Transcript
Marshall Poe (0:00)
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
Rebecca Buchanan (1:07)
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books and Popular Culture. And today I'm here with Timothy Gitson, who's the author of Unscripting the the Security Panic of Queer Youth Sexuality. Timothy, thanks for being here with me today.
Timothy Gibson (1:21)
Thank you for having me.
Rebecca Buchanan (1:23)
Could you start out by just sort of giving an overview of the book, how it came to be, why you decided to write about this?
Timothy Gibson (1:31)
Sure. So the book started in parts, during COVID I was in Hong Kong doing a postdoc and had a lot of time on my hands. I'm an anthropologist by training, but if I can't go out and do field work, I sort of have to find new ways to do research. And so I started doing media research, popular culture research, and, you know, started thinking about queer youth sexuality, something that had been on my mind for quite some time. But around 2022 20, Florida's don't say gay law started to come into fruition from Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis. Being from Florida myself, I felt particularly attacked and particularly concerned about what was coming out of Florida. And then when I started digging deeper, I saw similar laws being passed throughout the United States. But what was interesting is that these laws were in many ways not new. There were older laws from the 90s called no promo homo laws that sort of did something very similar that disallowed the discussion of queerness, queer sexuality, non normative genders and sexuality in the classroom. And so what we are seeing coming out of Florida and the like were rehashing old laws, but sort of like with new tricks. And so I started thinking about what would it mean to think differently about queer youth sexuality amidst this, you know, know, growing insecurity, this growing precarity around queerness, around sexuality and gender creativity, and started thinking about a queer theory of queer youth sexuality from the perspective of queer youth. Now, again, as an anthropologist, you know, I would, would have loved to have interviewed a bunch of, you know, queer youth to, to do this research. But what I started finding in popular culture was a story of queer youth being told as if it were from their perspective. And so I started doing this analysis of popular culture, queer popular culture that focused on queer youth and started seeing interesting ways in which queer youth were being represented as not necessarily focused on the precarity or the insecurity of what may come, but instead focused on relationships that they were forming in the here now. And so not just from the United States, but from European culture texts as well. I was seeing these new narratives of queer youth sexuality that sort of pushed against this panic that was being, that was being produced, you know, in many state legislations and many, you know, even national pushes towards things like book bans and you know, don't say gay laws and the likes of. So that's sort of how the book came, came to be.
