Joshua Gamson

Picture perfect : the art and artifice of public image making

An analysis of how the shrinking sound-bite has been replaced by the manipulated image in American politics and culture. The author documents and analyzes the pervasive and self-conscious role of image-making in campaign coverage where talk of media events and spin control have become the norm.

Reflections on Queer Theory and Communication

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of queer theory as a communication style. Like many people, at times I have found its language a bit hard to take; I like my communication relatively direct, even when the ideas at stake are complex and subtle, and queer theorists have justly earned a reputation for using words and sentences and paragraphs so convoluted, abstract, and vague that it can seem as if they are speaking some kind of high-falutin’ pig Latin. I’ve also been put off by its wheel reinvention: Many of its constructionist notions, ideas about the performance of identities and the coerciveness of norms and categories, bear unrecognized or uncredited resemblance to the work of a prior generation of sociologists and social psychologists. But, also like many people, I have refused to simply toss the whole enterprise aside just because some of its practitioners seem unaware of their intellectual ancestry or intent on not being understood. For one thing, it hardly seems fair to fault theorists for writing abstractions. For another, I have had a nagging suspicion that I just don’t get it. Most of all, it has always seemed to me that there are actually important things in queer theory to be gotten, especially for communication scholars.

Do Media Monsters Devour Diversity

Politicians and critics have long lamented that the rise of huge media conglomerates means the death of diversity in newspapers and on the airwaves. But research suggests that media conglomeration, however distasteful, does not necessarily reduce diversity.

The Normal Science of Queerness: LGBT Sociology Books in the Twenty-First Century

Generic human time is admittedly catching up to me, but gay sociology is on such a sped-up clock that just a few years after I was a whippersnapper I found myself a veteran. It’s not just me. Given the rapidity with which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) statuses, communities, and politics have changed, works that captured a new phenomenon in their time—for instance, my own 1990s study of LGBT populations and images within tabloid television talk shows—often become historical snapshots shortly after they are published. The field, like the populations on which it focuses, has grown and changed at sometimes dazzling speed. When I entered the academy in the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian-, gay-, bisexual-, and transgender-focused sociology was just past its infancy and in a big growth spurt. These were critical years for the field in a double sense: developmentally crucial and driven by critique. The activism of the 1960s and 1970s had helped to generate political ideas and a culture of outness that found its way into the academy, often in the person of openly lesbian and gay sociologists. The study of homosexuality had been effectively pushed beyond the field of ‘‘deviance,’’ where it had long been boxed. As feminist, ethnic-, and racial-studies scholars had been doing in a variety of arenas (including sociology), these folks pointed out blind spots, distortions, and holes in various sociological subfields. They began to redress the relative invisibility within sociology—and outright misrepresentation—of sexuality-based communities, identities, The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington, by Amin Ghaziani. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 419pp.

Scandal in the Age of Sexting

27.50 paper. ISBN: 9780226289960.

Keeping it in the Family Sociologist Joshua Gamson Interviews His Sociologist Parents

This chapter examines how sex scandal narratives have shifted as public storytelling has become less driven by centralized media organizations. How are scandal stories told when the very thing that makes them scandalous—the making-public of private, previously hidden non-normative behaviors—is an increasingly common feature of everyday life? The author examines the evolution of sexting scandals, which first emerged in news coverage back in 2009. He focuses on two events in particular—scandals belonging to NFL quarterback Brett Favre in 2010 and New York Congressman Anthony Weiner in 2011—where sexting itself generated the sensational media frenzy. While sexting technology may be new(ish), Gamson argues that the media narratives proceeded according to existing scandal scripts.

Stargazing: celebrity, fame and social interaction, by Kerry O. Ferris and Scott R. Harris

Sociologist Joshua Gamson interviews his parents, both sociologists, on parenting, sociology in social movements, and carrying on the family business.

Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life by Nina Eliasoph

contribution to the field of celebrity studies. Indeed, Sternheimer describes her own style as specifically unlike the ‘academic titles’ published on celebrity studies that are written ‘primarily for a scholarly audience, offering comprehensive theoretical discussions that would be difficult for lay readers and undergraduate audiences to connect with’ (p. xiv). Yet, while Celebrity Culture and the American Dream might be a helpful introductory text for a firstor second-year undergraduate course on celebrity studies, it does not approach the standard of intellectual rigour I would hope most university students are challenged to understand. Even respecting her dismissal of academic jargon, too many topics in this book go by quickly and superficially, thus becoming missed – and even failed – opportunities for nuanced discussion about celebrity culture. The fast and furious survey of periodicals (often, up to eight different magazines are featured in just one page) does little to account for the complexity embedded within each respective publication. And the constant instantiation of Horatio Alger as the sign-board for American tropes of mobility does little to account for the ways in which ideologies of advancement (and of celebrity) include other kinds of stories about gender, class and identity. I also found myself concerned by the way in which Sternheimer referenced the American Dream, and even celebrity culture, as seemingly something produced and consumed exclusively by those who live in the United States. Because of this assumption, only US cultural history and US-based movie and fan magazines factor in her study. Much excellent scholarship has shown that the ‘American Dream’ is a floating signifier made to reference an upward mobility that is anchored by a real United States but not contained within it. Similarly, celebrities and celebrity culture do not fit tidily within nation-state borders, either in our own contemporary moment or in the past. Indeed, who attains (and who loses) celebrity and how portable and recognisable such celebrity figures are says a great deal not only about the portability of aspirational tropes, but also of gender scripts and norms of citizenship. While I understand that Sternheimer set out to create a book that was not over-theorised, I often found myself frustrated by its unrelenting commitment to generalisations. I believe her book can be of interest for a general audience interested in the cultural work of celebrity, but unfortunately Celebrity Culture and the American Dream serves only a limited purpose to students and scholars seeking to develop complex analyses about American studies and celebrity culture.

The Sociology of Sexualities: Queer and Beyond

I read this smart, energetic, slightly odd book about political apathy at the tail end of the Bill and Monica saga, when even the observation that citizens were uninterested in the impeachment trial elicited widespread disinterest. Read against Nina Eliasoph’s concern for the sparseness and thinness of what she calls “public-spirited political conversation” (p. 14), what was striking about the recent scandal was how much people were talking about politics for once, even if it was just to say they wished people would shut up about them already. All the bored chat about public life underlines the important phenomenon Eliasoph tackles: how and why people “keep politics at arm’s length in so many situations” (p. 10) and how and why, as she puts in it her central metaphor, American political discussion tends to evaporate so quickly and easily. Many people have pointed out the impoverishment of American political discourse, but what distinguishes Avoiding Politics is not just that Eliasoph refuses simple explanations (television has made people dumb, for instance, or major institutions inhibit political engagement), or her facility with public-sphere theories, but that she actually went out and talked and listened. The book is the result of two-and-a-half years of ethnographic research with a range of civic groups in a “post-suburban” region: voluntary associations such as antidrug groups, a recycling center, and a high school parents’ group; recreational groups such as a countrywestern dance club and a fraternal organization she calls “Buffalo Club”; and activist groups such as an antitoxics group and a peace vigil. While it exhibits some of the minuses of a converted dissertation—a tendency to pack in too much and to include tangential, so-and-so-might-argue discussions of too many other scholars—the book makes an innovative contribution to the important, ongoing discussion of American public discourse. What Eliasoph found, most significantly, going to meetings, dance sessions, lodges, and in both her interviews and day-to-day conversations, was the puzzling, ironic disappearance of publicly minded talk, especially in more public contexts. It is not that people had no communal concerns but that they tended to speak about politics “backstage, in hushed tones”