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Papers by Nikola Stepic

This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the... more This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the genre of lad lit. Instead of focusing solely on its late twentieth-century moment of emergence as a response to chick lit, the paper proposes a longer historical view in order to understand the crisis of masculinity that lad lit lays bare in its protagonists’ inherently queer status as collectors. The analysis puts critical pressure on the collectible object by re-reading the “lad” through the literary figure of the fop, who represents a recurring response to similar crises in gender from the seventeenth-century’s comedy of manners to the novels of Jane Austen. The fop’s overinvestment in style and consequent marginalization is considered in Nick Hornby’s novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, in which the protagonists’ obsessive collecting of objects can be understood as both a dominant feature of their masculinity and the roadblock to their participation in heteronormative rituals of romance. Instead of reading Hornby’s characters as straightforwardly queer, this paper focuses on the commodity as a signal of queerness, and in turn its central role in the creation of, and the challenge to, the lad’s masculinity.

Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta u Prištini, 2017

In the anthology Queer Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, "the personal and th... more In the anthology Queer Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, "the personal and the social shame attached to eroticism" is taken to task in relation to the larger contemporary discourse surrounding gay pride (understood in terms of activism and cultural production), while being seen as a defining characteristic of queer history, culture and identity. Shame, as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Halperin and others, is predicated on a larger issue of queer people's access to discursive power, which Sedgwick herself had theorized in The Epistemology of the Closet. Such a conceptualizing of queer culture and queer politics begs the interrogation of how queer shame is contained and negotiated in contemporary popular culture.
One of the most successful auteurs working in film and television today, Ryan Murphy's opus is marked by a constant dialogue with queer cultural artifacts. The excitement that his productions generate is typically predicated on his use of queer cultural objects, especially as they are rearticulated for mainstream audiences. This paper investigates the inherent shame of queer memory as embodied in Murphy's show American Horror Story through reference and negotiation of queer icons, filmic traditions and on-screen bodies. Utilizing queer and film theory as its framework, this paper treats Murphy's queer vernacular as the uncanny that destabilizes conventions of both the horror genre and mainstream television, in turn legitimizing and exploiting " shameful " queer categories such as trauma, excess, diva worship and camp through the language of popular television and the bodies that populate it.

As a counterpoint to the emerging homonormativity of the twenty-first century, this paper seeks t... more As a counterpoint to the emerging homonormativity of the twenty-first century, this paper seeks to identify and reevaluate the potential of queer chosen families as they are cinematically mediated, and historically located, in the context of the AIDS epidemic. With Bill Sherwood’s 1986 film Parting Glances as a case study, the paper argues that the melodramatic mode of these films, with the repetition of tropes such as caregiving, mourning and funerals, ushers an alternative mode of familiality into queer narratives and champions the queer chosen family. In this sense, it is argued that to look at the evolution of queer familial life means to look at a long process of transference of one social modality to another, and the AIDS film specifically as a place where familial relationality is emulated and transformed through relations based in love, friendship and parrhesia.

Žanrovska ukrštanja srpske i anglofone književnosti

The evolving representations of queer people in moving ima­ges have taken the form of a homecomin... more The evolving representations of queer people in moving ima­ges have taken the form of a homecoming, especially in light of recent law changes that pertain to same-­sex marriage in the United States, and the media’s concurrent readiness to recast sexual minorities in the roles of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children. In an effort to investigate the formation of queer chosen families, independent of, or in opposition to, heteronorma­tivity, the paper approaches director Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning as an intertextual object in order to situate queer kinship at the inter­ sections of gender, race, sexuality and genre.

This essay traces the figure of Saint Sebastian as it is employed in two plays, Tennessee William... more This essay traces the figure of Saint Sebastian as it is employed in two plays, Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer and Michel Marc Bouchard’s Lilies, as well as in their film adaptations (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and John Greyson, respectively). Saint Sebastian, an example of the stereotype Richard Dyer calls a “sad young man,” is here analyzed as conduit for both identity formation and homoerotic anxiety. The Saint is positioned as a figure through which issues surrounding storytelling, production of memory, personal history and historical revision are embodied. By making these issues the central dramatic conflicts, the two plays do not only engage with the figure of Saint Sebastian in order to codify its central melancholy gay characters, but also explore the way the Saint’s queer potentiality is reproduced through the work of memory, revision and revival.

Discourses That Matter: Selected Essays on English and American Studies, 2013

Journal Issues by Nikola Stepic

Synoptique: An online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, 2021

As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to u... more As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to understand sexually explicit media. The growth of the discipline has been supported through debates and disagreements that allow for teasing out radical ethics and politics which, in turn, enable certain reading practices and representational schemas to persist. The growth and solidification of porn studies notwithstanding, the field maintains a marginal status in academia. Porn scholars routinely attend conferences where fellow attendees are embarrassed by their topics, and stories abound of young scholars who are advised to repackage their work in order to be taken more seriously or seem more “hireable.” In other words, assumptions exist that pornography studies are either too limited in scope or too contentious for the academy. The three co-editors of this issue all study porn from radically different perspectives: Darshana researches transnational porn cultures with a specific focus on South Asia, Nikola employs a queer historicist approach to adult media within a larger discourse on urban masculinities, and Rebecca studies the cultures and technologies of digital pornography. Through our discussions, which were originally occasioned by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group where the three of us met, it became evident to us that adult media allows for a confluence of different
ideas, sensibilities, and political perspectives even as it represents a point of departure from more traditional objects of study. With that in mind, we wanted this special issue on “Porn and its Uses” to wrestle with critiques, both institutional and popular, that had questioned and challenged pornography on the grounds of its use value or as “pointless” deliberation while at the same time meditating on our own sense of porn’s usefulness as an object of study.

This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the... more This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the genre of lad lit. Instead of focusing solely on its late twentieth-century moment of emergence as a response to chick lit, the paper proposes a longer historical view in order to understand the crisis of masculinity that lad lit lays bare in its protagonists’ inherently queer status as collectors. The analysis puts critical pressure on the collectible object by re-reading the “lad” through the literary figure of the fop, who represents a recurring response to similar crises in gender from the seventeenth-century’s comedy of manners to the novels of Jane Austen. The fop’s overinvestment in style and consequent marginalization is considered in Nick Hornby’s novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, in which the protagonists’ obsessive collecting of objects can be understood as both a dominant feature of their masculinity and the roadblock to their participation in heteronormative rituals of romance. Instead of reading Hornby’s characters as straightforwardly queer, this paper focuses on the commodity as a signal of queerness, and in turn its central role in the creation of, and the challenge to, the lad’s masculinity.

Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta u Prištini, 2017

In the anthology Queer Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, "the personal and th... more In the anthology Queer Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, "the personal and the social shame attached to eroticism" is taken to task in relation to the larger contemporary discourse surrounding gay pride (understood in terms of activism and cultural production), while being seen as a defining characteristic of queer history, culture and identity. Shame, as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Halperin and others, is predicated on a larger issue of queer people's access to discursive power, which Sedgwick herself had theorized in The Epistemology of the Closet. Such a conceptualizing of queer culture and queer politics begs the interrogation of how queer shame is contained and negotiated in contemporary popular culture.
One of the most successful auteurs working in film and television today, Ryan Murphy's opus is marked by a constant dialogue with queer cultural artifacts. The excitement that his productions generate is typically predicated on his use of queer cultural objects, especially as they are rearticulated for mainstream audiences. This paper investigates the inherent shame of queer memory as embodied in Murphy's show American Horror Story through reference and negotiation of queer icons, filmic traditions and on-screen bodies. Utilizing queer and film theory as its framework, this paper treats Murphy's queer vernacular as the uncanny that destabilizes conventions of both the horror genre and mainstream television, in turn legitimizing and exploiting " shameful " queer categories such as trauma, excess, diva worship and camp through the language of popular television and the bodies that populate it.

As a counterpoint to the emerging homonormativity of the twenty-first century, this paper seeks t... more As a counterpoint to the emerging homonormativity of the twenty-first century, this paper seeks to identify and reevaluate the potential of queer chosen families as they are cinematically mediated, and historically located, in the context of the AIDS epidemic. With Bill Sherwood’s 1986 film Parting Glances as a case study, the paper argues that the melodramatic mode of these films, with the repetition of tropes such as caregiving, mourning and funerals, ushers an alternative mode of familiality into queer narratives and champions the queer chosen family. In this sense, it is argued that to look at the evolution of queer familial life means to look at a long process of transference of one social modality to another, and the AIDS film specifically as a place where familial relationality is emulated and transformed through relations based in love, friendship and parrhesia.

Žanrovska ukrštanja srpske i anglofone književnosti

The evolving representations of queer people in moving ima­ges have taken the form of a homecomin... more The evolving representations of queer people in moving ima­ges have taken the form of a homecoming, especially in light of recent law changes that pertain to same-­sex marriage in the United States, and the media’s concurrent readiness to recast sexual minorities in the roles of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children. In an effort to investigate the formation of queer chosen families, independent of, or in opposition to, heteronorma­tivity, the paper approaches director Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning as an intertextual object in order to situate queer kinship at the inter­ sections of gender, race, sexuality and genre.

This essay traces the figure of Saint Sebastian as it is employed in two plays, Tennessee William... more This essay traces the figure of Saint Sebastian as it is employed in two plays, Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer and Michel Marc Bouchard’s Lilies, as well as in their film adaptations (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and John Greyson, respectively). Saint Sebastian, an example of the stereotype Richard Dyer calls a “sad young man,” is here analyzed as conduit for both identity formation and homoerotic anxiety. The Saint is positioned as a figure through which issues surrounding storytelling, production of memory, personal history and historical revision are embodied. By making these issues the central dramatic conflicts, the two plays do not only engage with the figure of Saint Sebastian in order to codify its central melancholy gay characters, but also explore the way the Saint’s queer potentiality is reproduced through the work of memory, revision and revival.

Discourses That Matter: Selected Essays on English and American Studies, 2013

Synoptique: An online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, 2021

As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to u... more As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to understand sexually explicit media. The growth of the discipline has been supported through debates and disagreements that allow for teasing out radical ethics and politics which, in turn, enable certain reading practices and representational schemas to persist. The growth and solidification of porn studies notwithstanding, the field maintains a marginal status in academia. Porn scholars routinely attend conferences where fellow attendees are embarrassed by their topics, and stories abound of young scholars who are advised to repackage their work in order to be taken more seriously or seem more “hireable.” In other words, assumptions exist that pornography studies are either too limited in scope or too contentious for the academy. The three co-editors of this issue all study porn from radically different perspectives: Darshana researches transnational porn cultures with a specific focus on South Asia, Nikola employs a queer historicist approach to adult media within a larger discourse on urban masculinities, and Rebecca studies the cultures and technologies of digital pornography. Through our discussions, which were originally occasioned by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group where the three of us met, it became evident to us that adult media allows for a confluence of different
ideas, sensibilities, and political perspectives even as it represents a point of departure from more traditional objects of study. With that in mind, we wanted this special issue on “Porn and its Uses” to wrestle with critiques, both institutional and popular, that had questioned and challenged pornography on the grounds of its use value or as “pointless” deliberation while at the same time meditating on our own sense of porn’s usefulness as an object of study.