BEYOND THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW - Trailer

Beyond the Straight and Narrow: Queer and Trans Television in the Age of Streaming is the newest installment in filmmaker and media scholar Katherine Sender’s groundbreaking series exploring LGBTQ representations on American television. In the film, Sender (the director, most recently, of Brand New You) picks up where her acclaimed film Further Off the Straight and Narrow left off in 2006. Surveying a stunning range of new shows, Sender shows how LGBTQ visibility and political progress have combined with new digital media technologies and television platforms to produce an increasingly complex range of queer and transgender representations. The film also considers the emergence of these more nuanced representations of LGBTQ characters and plotlines within the context of an accelerating backlash against LGBTQ visibility in our politics, schools, athletics, and public spaces. Beyond the Straight and Narrow stands to empower a new generation of young people with the tools needed to critically examine the relationship between media representations, corporate power, and long-fought social and political struggles over who gets to exist in our national imagination. Featuring interviews with leading media scholars, journalists, actors, and activists, Beyond the Straight and Narrow is ideal for courses in media studies, television history, queer studies, sociology, media and culture, gender studies, and media production.