Unscripting the Present: The Security Panic of Queer Youth Sexuality (SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures)

By: Timothy Gitzen

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Synopsis: Interrogates contemporary sex panics in the United States, looking especially at popular culture texts to conceptualize queer youth survival strategies.Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with their presumed innocence always in danger of being lost. Unscripting the Present interweaves analysis of laws and lawsuits, news media, sociological studies, and popular culture both to understand contemporary sex panics and to highlight how queer youth find ways to survive in the here and now. Developing a novel technique of "unscripting," Timothy Gitzen focuses our attention on those impromptu moments when things go awry in representations of queer youth-moments that disrupt securitization's social "scripts." Foregoing well-worn promises of things getting better, texts such as Netflix's Sex Education, the film Love, Simon, and the multimodal show Skam upend the anxious hyperfocus on what's to come in favor of a hopeful present.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 222 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9798855801668
Related ISBNs:: 9798855801651, 9798855801644
Publisher:: State University of New York Press
Date of Addition:: 04/01/25
Copyrighted By:: SUNY
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.