Tsika explores the constraints that publishers, advertisers, and content farms place on queer cinema as a category of production, distribution, and reception. He shows how the commercial internet is increasingly characterized by the algorithmic reduction of diverse queer films to the dimensions of a highly valued white, middle-class gay masculinity—a phenomenon that he terms "Pink 2.0." Excavating a rich set of online materials through the practice of media archaeology, he demonstrates how the internet's early and intense associations with gay male consumers (and vice versa) have not only survived the medium's dramatic global expansion but have also shaped a series of strategies for producing and consuming queer cinema. Identifying alternatives to such corporate and technological constraints, Tsika uncovers the vibrant lives of queer cinema in the complex, contentious, and libidinous pockets of the internet where resistant forms of queer fandom thrive.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Scope and Terminology
Introduction: Questioning the "Queer Internet"
1. Digitizing Gay Fandom: Corporate Encounters with Queer Cinema on the Internet
2. Epistemology of the Blogosphere: Queer Cinema on Gay Porn Sites
3. Franco, Ginsberg, Kerouac & Co.: Constructing a Beat Topos with Digital Networked Technologies
4. Liberating Gayness: Selling the Sexual Candor of I Love You Phillip Morris
5. "Nollywood Goes Homo": Gay Identifications on the Nigerian Internet
Conclusion: Antiviral
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• Homosexuality
• History of film
• New Media
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 8
• EAN13: 9780253023230
• Langue: English

Extrait

PINK 2.0
Pink 2.0
ENCODING QUEER CINEMA ON THE INTERNET
NOAH A. TSIKA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Noah A. Tsika
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tsika, Noah [date], author.
Title: Pink 2.0 : encoding queer cinema on the internet / Noah A. Tsika.
Other titles: Pink two point zero | Pink two point oh
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022246 (print) | LCCN 2016034865 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022752 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023063 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023230 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Homosexuality in motion pictures. | Gays in motion pictures. | Mass media-Technological innovations.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H55 T755 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.H55 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/653-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022246
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Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Scope and Terminology
Introduction: Questioning the Queer Internet
1 Digitizing Gay Fandom: Corporate Encounters with Queer Cinema on the Internet
2 Epistemology of the Blogosphere: Queer Cinema on Gay Porn Sites
3 Franco, Ginsberg, Kerouac Co.: Constructing a Beat Topos with Digital Networked Technologies
4 Liberating Gayness: Selling the Sexual Candor of I Love You Phillip Morris
5 Nollywood Goes Homo : Gay Identifications on the Nigerian Internet
Conclusion: Antiviral
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
E NDLESS THANKS GO to Indiana University Press, and especially editor Raina Polivka, for making Pink 2.0 possible. Since the moment I first shared my interest in writing a book about the online distribution and reception of contemporary queer cinema, Raina has been immensely supportive, offering considerable insight at every step on the road to publication, and I am, once again, enormously grateful to her. I am also indebted to Jenna Lynn Whittaker, Janice E. Frisch, Nancy Lightfoot, Mary C. Ribesky, Adriana Cloud, Dave Hulsey, and all members of the production team.
I thank the anonymous readers who evaluated the manuscript with admirable care, helping me see what worked about my arguments and, more importantly, what did not. Indeed, their attention to detail was nothing short of humbling. Michael DeAngelis, whose book Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom has been a scholarly touchstone for me since I was a senior in high school, read and offered incisive comments on the entire manuscript, and I thank him for his invaluable feedback. Michael s contributions to queer theory and film studies have, in many ways, influenced my own scholarship, and Gay Fandom in particular-a beautifully written book that I have read countless times-taught me, and continues to teach me, the importance of addressing figures, intertexts, and archival documents that are often overlooked.
I thank another Michael, the critic and historian Michael Bronski, for nearly twenty years of friendship, immeasurable insights, and welcome reminders that Belle Barth is good for anything that ails you. This book, like so many others in the field of queer studies, owes a considerable debt to Michael s groundbreaking 1984 publication Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility -another scholarly touchtone for me.
I thank David Greven, whom I have not yet met, for the encouragement that he provided through an especially thoughtful review of my 2009 book, Gods and Monsters: A Queer Film Classic -a review that, in its challenging rigor, remarkable discernment, and sheer comradely generosity, I really needed as the cruelly dismissive and frustratingly obtuse one- and two-star reviews began piling up on Amazon, Goodreads, and other websites where users may anonymously denounce those they dislike. Speaking of that earlier book: I remain indebted to its editors, and, in particular, to the fabulous Thomas Waugh, who continues to inspire me.
I thank those of my teachers at Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Michigan, and NYU who encouraged my queer interests even as I had trouble articulating them. At these schools, a number of brilliant scholars inspired me to do this work: at Cornell, Sabine Haenni and Jared Stark; at Dartmouth, Susan Brison, Mary Desjardins, Amy Lawrence, Angelica Lawson, Kathryn Lively, Brenda Silver, Kate Thomas, and Mark Williams; at Michigan, Bambi Haggins, David Halperin, and Sheila Murphy; at NYU, Jonathan Kahana, Antonia Lant, Anna McCarthy, Dana Polan, and Chris Straayer. The late Robert Sklar gave me the awesome gift of his mentorship-a gift that I take with me, along with Bob s field-defining work and the memory of his face and voice on the day in 2006 when my name appeared in a Los Angeles Times article on Brokeback Mountain fandom.
Speaking of Brokeback: William Handley took a chance on an untested first-year graduate student and advised me through the publication, in his invaluable The Brokeback Book , of my study of the film s online reception, and I thank him for his continued support. It was for Moya Luckett s dazzling graduate seminar on film history and historiography that I first conceived of the Brokeback study, and Moya has always shared my sense of the importance of queer reception, inspiring me through her own incisive readings of cinema and popular culture.
I thank my parents, Mary Tsika and Ronald Tsika, in whose house and in whose luminous company I wrote parts of this book. I thank everyone at Colgate University, and in particular those involved with the LGBTQ Studies Program, for supporting me during my time as a faculty member there. The students in my Colgate courses on queer cinema deserve special mention for their commitment, curiosity, humor, and insight. I also thank the following individuals, who similarly offered both practical and poetic support: Matt Brim, Edmond Chang, Nick Davis, Amin Ghaziani, Lindsey Green-Simms, Hollis Griffin, David Halperin, Guy Lodge, Alexis Lothian, Tara Mateik, John Mercer, Lisa Nakamura, Sam Penix, Christopher Pullen, Kristy Rawson, Margaret Rhee, Julie Levin Russo, Jim Stacy, my colleagues at the City University of New York s Queens College and the Graduate Center, especially Amy Herzog, and the students in my spring 2015 graduate seminar on media archaeology, especially Stephen Bartolomei, Brian Hughes, and Adam Netsky. My department chair, Richard Maxwell, carefully read portions of the manuscript and offered countless insightful comments, inspiring me to expand my thinking. I extend a special thanks to my Queens College colleague Matt Crain, who shared his considerable expertise on the history of internet advertising, generously reading and commenting on key chapters even as his family expanded with the arrival of a daughter.
Finally, and with an abundance of love and admiration, I thank the elegant Eric Grimm-my husband, my best friend, my BFF Rose-who never met a meme he couldn t queer, and who joins me in living against the grain, generously and joyously.
A Note on Scope and Terminology
T HIS BOOK IS about some of the online lives of contemporary queer cinema. It adopts a broad view of the internet as, both metaphorically and materially, a connective fabric 1 -a network of networks, which includes related media and information and communication technologies -for instance, the geolocation services, mobile operating systems, and input devices that enable an app like Grindr (a significant if understudied forum for the reception of queer cinema, as user profiles patterned on Brokeback Mountain attest). 2 This book accepts that one of the defining features of the Internet is its variable and amorphous topology, 3 and it seeks to avoid the pitfalls of utopian approaches to new media by rejecting uncritical celebrations of cyborgs and the posthuman in favor of a sustained critique of the consequential racism, classism, corporate structuring, gender essentialism, sexual politics, and general discursive shortcomings of digital networked technologies. It is not at all clear that the Internet, our Internet, is in fact the decentralized, open, and democratic tool of connection and communication that technolibertarian rhetoric applauds, warns the computer scientist Paul Dourish. 4 This book offers a similar challenge to those who continue to champion the internet as an inevitable boon to the lives of sexual and gender minorities-a kind of queer utopia where anything goes, and where everything is gay. As I write this in 2016, it seems that many of the foundational, oppositional concerns of queer theory are as applicable to contemporary networked environments as to the sociopolitical conditions of the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS, Bowers v. Hardwick , and Jesse Helms dominated vast swaths of the horizon of queer representability, at least in the United States. Indeed, the questions posed over a quarter-century ago by the queer reading