Benjamin Kruger-Robbins

Weber State University, Film Studies, Faculty Member

University of California, Irvine, Humanities Core Program, Adjunct

Emory University, Film and Media Studies, Faculty Member

University of California, Irvine, Film and Media Studies, Adjunct

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Ben Kruger-Robbins is an Assistant Professor in the Film Studies program at Weber State University. He served previously as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Emory University and a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Ben earned a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from UCI in 2019 with a dissertation on gay television representation and awards discourse during the late network era, and his research focuses on queerness within American media industries and TV audience cultures/communities.

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Monash University

Alisa Perren

The University of Texas at Austin

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Western Sydney University

Murat Akser

University of Ulster

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Queen's University Belfast

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Luca Barra

Università di Bologna

Andrea Pinotti

Università degli Studi di Milano - State University of Milan (Italy)

Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes

Universidade de São Paulo

Lucas R . Platero

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

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Papers by Benjamin Kruger-Robbins

"Holy Fruit Salad, Batman!": Unmasking Queer Conceits of ABC's Late-1960s Branding

Camp TV of the 1960s: Reassessing the Vast Wasteland, 2023

This chapter considers how Batman (1966–68) functioned as a part of the American Broadcasting Com... more This chapter considers how Batman (1966–68) functioned as a part of the American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) competitive drive against the other two major networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), to push boundaries of acceptable denotative and connotative queer visibility in prime-time television. While academics and popular critics frequently cite William Dozier’s TV adaptation of Bob Kane’s comic series as a canonically camp, gay-inflected text, this chapter analyzes reception, production, and distribution artifacts surrounding Batman in conjunction with those relating to explicitly gay-themed episodes of the short-lived detective procedural N.Y.P.D. (1967–69). Such comparison reveals a dual branding strategy that positioned ABC as an emerging venue for “quality” adult gay content while tightening the network’s grip on queer-tinged “adolescent” entertainment. Ultimately, ABC’s camp stylization across its programming formed part of a complex and occasionally affirmative, if also socially problematic, overture to “new” audience demographics.

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Heartbreakers/Brand Makers: Ryan Murphy, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, and HBO’s Politics of AIDS

Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 2022

This article examines Ryan Murphy’s collaboration with HBO on activist Larry Kramer’s adaptation ... more This article examines Ryan Murphy’s collaboration with HBO on activist Larry Kramer’s adaptation of The Normal Heart (2014), which represents a departure from the director/showrunner’s more complex and nuanced explorations of queer life. Although the mainstreaming of the AIDS narrative in The Normal Heart may seem to be a simple aesthetic choice, and perhaps even a positive step in the normalizing of gay lives for a broad American viewership; I argue that HBO’s marketing of The Normal Heart and its elevation of Kramer as a spokesperson for sexual health has serious and complex real-world consequences for multiply marginalized queer groups. In developing this argument, I analyze the TV movie itself as inhabiting an ambiguous, contradictory space between camp spectacle and social realism, while also considering how HBO’s marketing and its awards season press “restored” the play’s politics of sexual shame. Murphy and Kramer’s awards circuit appearances legitimate Kramer’s unsubstantiated assault on the use of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) medication to stymie new HIV infections at the time of the film’s release, reviving stigmas perpetuated during the 1980s and 1990s. Murphy’s work with HBO also enhances his “respectability,” which he continues to develop to bolster his “auteur” status within the television industry.

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Golden Gays: Awards Legitimation from the Globes to GLAAD

The Velvet Light Trap, 2022

This article historicizes how the Golden Globe Awards and the George Foster Peabody Awards select... more This article historicizes how the Golden Globe Awards and the George Foster Peabody Awards selectively commended television programming with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) themes from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. I argue that these awards programs’ different legitimizing practices helped to define LGBTQ+ programming as elite, sequestering it from television’s everyday discursive positioning. I first consider how the outcast status of the Golden Globes, organized by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, compelled greater attention to “queer” television oddities, even while the recognitions upheld a troublingly classed framing of LGBTQ+ shows that dovetailed with the organizer’s late-1980sdiscrediting following disclosures of bribery and other dealings. The Peabodys, on the other hand, promoted standards for “respectable” programming and therefore refused recognition of gay-themed shows until doing so became politically expedient in the late 1980s. This academic awarding institution later singled out “quality ”entries for acclaim, paving the way for more contemporary associations between LGBTQ+ television and premier viewing platforms. Ultimately, I argue that activist media watchdogs such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD)emulated the Globes’ and Peabodys’ public relations strategies, becoming de facto awards organizations in the 1990s that adopted “quality” criteria for recognizing queer-themed shows.

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