Queer readings and humor in contemporary Gothic film and television
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In this dissertation, I examine queer spectatorship and interpretations of popular media through queer humor. To that end, I analyze canonical Gothic texts, such as Rebecca (1938) and Interview With the Vampire (1976), alongside their film and television adaptations to determine how contemporary queer spectators can engage with these texts and how queer humor can open up opportunities to reject and make fun of hegemony, and especially its emphasis on the patriarchal nuclear family and heteronormativity. My analysis reveals that we are currently at a critical point for both the Gothic genre and queer representations in popular media. While queer audiences could once push back against "preferred" readings of classic Gothic texts through humor and "aberrant" readings, this phenomenon is no longer the case. It appears that the film industry has begun to expunge queerness from Gothic texts. While television has created a niche space where queer characters are ethically depicted for queer audiences, this change has also impacted our ability to conduct queer readings through humor. Although this change is good in some ways, since queer spectators no longer must rehabilitate villains in order to effect positive queer readings, it has also rendered these spectators passive in their consumption of mainstream media, thereby making transgression and subversion through queer readings more difficult and less impactful. In other words, queer spectators have begun to lose agency in their consolidation into mass culture, as demonstrated through an analysis of contemporary Gothic adaptations.
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Ph. D.