Unscripting the Present by Timothy Gitzen

Unscripting the Present by Timothy Gitzen

Interrogates contemporary sex panics in the United States, looking especially at popular culture texts to conceptualize queer youth survival strategies.

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.

"In this original, astute, and timely work, Gitzen interrogates the heightened panic toward nonnormative messages about gender and sexuality—fears rooted in the erroneous assumption that youth exposure to queer words and texts will corrupt their presumed innocence and their supposedly fragile heterosexual family" — CHOICE

"Smart and engaging, this book troubles the future orientation of both sex panics and the security state to focus attention instead on the great creativity and ingenuity of queer young people. Gitzen's use of a variety of pop culture texts and attention to European issues over and beyond US issues help make the methodological move of 'unscripting' not just a metaphor but also a material intervention in the present." — Jonathan Alexander, author of Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing

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.