Feeling Normal Quotes

“29. These tensions are discussed at length in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547–566.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“25. For historical analysis of same-sex desire in a wider array of locations, see Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997).”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Lars Elleström puts forth this notion of intermediality-as-bridge in “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” in Media Borders, Multimodality, and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 11–50.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“10. I refer here to the relationship Warner sees between publics and counterpublics, which features the give-and-take of Gramscian hegemony. Both publics and counterpublics are “publics” insofar as they both “offer . . . members direct and active membership through language [and] place strangers on a shared footing.” But members of counterpublics are marked socially by their participation in a discourse organized by a power differential, wherein the counterpublic “maintains . . . an awareness of its subordinate status” to a broader public. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 108, 119.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“. Michael Warner defines a public as “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space . . . A public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space . . . [It] comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.” The term names the phenomenon wherein bodies coalesce around texts. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002), 65–66.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“The convergence of publics in urban centers provides a historical precedent for media marketed to sexual minorities in the cinema, television, and online media produced and distributed in the context of digital production and distribution.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“All of the media forms created by and for sexual minorities feature some notion of genre insofar as they render same-sex desire typologically, making it an identity category that includes many different people but is organized around a recognizable set of experiences, feelings, and sensations.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“genre is a lived category that is shaped by both producers and consumers. The publics that converge in city businesses play an active role in how genres function in them, a phenomenon that the group”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Remix-friendly songs, outsized media personas, and/or status as subcultural icons make artists like Robyn, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj frequent fixtures on this service as well.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Via partnerships with record labels, Screenplay provides commercial venues with sound and screen media that allow them to differentiate their appeals to consumers from those of their competitors using similar attractions.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Screenplay is a company that provides music videos to businesses. Music and video screens are such common attractions in city businesses that court sexual minorities that many of them subscribe to this service. Via disc-based or direct-to-system download, Screenplay subscribers pay for access to a service called “VJ Pro,” where they choose from different genres of music videos that loosely resemble radio formats: HitsVision, a Top 40 mix that promises subscribers “nothing but the hits from every source”; DanceVision, featuring “exclusive remixes, hard to find imports and popular mainstream hits and everything in between designed expressly for the fast paced dance environment”; UrbanVision, a rhythm and blues/hip-hop hybrid that purports “to be all inclusive”; RockVision, rock music featuring songs “from Classic . . . to Disco, New Wave to Old School”; CountryVision, “an upbeat mix of current hits and classic favorites”; and LatinVision, “designed specifically for the sophisticated Latin dance crowd that demands only the hottest and best in tropical, Caribbean, merengue dance and Latin pop.”48 Many gay bars subscribe to ClubVision, which features a mix of “techno, trance and euro-flavored . . . tracks.”49 For dance-themed bars, this subscription features “an extended autoplay feature and individual chapter stops for single track selection.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Bars and clubs that cater to sexual minorities in urban centers often construct their identities by specializing in certain genres of music: some play dance music, others play country and western, hip-hop, and the like.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Genres feature both similarity and difference, as businesses use comparable attractions to court customers even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from others like them.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Genre can be defined as a typology of identification and desire that creates affective expectations among consumers.46 By cultivating distinct personas, businesses court returning customers and attract new ones.47 Businesses construct different notions of genre on various nights of the week, inviting multiple kinds of publics to participate in the forms of entertainment and sociality they use to court consumers. Some bars cater to patrons interested in leather and BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism) sex. Others target consumers interested in drag shows and other live entertainment”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“The marketplace competition that takes place between businesses courting sexual minorities in urban centers has many parallels with the competition between media companies that court sexual minority audiences. Cinema distributors and mobile media companies that target sexual minorities imagine overlapping target audiences and angle for broader market reach in the pages of trade publications.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“In the May 3, 2007, issue of Gay Chicago Magazine, the regularly featured “Calendar of Events” isolates a few events on each night of the week, drawing readers’ attention to a handful of attractions: a CD giveaway at the bar Roscoe’s on Thursday, May 3, and a benefit for the Women’s Treatment Center at a downtown hotel that same night; or the Barbra Streisand party at Sidetrack against attractions at competing businesses on Monday, May 7. Listings”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“The calendar listings in Nightspots note the drink specials, television viewing parties, CD giveaways, and special appearances occurring in businesses throughout the city over a seven-day period.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“The ways that businesses aggregate multiple publics parallel how that process takes place in media forms. In the travel content that circulates on gay and lesbian cable TV networks, programs feature a variety of different segments that showcase a range of different sexual minorities”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Businesses also aggregate multiple publics by exploiting their spatial diversity, where different areas can be sectioned off to serve different groups of customers. Advertisements for San Francisco’s DNA Lounge invite patrons to listen to guest DJs mixing songs in one portion of the venue, and also promote the club’s resident DJs who spin for the crowd in another area of the bar. Similarly, the city’s Cat Club often advertises attractions in different spaces in the venue: “back room” DJs and “front room” DJs. The club aggregates different forms of entertainment in a single space, suggesting to customers that there are a bevy of attractions available there. By doing that, the advertisement suggests at least some variety in the publics that form there. Similarly, the Chicago bar Sidetrack uses its architecture to aggregate multiple publics.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“This business strategy is a process of aggregation because it imagines a range of publics in a single venue, where each attraction is imagined to offer something different to customers.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Digital technology enables new modes of production and distribution, which in turn enable new sorts of representations that anticipate sexual minorities as audiences. But these practices are predicated on assumptions about those audiences, and they hinge on privileges associated with gender, race, and class that delimit the forms of diversity they are able to engender at all. This paradigm is most evident in cinema, where digital technology has resulted in a large number of distributors circulating movies to sexual minorities across different delivery platforms. Despite this multiplicity, the movies they distribute are striking in their similarities. They tend to animate narrative paradigms steeped in ideas about personal agency that actively curb attention to the different forms of diversity that characterize the very publics they convene.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Digital technology enables new modes of production and distribution, which in turn enable new sorts of representations that anticipate sexual minorities as audiences.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Thus, Chicago’s spatial area and the sheer magnitude of its population enable the formation of a range of queer publics that are simultaneously concentrated in particular zones and dispersed throughout the city.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Two of the neighborhoods on the city’s North Side have long been associated with Chicago’s sexual minorities: Lakeview with men and Andersonville with women.34”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“While the modes of publicness that New York City offers to sexual minorities may be more ethnically diverse than the pages of HX and Next suggest, they are decidedly more gender-specific.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Samuel Delany outlines the impact of these developments on the ability of diverse publics to form in New York City. He charges that while cross-class contact flourished in the Times Square area’s adult movie theaters in the 1960s through the 1980s, gentrification has largely exiled the queer, working class, and racial and ethnic minority publics who used to commingle there with relative ease. Beginning in the 1990s, city ordinances regulating sex-related commerce and renewed corporate interest in refashioning New York as a family friendly tourist destination marginalize some publics in the interest of generating profit from others.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“The magazines demonstrate how the convergence of sexual minorities in urban centers is affective in nature: advertisements and articles gesture to the joy of meeting friends at a community event, the laughter precipitated by nightlife entertainment, the wet heat of sticky bodies on a dance floor. The magazines announce guest DJs and television screening parties alongside discounted drinks, free food, dancing, giveaways, and similar entertainments. As a result, they underscore how the publics comprised of sexual minorities that form in urban centers are enabled and shaped by the circulation of bodies in public space.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“In each of the magazines, maps, event listings, and advertisements imagine the convergence of sexual minorities in public space. In essence, the magazines articulate urban centers as a collection of opportunities for personal agency and community belonging for their readers.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“Because same-sex desires—as well as the identities and communities they help form—are so often realized via people’s circulation in public space, cities offer a framework for understanding the relationship between capital and affect found in all gay and lesbian media. Indeed, the public spaces of urban centers preexist the forms of sociality imagined in gay and lesbian cinema, television, and online media. Even as these ostensibly more “private” media have since proliferated, the publics that form in urban centers continue to operate via the patterns of commerce described here.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

“These four patterns—dispersal and concentration, aggregation, marketplace competition, and genres—enable the formation of sexual minority publics by way of commerce, creating opportunities for sociality by bringing bodies together in city space.”
― F. Hollis Griffin, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age