eBook - PDF

I Know You Are, but What Am I?

Name: I Know You Are, but What Am I?
ISBN: 9781452972039

On Pee-wee Herman

Cait McKinney,

92 pages
English
PDF
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - PDF

I Know You Are, but What Am I?

On Pee-wee Herman

Cait McKinney,

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access I Know You Are, but What Am I? by Cait McKinney in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Television History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.