I Know You Are, but What Am I?

On Pee-wee Herman

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by Cait McKinney

Type

Studies

Subject

One Film > Pee-wee's Big Adventure

Keywords

Tim Burton, characters, technology

Publishing date

2024

Publisher

University of Minnesota Press

Collection

Forerunners: Ideas First

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 92 pages
5 x 7 inches (12.5 x 18 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5179-1828-6

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Book Presentation:
How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology

I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a queer man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.
Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.
McKinney looks at how queer people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-queer political movements organized today.

About the Author:
Cait McKinney is assistant professor of communication at Simon Fraser University. They are author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies and coeditor of Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and other Lesbian Hauntings.

See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press

See Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) on IMDB ...