Camp TV

“An important and intriguing work of theoretical and historical media scholarship, this book dramatically rethinks 1950s and 1960s U.S. television comedy in order to uncover a more nuanced sense of the social world being made visible on television—one in which trans figures were a significant element—than previous media scholarship has allowed.” - Matthew Tinkcom, author of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema

“Camp TV is a powerful study of the camp currents of 1950s' and 1960s' American television comedy. Quinlan Miller argues passionately for a corrective account of the multiple gendered and erotic sounds and images that constituted the key evolutionary moment in the form of the sitcom.” - Amy Villarejo, author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire

"Camp TV offers us theoretical and methodological challenges to presumptions and argumentations common in queer media histories…hence the usefulness here of a new terminology entirely. What the book also offers, however, is an impressive model of full-scale approach to queer media histories." - Taylor Cole Miller, New Review of Film and Television Studies

"A revelatory historical reassessment of US network sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s.… Miller combines scholarly rigor with the engaged, politicized vivacity of a subversive connoisseur and the banter of a raconteur in order to rewrite dominant histories of the sitcom, camp, and LGBTQIA+ media representation.… A tour de force abounding with compelling and witty textual analyses fueled by painstaking archival research."

"A detailed picture of the production and cultural contexts of queer gender appearance in sitcoms, ranging from non-conforming dress and gestures to critiques of heterosexual marriage." - Katharine Mussellam, Jump Cut

"[Camp TV] is impressive and provides a necessary re-reading of neglected and devalued texts that cast our present studies of contemporary queerness into provocative question. . . . This book will be a valuable contribution to courses in television history, queer studies and, especially, studies of the queer in popular culture, and will be an antidote to institutional narratives that have solidified unproductively around the ‘newness’ of queer TV." - Judith Fathallah, Critical Studies in Television