Conservatively Queer TV

Conservatively Queer TV is a cultural history of televisual masculinities in the long 1980s, a period in which vestiges of 1970s sexuality, feminism, and queerness persisted in a state of tension with Reagan-era conservative values and regressive machismo. Bridget Kies traces how television executives and producers of the era created images of queer and contested masculinities across mainstream programming to target women viewers and experiment with television genres and forms in the burgeoning cable era. Consequently, this period gave American television a dynamic contrast between forms of masculinity being touted as virtuous in political and religious discourse and on-screen portrayals of men as trauma survivors, domestic laborers, and drag performers. Kies uses feminist methodologies to examine television’s queer and contested masculinities to shed light on missing pieces of television history. Specifically, she explores how feminism and anti-feminist anxieties shaped televisual images of masculinities and the construction of audiences by executives and producers. Conservatively Queer TV goes beyond current studies of explicitly gay material that often look at how the television industry responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis across the 1980s and instead demonstrates how Reagan-era values, feminism, and queerness collided to create a dramatic reconstruction of seemingly normative American masculinities.