Ethereal Queer offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television’s lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

"[A]n engaging, brilliant, and meticulous account of queerness, temporality, and television. The book abounds with fundamental insights . . ." - Choice

"[P]arts of Ethereal Queer are excellent-- particularly when it comes to Villarejo's apt dissection of recent Western Media conglomeration and how it has impacted television spectatorship." - Bitch

"The brilliance of Villarejo’s argument is that she shows that prior to the increase of open LGBT characters on television, closeted or one-off queer characters represented an act of survival, representation, and identity that television lacked.... Villarejo’s thesis proves worthy of tuning into and remembering for a long time to come." - Lambda Literary Review

"“A fine exploratory entry into the intersection between television studies and queer theory….Villarejo offers nuanced and sustained meditations on her aptly titled ethereal subject matter….Wholly readable and at times quite enjoyable (Villarejo’s own occasional autobiographical notes are well served by her engaging prose), Ethereal Queer emerges as a probing undertaking that sketches out possible methods and approaches to queer representation in that ever-shifting medium of television.”" - Film Quarterly

"“Villarejo explodes the parameters of genre studies, queer historiography, and the identity politics of “representational justice” to put forward a theoretical meditation on temporality, wherein queer identity and televisual presentation inform, indeed constitute, each other but themselves only ever appear as ethereal (4, 5).... Ethereal Queer advances the postidentitarian impulses of these other volumes on intricate intellectual grounds without falling into the “queering” of anything not strictly heteronormative.”" - Women's Studies Quarterly

"Ethereal Queer’s robust philosophical interventions undoubtedly enrich and challenge ongoing discussions in queer and media studies about how television’s 'prosthetic lifeworlds' constantly refigure sexuality and gender. Let’s not be shy: Villarejo’s book is a showstopper." - GLQ