FTDM Professor Kylo-Patrick Hart Explores Queer TV in New Book

FTDM professor Kylo-Patrick Hart’s new book, the edited collection Queer TV in the 21st Century: Queer TV 21cEssays on Broadcasting from Taboo to Acceptance, is hot off the press. The contributions to this collection explore queerness in contemporary television during the period from 2000 to the present, in a variety of noteworthy offerings that includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The L Word, Modern Family, The New Normal, Queer as Folk, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Spartacus, and Will & Grace, among others. Professor Hart’s own contributions to this collection are the essays “Media Representation and Sensitive Subjects” and “We’re Here, We’re Queer—and We’re Better Than You: The Representational Superiority of Gay Men to Heterosexuals on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” As these and the additional analyses demonstrate, in many television series of the current millennium queer characters have achieved visibility at the expense of minimizing much of their queerness. Readers will discover that the exceptions to this trend are as eye-opening as the numerous examples in which it is readily evident.