Note: lodging will be difficult to book that weekend because of an IU home football game so please plan accordingly. Some rooms have been reserved at the Brown County Inn in Brown County, Indiana (approximately 20 minute drive from campus).  Please call the Brown County Inn, 51 St. Rd. 46 E., Nashville, IN 47448  TOLL FREE: 1-800-772-5249.  Tell them that you are coming for the “Doty Memorial.” You must call no later than September 12.

If you have photos that you would like to share with the planning committee, please email Mary L. Gray (mLg at indiana dot edu) or Brenda Weber (breweber at indiana dot edu).

I regret now that I didn’t get to know Alex Doty personally, and never told him how much his work has impacted me, not only in terms of its content but also his methodology, his modeling of the possibilities of scholar-fandom. As a scholar fan, I continue to share his intention to push at the divide between “high” and “low” culture. Though I never met him, I feel his loss keenly.

I want to share with you this fanvid/remix video that combines Glee with other popular cultural texts (mostly classic movies and movie musicals). I made this vid with Doty’s work and words in mind; I hope that it reflects not only his concern with the various ways in which queer meanings circulate in popular media, but also the way in which our investment in popular media shapes us and vice versa.

In the conversations at Henry Jenkins’ blog last fall, Doty spoke of his hope that “the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of ‘fan’ and ‘academic’ (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with…a space that allows ‘our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves’ no matter what their approach, methodology, or form.” In this spirit, the vid is dedicated to Doty. I hope that those who admired him and his work (as well as those who enjoy Glee‘s Kurt Hummel) will appreciate this offering.

Doty’s voice was vivid in his work, so open and personal that far more than with most scholars reading his writing felt like listening to someone you knew well. His work brought you into his world, allowing you to re-experience Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the bothersome but beloved Hitchcock catalog through new eyes. When I had the privilege of hearing him speak, his humor, warmth, and passion were readily apparent and his interest in nurturing a queer scholarly community was obvious; this inviting spirit came through in both his speaking and his writing, including his two pivotal books Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics and numerous articles.

This spirit has made Doty’s work my go-to resource when first bringing queer theory, particularly queer reading, into the classroom. Whenever students find it difficult to see beyond the surface of a text, the detailed, lively confidence of Doty’s readings of classic texts opens up whole new ways of seeing to new audiences. Like many great theorists, his work provided numerous tools that has allowed me to be a better teacher not only when teaching queer theory but also when introducing students to decoding texts and varied audience practices. From his work I have seen students adopt a new lens through which they can make sense of media and the world.

While for many what Doty offered was a new way of seeing, for me, and for many others, he gave an even greater gift….a language for what we had experienced and did not yet know how to bring into our scholarly lives. I do not remember the first time I read Flaming Classics, but I do remember discovering for the first time a common language to put a name to what, as a young girl, I had always felt was going on in Batman: The Animated Series between Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. He showed me how I could use in my work the strange feeling my teenage self had that I saw more of myself in Hawkeye in M*A*S*H then I did Hotlips and how I at once identified with James Bond and the Bond girls. Through his example, Doty showed the value in mining our own, sometimes complicated and conflicted, media consumption and responses in our work. He helped give me the vocabulary with which to explain myself, to bring what I saw in texts into conversation with queer theory. As a young scholar, being given a way to talk about what I saw in a way that was legible to others was an invaluable gift.

Doty’s work passionately argued for the importance of space for both the personal and political in our academic work. In so doing he helped to validate the labors of those of us who do not see academia and activism as antithetical, who find the political valuable–even inescapable–in work we do on queer sexualities and media. By problematizing but creating space for the “I” in our work, he helped to make us aware of our place as distinct readers of media texts even in our scholarly voice. By sharing with his readers little slices of his life and how they shaped him into the scholar that he was, he helped to give us the license needed to attempt to do the same. Doty’s work showed the value of getting beyond the simple empirical and understanding queer reading not as an optional or imposed reading but as simply another facet of a complex text.

It is through this lesson that Doty has impacted all of my work, not only my research on queer reading and representation but much of my textual analysis of media texts. The principles that Doty used in his queer reading practices went beyond the texts he discussed, or even queer reading as a methodology. Rather, it helped me to understand how to approach reading texts with an open mind, a sharp attention to detail and connotative meaning, and to trust the value in the meanings that we can wrest from texts rather than just those that are obviously there.

For all that Doty’s work has taught me, and all that it simply helped me learn how to say, I will always be grateful. While I never had an opportunity to take a class with Dr. Doty, I nonetheless hope that I can count myself as one of his students. I hope through my writing and my teaching, Doty will have many more students in the years to come. I mourn the work that he might have written, I mourn what else I could have learned from him, and I mourn that I gave up my opportunity out of cowardice to tell him how much his work meant to me. I regret that I never was able to thank him for the gifts that his work gave to me. I can only hope that those of us he touched gave something back to him, in the knowledge of the impact that his work had on so many of us and in the growth of the queer media scholarship tradition that he helped to foster.

Thank you, thank you very much,
I can’t express it any other way.
For with this awful trembling in my heart,
I just can’t find another thing to say.

I’m happy that you liked the show,
I’m grateful you liked me.
And I’m sure to you the tribute seemed quite right.
But if you knew of all the years,
Of hopes and dreams and tears
You’d know it didn’t happen overnight.
Huh, overnight!

I imagine these words whispered back to all the moving tributes from family, friends, and fans of Alex Doty, an influential scholar whose generosity exceeded any metrics of greatness and whose untimely passing will be mourned by many generations of scholars to come. These words I use because they preface a lyric with which Alex introduced himself: “I was born in a trunk at the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.” But I also use them here because they were first uttered by one of Alex’s own early inspirations, Judy Garland, in the same number in the same film, A Star is Born (1954), which also happens to be the year in which Alex was born.

Alex with friend and colleague Mary Gray who he helped lasso into participating in my Console-ing Passions panel this year.

I did not know him personally as many of you did, nor do I share the library of memories you may have of him. But I wanted to write a piece about how his life and his work has inspired my own as a young academic to demonstrate the ways in which, like such diva figures as Judy Garland, he will continue to inform and empower young queer individuals such as myself long after his or my time.

The first article I ever presented in a graduate seminar and one of the first queer theory pieces I ever read, was the first chapter of his book Making Things Perfectly Queer entitled “There’s Something Queer Here.” I found myself fervently and excitedly highlighting passages as though they’d been written especially for me and jotting them down on a legal pad so as not to lose them in the sea of other articles I was struggling to read week after week.

I come back to it often and reference enough of his other work that Alex seems to hold a consistent spot in my bibliographies. Indeed this chapter made me recall one of the first moments in which a media text informed my own struggle with sexuality and the feelings of difference I was beginning to experience as a young child raised in a rural, homophobic environment, which I wrote about later that fall:

“I can, with great clarity, remember the precise moment when everything fell into place: I sit motionless on the couch, staring at the TV, images flickering before my glazed but pensive adolescent eyes. Bewitched is on, and I’m left alone in the dark basement, sheltered and away from the homophobia and hate shouted at me all day in school. I’m in a sort of meditative state—receptive to what I’m watching, laughing on cue, performing my role as the audience but understanding only the face value. Something snaps, and I think, ‘Why should she have to hide a part of herself to fit in?’ And then there comes this single, beautiful, intimate moment. My eyes water, my nostrils flare, and I breathe out a sigh as I begin to smile. Samantha is me.”

I did not have the language at that young age to describe my experience of Bewitched as a queer reading nor did I give any other interpretation of it much more than a passing thought. I might not have understood what sexual identity meant or in what ways I was different, but something about dissolving myself into Samantha’s colorful world with her unwed, flamboyant, and powerful mother along with a parade of queer magical beings made me covet life outside her broom closet. These sorts of reading strategies–of finding or making a space for queerness on television (perhaps not strategies at all)–are not, as Alex writes, “‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”

Building on Alex’s influence, I am launched into scholarship invested in finding other rural queer individuals and relaying their stories of using the media for identity work. Drawing from a pool of other reception scholars, Alex encourages the use of ethnographic work to re-imagine the audience not within pre-established categories but rather to investigate their daily life and how they integrate media into it. Putting the “I” back in our work in feminist tradition and being reflexive of our own media practices and subjectivities, as Matt Hills argues, is useful in conveying “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments” of the communities from which we write that our own voices can help illuminate. These are the stakes involved in our research, and as Alex himself writes defending his use of the word queer, “I want to recapture and reassert a militant sense of difference [and] suggest that within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.”

Alexander Doty presented on what he called the "Beefcake Paradigm" at Console-ing Passions 2012. He noticed a challenging of dominant understandings of narcissism as feminine, and that men in such shows as Spartacus, Jersey Shore, and Ultimate Fighting Championship were attempting to assert conventional masculinity while allowing themselves and others to admire men's bodies, often themselves engaging in queer behavior.

My future in research will be difficult as it cannot rely on essentializing or over-theorized assumptions about audiences and does not have many precedents from which to be informed. I am often subject to a feeling of “imposter syndrome” and constantly worry that I will be “found out” as a fraud. In our email exchanges, however, Alex’s magnanimous generosity with me by showing interest in my work has and will continue to make me feel as though I’m on the right track. Found in the lyrics that open this post, which I imagine to be true of Alex’s life, success comes from years of hopes and dreams and tears, “it didn’t happen overnight,” and as I move forward, I like to think I’ll remember and be encouraged by the words that close his song: “This is it kid, sing!”