Unscripting the Present: The Security Panic of Queer Youth Sexuality (SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures) - Hardcover

Timothy Gitzen

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798855801644

Publisher: SUNY Press, 2025

Synopsis

Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with their presumed innocence always in danger of being lost. Unscripting the Present interweaves analysis of laws and lawsuits, news media, sociological studies, and popular culture both to understand contemporary sex panics and to highlight how queer youth find ways to survive in the here and now. Developing a novel technique of "unscripting," Timothy Gitzen focuses our attention on those impromptu moments when things go awry in representations of queer youth—moments that disrupt securitization’s social "scripts." Foregoing well-worn promises of things getting better, texts such as Netflix's Sex Education, the film Love, Simon, and the multimodal show Skam upend the anxious hyperfocus on what’s to come in favor of a hopeful present.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Gitzen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses.

Edition details

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798855801644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208