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Explains why audiences dislike certain media and what happens when they do
The study and discussion of media is replete with talk of fans, loves, stans, likes, and favorites, but what of dislikes, distastes, and alienation?
Dislike-Minded draws from over two-hundred qualitative interviews to probe what the media’s failures, wounds, and sore spots tell us about media culture, taste, identity, representation, meaning, textuality, audiences, and citizenship. The book refuses the simplicity of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous dictum that dislike is (only) snobbery. Instead, Jonathan Gray pushes onward to uncover other explanations for what it ultimately means to dislike specific artifacts of television, film, and other media, and why this dislike matters.
As we watch and listen through gritted teeth, Dislike-Minded listens to what is being said, and presents a bold case for a new line of audience research within communication, media, and cultural studies.
"A critical and incisive expansion of Jonathan Gray’s foundational work on antifandom, Dislike-Minded offers a nuanced and theoretically rich model for understanding the motivations and mechanics of dislike. Gray’s insightful exploration of taste cultures and the ways in which degrees of privilege shape our relationships to media objects makes this an essential book for better understanding our deeply polarized culture. As Gray’s robust ethnographies make clear, there are many things to dislike about our contemporary media landscape, but I am happy to report I found nothing to dislike about this book."
"In Dislike-Minded, [Gray] makes a deeply compelling argument to stare directly into the face of an idea that we find distasteful and inappropriate, but in the name of bettering ourselves, through an entertaining, yet thoroughly complex piece of research that is indeed worthy of its name."