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- Title
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ….
- Authors
Fields, Jessica
- Abstract
The article focuses on the book "Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity," by Joshua Gamson. According to Gamson, TV talk shows provide lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and gay men with a simultaneously democratizing and exploitative forum that fosters both familiarity and contempt and pursues the truth by means of deception. Such "paradoxes of visibility" are the subject of "Freaks Talk Back." Gamson finds that as tabloid television has changed, so has its relationship to sexual and gender nonconformists. TV talk's early version of the feminist insight that the "personal is political" had a striking affinity to middle-class models of gay liberationist politics in which coming out is considered among the most effective means of resistance and in which normalization is pursued as a strategy of social change. Gamson's claims about tabloid TV's role in a broad "public conversation over sexual moralities" are grounded in "the everyday, practical activities through which sexual meanings are produced and reproduced."
- Subjects
FREAKS Talk Back (Book); GAMSON, Joshua, 1962-; TELEVISION programs; SOCIAL change; HUMAN sexuality
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 1999, Vol 22, Issue 3, p265
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Book Review
- DOI
10.1023/A:1022961906439