Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

Griffin (Denison) offers a piercing examination of modern identity politics focused on relationships among new forms of media consumption and marketplaces, urban centers, and the experiences of sexual minorities. The author's emphasis on the fundamentally affective phenomenon of experiencing oneself as a sexual being in today's media environment is refreshing. This book also presents a nuanced analysis that illustrates how mass media and city arrangements constitute embodied and emotional experiences in significant ways, especially for members of the LGBT communities. Griffin's ideas synthesize how the nature and structures of new marketplaces and diverse forms of media interact with bodily and mental experiences to produce particular sets of social realities and lived experiences for sexual minorities. At the center of Griffin's analysis is the idea that although modern media and urban centers create new types of affective experiences for gays and lesbians, strong feelings of isolation and exclusion in a heteronormative media environment and society remain unaffected. This reduced array of options, as problematic as it may be, still remains appealing to many who crave to see themselves in the media that they consume. Feeling normal is a must-read for scholars and students in queer studies and communication, media studies, film studies, and sociology.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.