Joshua Gamson,
Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
ISBN 0 226 28065 9
294pp
US$15.00 (pb)

(Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2000

Joshua Gamson explains up front, and without shame, in his 1998 book, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, why he loves “trash” television. For Gamson these shows embody the private as public information “with Barnumesque gusto”, and he likes “what talk shows make us think about” (4). He loves the “hyper enactment of what Michel Foucault called the `incitement to discourse'” of “trash” television with its “incessant modern demand that we voice every this-and-that of sexuality” (4). Rather than being seen as a danger to “gender nonconformists”, Gamson sees television talk shows as providing an opportunity for “a big shot of visibility and media accreditation” (5). He identifies these shows as the new public battlegrounds of gender and sexual identity, albeit in an exploitative manner, welcoming marginalised groups and offering audiences and participants voice and visibility in “hollow but gratifying ways” (5).

Despite his conservative demeanour, Gamson makes it clear to us that he closely “identifies with the misfits, monsters, trash, and perverts” (4), while distancing himself throughout by using these types of collective nouns for participants, and referring to guests and audiences as “them”. Gamson’s book reads like a tv chat show, offering us his very personal experience and a completely contradictory journey. As a gender nonconformist he “sometimes gets choked up” (5) longing for media visibility for the tap dancing drag queens and bisexual teens who bare their souls during the show which “discredits them and disenfranchises them” (5) at the same time. At the heart of Gamson’s book are these “paradoxes of visibility” (19). Pushing this envelope he embraces and challenges our automatic assumptions about talk shows, and considers the postmodern American ideologies of “democratization through exploitation, truths wrapped in lies, [and] normalization through freak shows” (19), inherent in the paradoxical content of US television talk shows.

Gamson’s vivid style tells the story of the researcher’s experience in production and participation contexts where, “dangers begin to look like opportunities, spotlights start to feel like they’re burning your flesh” (5). A sociologist by training, Gamson’s interesting cultural study utilises a “tripartite model” (227), interviewing and observing production staff and participants first hand, covering production contexts, textual analysis and audience reception aspects of American television talk shows from the 1980s and 1990s. Written and presented in a populist rather than academic style, Freaks Talkback is an entertaining and intimate journey through the annals of talkback television, offering a utopian vision for the future of chat shows.

However, Gamson is critical of the argument that talk shows are “politics by other means” (16), stating that “just because people are talking back does not mean we are witnessing democratic impulses and effects” (14). I am inclined to agree with the interpretations of Gamson regarding the potential and limitations of television chat. Rather than invest talk shows with attributes to empower and change audiences, Gamson does recognise the conformist values inherent in television chat and the difficulties audiences and guests face resisting these values inside this formulaic television genre. He also fully acknowledges the fakery and chicanery of television talk shows and demonstrates throughout his study the contradictory nature of what is on offer to guests and audiences in terms of “freaks” authentically talking back.

While it makes for a very entertaining read, full of humour and pathos, unfortunately the results of Gamson’s rigorous research efforts (interviews and empirical observations) do not substantiate his claims. At times Gamson’s evidence contradicts his hopes for activists to use television chat shows for their own cause, concluding, in pluralist fashion, that they have to be in it to win it. He lays an each way bet, holding out great hopes for the sexual nonconformist’s use of television talk shows while admitting the constructedness of the subject, and highlighting their inherent fakery and flamboyance. Gamson does however raise some important points about the blurring of public and private realms, but is somewhat over optimistic about the power of existing television chat show formats to be used for political purposes. This book makes one wonder why there hasn’t been a gay talk show produced yet, where problematic guests could come on to chat about the dilemmas and intimacies of their heterosexual existence.

Kristine Philipp