Queer Analog Pleasure and Digital Ambivalence: LGBTQ Media Worlds in Nostalgic Times

Abstract

LGBTQ people are not always encouraged to be nostalgic. Dominant historical narratives of the development of LGBTQ rights in the United States emphasize a blooming distribution of legal rights and normative public acceptance that gestures emphatically towards a generous present and a hopeful future. In spite of this, LGBTQ media has long-demonstrated a sentimental proclivity for the past, luxuriating in reconstructions of prior time periods, and often anachronistically summoning a fusion of past and present. Queer retreats to the past in film, television, online media, and festival cultures are often motivated by the perceived wealth of freedoms open to queer subjects prior to the ossification of homonormative politics and legible sexual minority identities, as Douglas Crimp describes it, a time “queer before gay” (58). This often lends a radical ethos to nostalgia, but one that does not go uncomplicated by other material political factors. The persistent allure of the past for queer people shapes a structure of feeling that constructs media texts, media publics, and the complex channels of affective exchange surrounding them. Demarcating a transmedial genre I term LGBTQ nostalgia media, my dissertation traces the cultural work of imagined fantasies of the LGBTQ past. LGBTQ nostalgia media come to serve three general uses in media ecosystems. First, LGBTQ nostalgia media is a pleasure structure formulating queer attachments to the past and lending them formal character with a critical socio-affective functionality. Second, LGBTQ nostalgia media act as cultural archives that document the past (and representations of the past) to lend a weighted stability to histories frequently conceived affectively, as the ephemeral transmission of feeling and coded semiotics. Third, LGBTQ nostalgia media acts as a mediation and attempted reconciliation of tension and mixed feelings about the transformations of LGBTQ history, the definitions and politics of community, and changing avenues of media consumption. My chapters focus on clusters of media that uniquely gesture to points of tension and discord in the LGBTQ historical imagination, and evidence the ways nostalgia is constructed as an ambivalent affective formation for LGBTQ media audiences and users– one often a staging ground for the attempted resolution of social pressures. Employing a transmedial collection of case studies– across prestige historical cinema, sexual hookup cultures online, documentary, and film festival environments– I utilize theoretically-informed textual analysis to understand the cultural work of feeling in LGBTQ nostalgia media. The first half of the dissertation focuses on the textual shape of nostalgic pleasure, rooted in an erotics of presence and absence articulated through the discursive frames of tactility and knowability. The second half turns to questions of community and networked affect, seeking to understand the flow of feeling across complicated, diverse publics, and the social borders inevitably impacting nostalgic pleasure. Overall, this dissertation considers the notable work of analog pleasures in queer world-building, calculated and mediated against structures of digital ambivalence.