Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Melissa Hardie Attachment to the Real
The 1970s televisual drama Family (1976-80) took as its brief the fictional plotting of social ‘issues’ in such a
way that the dilemmas of the “real” world were furnished fictional conditions for their intellectual and
political processing. Attachment to the show promised a catalogue of resources for identifying
contemporary dilemmas. This paper considers two episodes of Family where a gay man and a lesbian
respectively arrive in Pasadena to trouble the “ordinary” everyday of the Lawrence family. The queer
characters both come from San Francisco and in each case the “problem” of queer is identified through the
show’s familiar technique of plotting two separate storylines – one grave, one light-hearted – that eventually
cross. This uncanny narrative intersection represents the complex entanglement of the comic and the tragic
and provides the ground on which lesbian and gay “problems” can be acknowledged if not resolved.
Lee Wallace
Attachment to Story
The narrative affinities between Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002) and The Kids Are All
Right (2010) are so strong that it is barely an exaggeration to say that the three films tell the same story. A
sexual and emotional ingénue arrives in a tightly circumscribed social world that both resembles and departs
from a conventional family. At the heart of this unconventional world is an established couple whose
seemingly secure erotic bond will be tested by the presence of the outsider. Whether the relationships
inscribed are straight, gay or bisexual, the lesson of each film is basically the same: attachment is always
ambivalent, that is part of its satisfaction. End of story. Or, begin again. Cholodenko’s attachment to the
story of attachment gains pertinence in the context of gay marriage and also in relation to the contemporary
media practice of franchising stories that endlessly repeat in serial form.
Annalise Pippard
Over Attachment
Historically coded as a domestic medium, broadcast television’s “flow” was thought to induce mind-numbing
passivity, particularly in its daytime female audience. Serial television was considered low-brow, anti-social
and addictive. In contrast, contemporary television technologies are increasingly legitimated through
association with consumer choice and control. Through a close reading of Showtime’s comedy-drama series
Nurse Jackie (2009-2015), this paper will trace the ongoing valence of the compulsive female television
viewer. I place Edie Falco’s character – a drug-addicted nurse – in a line of bad television mothers that
stretches from Peyton Place (1964-1969) to The Sopranos (1999-2007). This allows me to trace a critical shift
in the meanings that attach to female spectatorship and reanimate feminist questions about women’s
affective relationship to television. Queerly, female attachment to television emerges as a model of
maternal pedagogy and a means of attaching to life.
8P
Race, whiteness and digital cultures (Chair, Karen Connelly)
Marjo Kolehmainen
The Material Politics of White Trash: Flexible Class-Making
This presentation provides an analysis of novel forms of class-making in Finland, focusing on emerging
threads on “white trash” in a popular discussion forum. The presentation is based on an empirical study, the
data for which was gathered by making online observations and extracting threads on white trash. While
several studies demonstrate how the phrase “white trash”, or similar terms, has been linked with
tastelessness, poverty or immorality, popularity and ordinariness are also associated with it, as indeed are
exclusive consumer choices. It seems that this flexible use of the phrase is a result of globalization of this
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