I Know You Are, but What Am I?
Author | : Cait McKinney |
Publisher | : U of Minnesota Press |
Total Pages | : 96 |
Release | : 2024-07-02 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781452972046 |
ISBN-13 | : 1452972044 |
Rating | : 4/5 (46 Downloads) |
Download or read book I Know You Are, but What Am I? written by Cait McKinney and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies. Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube. McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.