Joshua Goodstein is a Media Studies MA student at The New School and 2022-2024 HASTAC Scholars Fellow. Their research specializations are movie musicals, camp and cult film, stardom, classical Hollywood, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Their undergraduate thesis at Purchase College engaged theories of camp, cuteness, reflexivity, star image, and adaptation to explore how the Hollywood musicals of the 1970s-1990s depart from the conventions of the classical era and queer normative regimes of social abjection by ushering in new modes of emotional identification, deploying an aesthetic of sincerity that overlaps with the queer sensibility of camp. Major case studies included Little Shop of Horrors, The Wiz, and Evita. The project explored how post-classical musicals queerly interrogate imperialist, Western categories of abjection through their sympathetic framings of marginalized figures who are rendered abject explicitly in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.
While attending the Purchase College School of Film and Media Studies, they co-founded the bimonthly film journal Cinema-Roll with a group of other classmates. In addition to soliciting and editing student submissions, they wrote a column called The Recipe Box; which paired short essays on films like When Harry Met Sally and Monkey Business with original recipes inspired by the films. Also at Purchase, they were granted the Lucille Werlinich Senior Project Award and the 2022 Outstanding Senior Award for Cinema & Television Studies.
Outside of academia, Joshua’s writing appears in publications such as The Week, HeyAlma, Film Cred, and Screen Speck; as well as on their newsletter For No One’s Consideration.