Media platforms continually evolve, but the issues surrounding media representations of gender and sexuality have persisted across decades. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism has published groundbreaking articles on gender and sexuality, including some that have become canonical in film studies, since the journal’s founding in 1982. This anthology collects seventeen key articles that will enable readers to revisit foundational concerns about gender in media and discover models of analysis that can be applied to the changing media world today.

Spectatorship begins with articles that consider issues of spectatorship in film and television content and audience reception, noting how media studies has expanded as a field and demonstrating how theories of gender and sexuality have adapted to new media platforms. Subsequent articles show how new theories emerged from that initial scholarship, helping to develop the fields of fandom, transmedia, and queer theory. The most recent work in this volume is particularly timely, as the distinctions between media producers and media spectators grow more fluid and as the transformation of media structures and platforms prompts new understandings of gender, sexuality, and identification. Connecting contemporary approaches to media with critical conversations of the past, Spectatorship thus offers important points of historical and critical departure for discussion in both the classroom and the field.

Roxanne Samer is visiting faculty in visual and media arts at Grand Valley State University. In 2016–2017, she served as the postdoctoral scholar–teaching fellow in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California, where she edited Spectator 37.2 (Fall 2017), a special issue dedicated to the study of transgender media.

William Whittington is the assistant chair of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. He has been the managing editor of Spectator since 2002.