Humor and Latina/o Camp in Ugly Betty: Funny Looking

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Humor and Latina/o Camp in Ugly Betty: Funny Looking expands the vista of critical approaches to comedy and representational politics on mainstream television from an interdisciplinary Latina/o studies approach. Gonzlez and Rodriguez y Gibson examine how Ugly Betty uses humor and Latina/o camp to reframe socially charged issues on the show: representations of masculinity and familia, immigration, drag and queer subjectivities, Latina sexuality, and finally, a Latina feminist critique of the American Dream. Ugly Betty moves beyond the binaries of traditional representational politics and opens a vista of critical possibility applicable to all mainstream texts that portray people of color through comedy. This work will be of interest to scholars in media studies, Latina/o studies, and communication studies.

Reviews

Gonzlez and Rodriguez y Gibson use a funny looking lens to analyze the popular television series Ugly Betty (200610). Featuring minority characters and taking a progressive stance on LGBTQ issues, the sitcomresides on the borderon one hand acclaimed foravoiding clich, on the other derided for humorous and campy manipulation of stereotypes. Embracing the ambiguities of borderland culture, the authorsobserve the main characters attempt at auto-defining what it means to be a second-generation Mexican American/Chicana engaging with race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Each chapter highlights specific episodes that make fun and make sense of a particular topic within Chicana/o culture. The series and thus this book give alternative representations of Latino masculinity and familia. The authors also address immigration issues such as separation of families, adaptation of recent immigrants, and assimilation into mainstream culture of subsequent generations. They reflect on sexually charged masculine and feminine roles and new interpretations of Latina sexuality. This book illustrates a progressive Latinidad that challenges the inequalities and injustices at the foundations of the American dream. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *
In Humor and Latina/o Camp in Ugly Betty: Funny Looking, Tanya Gonzlez and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson provide a much-needed addition to the slim scholarly canon of book-length studies in Latina/o humor.... Humor and Latina/o Camp in Ugly Betty: Funny Looking provides an excellent and accessible introduction to Latina/o studies theory and television analysis, making this text valuable for scholars and students in under-graduate media studies as well as Latina/o studies courses. The authors close readings of a third of the shows episodes provide multiple examples of how Ugly Bettys humor is both complicit in and critical of the American dream and how the shows use of camp and stereotype complicate representations of Latinos/as in popular culture. * Studies in American Humor *
Gonzlez and Rodriguez y Gibson show us how Ugly Betty cleverly explores complex social issues surrounding ethnicity, race, gender, identity, and sexuality through its comedic repurposing of stereotypes created and reinforced by mainstream media. This book offers a critical approach to understanding the shows parodic yet subversive treatment of these myths from within the framework of popular cultural production. -- Patricia M. Montilla, Western Michigan University
Gonzlez and Rodriguez y Gibson offer a sophisticated reading of the shows engagement with latinidad through the use of humor, critical camp, and queer aesthetics. With the theory of 'funny looking,' the book shows how the humorous and non-normative work together, helping us to think critically about the relationship between Latinidad and neoliberalism, a refreshing approach that makes an incisive contribution to television studies, Chicana/o cultural studies, and queer studies. -- Marci McMahon, The University of Texas Pan-American

Author Bio

Tanya Gonzlez is associate professor in the English Department at Kansas State University. Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson is associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University.