Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478030140)

From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Arrested Development to BoJack Horseman, the American sitcom revolves around crises that must be resolved by episode's end, with a new crisis to come next week. In Closures, Grace Lavery reconsiders the genre's seven-decade history as an endless cycle of crisis and closure that formally and representationally frames heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of both collapse and reconstitution. She shows that even the normiest family-based sitcoms rely on queer characters like Alice (The Brady Bunch) and Steve Urkel (Family Matters) who highlight how the family is perpetually incomplete and unstable. Analyzing the genre's techniques and devices such as the laugh track and the cringe pan, Lavery also charts the shift to friend-group and workplace sitcoms like Friends and The Office, which she contends reflect a weakening of social ties in ways that place characters in an unending state of becoming. With this capacious yet svelte queer and trans theorization of the sitcom, Lavery demonstrates that the family ties that bind the genre's normative heterosexuality are far more tenuous than we have been led to believe.

Author: Grace Lavery
ISBN-10: 1478030143
ISBN-13: 9781478030140
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/27/2024
Pages: 128
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.27d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/27/2023