Introduction to the special issue Genre After Media

A number of “thought-pieces” have recently come out proclaiming with glee that genre, as we know it, is dead; that it has been put out of its misery by algorithmic recommendations, search engines, and a rapidly transforming entertainment industry (de Pontent 2022; Battan 2019; Cooperman 2021; Leneghan 2020; Petrusich 2021). They present genre as the hard barriers that make entertainment boring and suggest that there is a utopian potential in breaking them down. In response, we collectively argue that genre is not only alive and well but is indeed one of the more thought-provoking aspects of contemporary media and media studies, and worthy of continued study.

During a period when you can watch television in a theater, see theatrical performances on Zoom, screen a big-budget feature film on your phone, and play a game on Netflix, questions around the relationship between medium and genre have rarely if ever been more salient or more fascinating. Media specificity, the question of what makes one medium distinct from others and what they are uniquely adept at expressing, becomes significantly more complex when exhibitors appear agnostic about how exactly content is shown and experienced. While medium may be the dominant way in which humanities scholars tend to define their fields and objects of study, the essays collected here point to the continuing relevance of genre across both the entertainment industry and the academy. Indeed, the entertainment industry has increasingly turned to genre distinctions to help them to organize their collections and appeal to users. Netflix and most other streaming services go into extreme specifics in their genre categories but hardly focus at all on what medium their content might consist of (a movie?, TV?, or Video game?). And as medium becomes a less salient category, it begins to look more like genre with flexible definitions and squishy boundaries rather than exact specifications. For instance, what exactly is television anymore? And when we call something a film, are we referring to its medium, its genre, both, or neither? Genre clearly still matters to audiences and industries; generic trains and intertextual familiarities persist despite new media uses and hybrid combinations across different media formats.

This special issue of Television and New Media brings together a group of luminary scholars across media studies to collectively consider what happens when instead of focusing our attention on media, we turn to genre as our field’s organizational structure. While we argue that genre is by its nature a slippery form of categorization that actively resists coherence, it is also true, as Mittell (2017) argues, that “every genre category gathers a cluster of assumptions and practices that connect to its presumed cultural significance, viewership, aesthetic value, and industrial strategies. Genres are fully embedded in their contexts, shifting across historical moments, national origins, and subcultural groups” (p. 83).

But how is genre a specific form of ontological categorization (a method for identifying all of what exists and how each part is related to another) distinct from other possible forms of categorization? Why does it matter whether we call something a genre, a mode, a medium, etc.? What does thinking in terms of genre allow us to imagine that focusing on media does not? Much of the impetus of this collection came from a desire to collectively imagine a more critical-utopian genre studies—we are not only interested in describing genres defined by industries, popular critics, and other hegemonic forces, but also in locating, defining and/or reclaiming the genres, and approaches to genre, we want to see more of in the world. We hope it encourages you as readers to do the same.

Genre studies has always been a populist force in media studies. It arose out of a challenge to the dominant focus on auteur cinema by scholars and critics alike. Tudor (1973), Bazin (1968), Wood (1977) and many others have argued that films made for mainstream audiences in large-scale studio systems could be just as complex and valuable as anything ostensibly made by a singular “genius” director. While auteur studies benefited from having a relatively clear way to organize and delimit its objects of study, genre studies instead focuses far more on the generative difficulty of this process. Many genre theorists like Buscombe (1970), Staiger (1997), Grant (2019), and deCordova (2001) questioned who got to decide what is and is not part of a genre and considered the ideologies behind such debates. In the process, genre studies helped expand the focus in film studies beyond the text itself to also consider audiences, producers, and all the other economic and cultural forces that come together to shape how films and all media are understood. Williams (1991) and Clover (1992) pushed this discussion further by considering how an understanding of genre is always shaped by one’s perspective and experiences at the level of the body and its physical reactions. And in further challenging who gets to define a genre, Barbara Klinger illustrated the potential of scholars using genre to group together films they want to highlight that may have been overlooked by other audiences (Klinger 1984).

Yet, over the last twenty or so years, genre has been an underutilized and under-discussed topic in media studies and is largely absent in discussions of digital media, from video games to algorithmic culture. Holmes and Williamson (2022) recently argued that “genre studies remain strangely fuzzy on questions of cinema, that is, on what the medium of film has done to shape the origins, contours, and patterns of film genre”. They point out that this ‘fuzziness’ has long been a central aspect of genre studies that Rick Altman noted in his landmark genre work in the 1980s. For Altman, film genres were paradoxically as easily recognizable as they were difficult to explain “and what theorizing had been done, particularly by way of semiotics and structuralism, was prone to confusion and contradiction” (quoted in Holmes and Williamson). While we agree that genre is confusing and contradictory, we collectively push back on the assertion that this makes it a problem. Rather, we argue that genre is uniquely able to handle and allow for confusion and contradiction far better than most other ontologies. One may find this quality annoying or vexing, but it is also what makes genre powerful tool for sorting objects like art and entertainment that are themselves often contradictory and capable of fitting into many boxes at once. In reading and reviewing the contributions for this issue we were struck by how genre became the mechanism through which we were able to start to make sense of these blurry boundaries. Indeed, genre, whose categories, as you will see evidenced here, have so much slippage, continue to provide us with a way through the noise of our contemporary media moment.

Other hierarchical ontologies—whether animal taxonomies, phylogenetics, object-oriented computer programming, or even media specificity—tend to actively exclude complex and contradictory items that either fit into too many boxes or none at all. For instance, one can be a mammal or an insect, or a film or a book, but not at the same time. In making items fit into these forms of categorization, they tend to become simplified until much of this complexity is masked. Genre is not limited by such a strict “this or that” logic. One need only consider how Get Out (2017), the acclaimed feature film that amplified the horrors of anti-Black racism in the United States, was nominated for Best Comedy at the 2018 Golden Globes to see how elastic and irreconcilable genre as a form of categorization can be. It also illuminates how classifying texts along genre lines can often become a negotiation between audiences and institutions that each have their own limitations and understandings of genre as a form of categorization. When asked by Stephen Colbert about the choice to submit the film for awards as a comedy/musical rather than as a drama, director Jordan Peele joked that he had submitted it as a documentary, but now actually thinks of it as a historical biopic. He went on to argue that the film subverts genre and can be understood variously depending on one’s perspective: “it’s a film that Black people can laugh at but white people. . . not so much” (“Jordan Peele Interview” 2017). While this response highlights how all films feature elements of various genres, it also obscures the power of choosing how to present a film in a particular way. If someone thinks Get Out is a comedy, what exactly are they amused by, and can such a reaction be anything but racist? Since the Golden Globes only has the two categories for feature film awards, it tends to label anything “that’s not an obvious, straightforward prestige drama” as a comedy/musical (Desta 2017). There is a clear value judgment in this distinction between serious and dry dramas versus fun and frivolous comedy/musicals. Given that prestige dramas are also heavily marketed to older white audiences, this drawing of hard genre boundaries is also racialized, framing anything that is not catering to this older white audience as trivial in comparison. Such sorting decisions reveal the complexity and contradictions behind how Hollywood imagines genre and its relationship to race, and class among other things. Love or hate it, these are the kind of unsettling sortings that genre not only allows for, but actively encourages.

Genre is rife with such paradoxes, which can make it hard to research and methodologically employ them. Collins (2006) argues that too often “most genre studies have purchased their promises of clarity and utility through a certain economization: making the term ‘genre’ do as little as possible” (p. 55). At the same time, there is an abundance of genre studies courses now offered in a wide range of humanities departments that need to be taught across various media at once. These courses, perhaps a relic of a bygone era when there seemed to only be one medium worth studying, are “generically” titled so that almost anyone can teach most anything within them; they tend to focus on single genres (e.g., comedy, horror, or whatever the instructor is interested in at the moment), often within a single medium. As a result, it can become more challenging to talk about “genre” as a specific type of unique categorization among many as there is little to contrast it with. Genre quickly becomes the least interesting part of a genre studies course; more of a gateway for seeing the intricacies and imbrications of various media. At the same time, it seems scholars often shy away from thinking with genre as a conceptual tool not because it is too “difficult,” but rather because the term is associated with only the most derivative of media that often feels counterproductive to study. But we do not need to accept the genre distinctions offered up by commercial media industries.

This collection examines genre as a very particular form of ontological categorization and offers an explication of the multiple ways genre still matters to audiences and industries. Even as media formats and consumption practices shift, genre traits and intertextual familiarities persist, creating new hybrid formations and novel combinations. Media theory is primarily interested in locating what a medium is capable of that other forms of categorization are not. In the process, much of media theory has historically focused on defining a medium’s essence (or specificity) and creating hard definitional boundaries between media that make them appear more stable, distinct, and ahistorical than they really are. At the same time, many of the most influential works in cinema and media studies from scholars like Laura Mulvey, Tom Gunning, Lev Manovich, Linda Williams, and Lauren Berlant (to name but a few) are far more focused on genre concerns than medium specificity, though their lessons are often misapplied to the whole of a medium, which can lead to oversimplifications and a lack of appreciation for how nuanced and various the output of any particular medium can be.

In highlighting the messier aspects of genre, we hope to show how it can be employed more strategically across the critical humanities to investigate new objects and new media, as well as reexamine well-trodden paths with a new lens. New genres emerge, transform, hybridize, dissipate, and return constantly in ways that media do not. Just like its sister-term, “gender,” genres resist clarification and categorization: while often presented as a problem of using genre as a system of classification the articles assembled here consider what the squishiness of genre allows for that the supposed hardness of media specificity does not. The difficulty of defining genres is what makes them so vital. In this vein, our articles reconsider the thorny relationship between genres and subgenres; how small and specific or large and indistinct a genre category can be; how certain genres like music videos can act transmedially; and the role phenomenology and other less employed methods can play in identifying and defining less obvious genres. In the process, they continually discuss the political and ideological bases for deciding how much a genre can stretch before it snaps.

Genre—like all ontologies—is so difficult to study that often it feels like there is nothing to say about it at all. In turn, this leads many to wonder whether one’s time might be better spent focused on other topics and methods with more obvious and immediate urgency. Often, trying to change your life for the better is indistinguishable from reframing it in terms of a different genre, from melodrama or horror to comedy or romance. Yet, consider, as Lauren Berlant did, the framing power of genre even in our daily lived experience. Berlant (2018) describes how in moments of distress or confusion, we often start by trying to reassess the genre of our lives so that we might better understand “how to move in it” (p. 156). This experience may be quite familiar to those who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic and had to wake up every day for months wondering whether they should act as if we were in a horror film, an absurdist chamber play, a melodrama, a workplace comedy, a dystopian sci-fi epic, or something else entirely. Genres set our expectations of what is to come and are central to how we understand our own lives and the world around us. Certain genres, like horror and comedy, break expectations as a matter of course. Understanding the world in terms of genre and recognizing the one you are living in are first steps toward confronting and naming your lived reality—a first step to transforming it.

The essays collected here introduce a wide variety of methodologies and model research questions that make clear how intriguing, necessary, and engaging the study of genres can be for understanding media across platforms today. In the process, we make a number of interventions in the use of genre within media studies and the critical humanities more generally. Together, these essays employ a range of different uses of the term genre that showcase how varied the term is currently defined and implemented.

First, we challenge the hierarchy set up between the terms medium and genre. While these terms are deeply connected, medium has long been privileged across the humanities. Yet, many of the articles included here argue that the distinctions between media and genre are far more fluid than they appear. In seeking continuities across forms, we aim to trace commercial imperatives and tactics. In “From Brand to Genre: The Hallmark Movie,” Andrea Braithwaite illustrates the ways in which the Hallmark movie operates as much as a genre as a brand; one that extends across platforms and media. By reading the persistent presence of the Hallmark movie in media culture as itself a genre, Braithwaite enables us to see the mutual imbrication of markets and audiences in the ongoing success of this specific form.

Like Braithwaite, Caetlin Benson-Allott considers medium-specific genres in “Temporal Dispersions of Disgust: Or, Learning to Appreciate Direct-to-Video Horror.” Here, she encourages us to consider direct to video (DTV) horror movies of the 1980s as a distinct genre unto itself rather than as a failed lesser version of theatrical releases. Understanding the specific generic conventions and uses of DTV horror elucidates the ways their makers created new and unique conventions within a new medium while illustrating how DTV video presaged and continues to inform American on-demand media culture.

Gerald Sim delves into the personalization mythos surrounding on-demand media in his essay “Deep Learning’s Generic Recourse.” By examining Netflix’s micro-targeted genres he illuminates the implications of machine learning on the utility if not the very idea of the film genre. Contrasting popular conceptions of streaming services as wholly transcending former systems for identifying, naming, and recommending genres, Sim deftly illustrates how streaming algorithms purposely reproduce traditional generic understandings and taxonomies.

In “Neo-Cult and the Altered Audience: Reviving Cult TV for the Post-TV Age,” Bethan Jones also examines the repackaging of existing genres as she demonstrates how contemporary networks and streaming services have co-opted, amplified and reified earlier cult TV fandom as a component of the production and marketing of revived content such as The X-Files and Twin Peaks. The neo-cult classification marks the intentional utilization of earlier generic contexts in attempts to capture new audiences.

This issue’s second core intervention is highlighting how genres can point us to societal shifts. Many of the most influential and inspirational contemporary media studies works—from Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema to Laura Horak and Maggie Hennefeld’s Nasty Women to Salomé Skvirsky’s The Process Genre to Samantha Sheppard’s Sporting Blackness—have made great use of genre theory to gather media texts together in ways that give them immediate heft and cultural importance. Here, we showcase articles that put a spotlight on how genre can refigure the history, present, and future of all media. In the process, it might also help us recenter media studies around the types and categories of texts we wish to see more of rather than the ones we are left with. In the process, our collection examines the historical and spatial situatedness not only of specific genres, but also of genre itself as a categorical structure. Some of these articles explore how genre can itself be used to analyze and critique conceptions of historicity while others look with hope to how transforming genres can also transfigure what we deem to be possible.

Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how culture norms can be identified and even transformed through genre in her essay “Genre as Feminist Platform: Neurodiversity, Rage and Serial T.V.” Focusing on several shows, such as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I May Destroy You, Killing Eve, and Physical, McHugh illustrates the emergence of narratives of unapologetic, angry, neurodiverse female characters whose appetites, emotions and affect, taken together, make space for new feminist formations on screen.

In “Creative Genre Matters: Trendy Drama as the Impulse of Glocalization Reshaping East Asian Cultural-geographic Media Market” Hsin-Pey Ping traces global cultural transformation through genre. Her essay elucidates how Han cultural heritage and beliefs synthesize with glocalized culture as the Trendy Genre, which originated in Japan and has become popular across East Asia, is experiencing ongoing transformation and redefinition.

Across this issue we aim to clarify how genre captures other ways of experiencing media beyond narrative structure and traditional metrics. As many of our authors illustrate, the choice of whether to present a technology as a medium or a genre is politically, economically, and culturally motivated. At the same time, while medium and genre are two forms of categorization, they work in very different ways and allow for quite distinct types of arguments to take shape. We claim that in undervaluing the lens of genre, our understanding of media writ large, and therefore media studies as a field has suffered. We ask, what are the possibilities that might emerge with a greater attention to the generic flows across media?

Andrea Andiloro’s essay, “Video Game Genre and Atmosphere,” pushes us to transcend former systems for understanding video games beyond the common classifications of game mechanics, degree of interactivity, or game world, but instead as “expressive of an atmosphere felt by the player.”

For Laurel Westrup, genre becomes a vital analytical tool, illuminating the remediation of specific music videos and the emergence of new uses of music in user-produced and commercial media. in “Music Video, Remediation, and Generic Hybridity”’ Westrup argues that transmedia genres provide a lens for seeing emerging discourses and styles, as well as the ways in which commercial and participatory production contexts are entwined.

Jaimie Baron turns to filmic media to argue that the datedness of a film text can amplify generic conventions that are useful for enabling us to see difference while amplifying transformations in discourse and representation. Her essay, “The Ethical Cringe, or the Dated Film as Revelatory Genre,” makes a case that when we approach archives of texts from earlier time periods, and the dated film itself, as a genre defined by how it makes us experience historicity and the idea that change is not only possible but happening all the time.,

Our hope is that this conversation will encourage future discussions of genre across local and transnational contexts. While this issue itself attempts to bring together a range of approaches, media, and genre considerations, it does skew to a more western, particularly U.S. framework. As audiences and industries are inextricably tied to questions of nation, we hope this issue contributes to ongoing, global discussions of genre. Taken together, this collection aims to help readers consider the complexity of the production and use of genre and aims to course correct us out of our field’s collective tendency to simply not deal with genre in our scholarship. Much of the pleasure and rigor of genre studies comes from noticing a pattern across media based on your personal proclivities that others have not, and then articulating why that connection is meaningful.