Dislike-Minded

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.

Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author and editor of numerous books, including Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010), Fandom, Second Edition (2017), Keywords for Media Studies (2017), and Satire TV (2009), as well as Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and A Companion to Media Authorship (with Derek Johnson).Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author and editor of numerous books, including Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010), Fandom, Second Edition (2017), Keywords for Media Studies (2017), and Satire TV (2009), as well as Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and A Companion to Media Authorship (with Derek Johnson).

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.

Dislike-Minded offers rich theories and much-needed vocabularies for understanding our complex relationships with media that annoy, bother, and haunt us. It helps us make sense of anti-fans, media failure, involuntary reception, second-hand media exposure, and all those negative feelings generated by media engagements. Rooted in lived experience, it explores routine audience practices in their social contexts and uncovers the reasons why we consume media we simply do not like. Clearly written and evocatively argued, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in audience research, media affect, and everyday life.