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What can critical theory, from Theodor Adorno to contemporary writers on the relationship between capitalism and digital media, tell us about the specific form or medium that is television? This article undertakes a two-step answer to this question, first by locating television as a key medium in the midcentury analysis of the "culture industries" and then by seeking to frame it as a theoretical object capable of shedding light on contemporary cultural and aesthetic forms in their relation to economic and political conditions. My argument is that Adorno and his readers/critics still have a great deal to teach us about the arrangement of desire and need that television implants, an arrangement that crystallized into its broadcast corporate form in the 1950s. Elsewhere, I have shown how helpful Adorno can be in splaying open the mechanisms of midcentury broadcast media, insofar as his writings attended to the specificities of 1950s television, including the importance of stereotypes as holdovers from radio comedy, the constraints of studio shooting, the standards of script development, and the complicated reception of "common sense." What remains now is to bring the questions he raises in his television criticism (broadly speaking, questions of psychosocial response, of writing for and about the culture industries, and of ideological analysis) into the current moment, testing the utility of his procedures and insights in light of convergence culture, the proliferation of digital platforms, new phenomenological modes of engagement, and new aesthetic forms. If Adorno by the pool in midcentury Los Angeles is not to be abandoned, how might he speak to us now?

"Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. While many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich, the "new queer cinema") in the United States, films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms. Cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance: at some points, for example in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing "history" not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as a uneven story of struggle, writers on queer cinema in this volume stress how that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but describes currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, instead foregrounding indigenous genders and sexualities, or those forged in the global South, or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, while "cinema" is in our title, many scholars in this collection see that term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as "queer cinema" shifts into new configurations"--

Extending the recent rapprochement among queer studies, Marxist theory, and political economy, this special issue of GLQ responds to the current crisis of capitalism. Contributors consider how methodologies of queer studies are specially poised to reveal the global, historical, and social dimensions of capitalist economic relations. Using queer hermeneutical tools in combination with globalization studies, secularization studies, and queer of color critique, contributors examine global economic history and the ideological collusion of capitalist production and biological reproduction. The Introduction explores the ways in which capitalism is only made possible by systems of racial, sexual, and national exploitation; further, we seek to interrupt the commonsensical presumption that recuperation from periods of crisis depends on the increasingly violent reassertion of these forms of exploitation. Turning our attention to the set of crises defining the period we understand as neoliberal capitalism—the long wave of recessions and dispossessions stretching from the 1970s to the present—we explore the shared queer and Marxist commitment to concepts of utopia and theories of totality as frameworks for strenuously negating and moving beyond current conditions. By providing an expansive theoretical perspective on current and historical economic patterns, we hope to illuminate and advance our understanding of the complex structures of global capitalism.