Reveling in Uselessness: Queer and Trans Media, Consumptive Labour, and Cultural Capital

Abstract

Reveling in Uselessness: Queer and Trans Media, Consumptive Labour, and Cultural Capital posits and defends a theory of media consumption as sites for the creation and maintenance of queer and trans cultural capital. This occurs around the nexus of uselessness of two varieties, explained in the introduction: media genres, styles, aesthetics, or objects considered useless due to their mass (re)producibility, banality, or niche specificity, and the people who consume them that, due to their marginalized identities, are made to feel “useless” under contemporary capitalism. Following the introduction is a chapter laying out the theoretical framework of this project, particularly resituating Marx and Bourdieu’s theories of (cultural) capital and value within queer and trans theories.

Chapter 2, the first of three case studies, examines the late-90s pop mega-phenomenon the Spice Girls as postmodern kitsch commodities, updating kitsch theory to account for changes in media commodity mass production and consumption in postmodern culture. Here, economic uselessness resides in the kitsch media commodity, while kitsch consumers are seen as structurally useless beyond their buying power. In Chapter 3, the history and formation of gay bear culture through an examination of how bears, a group of gay men who felt useless and ostracized from both mass culture and gay club cultures, contributed to and consumed pornography from BEAR magazine and discussed how they can use media to build a community that makes them feel useful and valued via the early Internet listserv The Bear Mailing List. My final case study examines the camp exploitation film Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives to explore how it is repurposing camp to centre on the experiences of trans women and promote communal healing and reconciliation with the traumas regularly inflicted on queer and trans bodies under capitalism.

Reveling’s conclusion returns to the broader questions of use/lessness and value explored in the introduction, framed through memory and the affective power of media to encourage and foster difference. Reveling in Uselessness insists upon consumption as an essential site for exploring the simultaneous social, political, and affective impacts of media commodities, an important additive to current discussions of media reception and political economy, by offering a framework for exploring the affective and material impacts media have on identity, community formation, and queer & trans world building beyond questions of representation. This dissertation demonstrates how it is in the “useless” places, genres, and aesthetic styles where people who feel socially, economically, or politically “useless” reside and build new, exciting, queer realities based in creative excesses of style and self.