About

Joshua Goodstein (they/he) 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, he co-founded the bimonthly film journal Cinema-Roll with several 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, he was 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.

Education

The New School

M.A. Student, Media Studies, 2022-2024

Purchase College, State University of New York

B.A., Cinema Studies, summa cum laude, 2021

Thesis: “You Must Love Me: Emotional Identification in Hollywood’s Post-Classical Camp Musicals”

Committee: Rachel Fabian (Sponsor), Agustín Zarzosa (Second Reader)

Dean’s List Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021

Bergen Community College

A.A., General Studies

Other Publications

’Showgirls,’ Camp, and the Making of a Queer Cult Classic.” Screen Speck. July 19, 2022.

“The Screen and Stage References of Kitchen Kabaret.” Film Cred Zine. June 17, 2022.

The Case of Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’: Antisemitism and Villainy in Visual Media.” Film Cred. May 11, 2022.

Celebrating 80 Years of Barbra Streisand — And Her Indelible Mark on Film.” HeyAlma. April 21, 2022.

Cruella’s Cruella is Never Cruel — And Never Truly Camp.” The Week. March 26, 2022.

Memberships

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2022-present (Member of Queer and Trans Caucus, Graduate Student Organization, and Animated Media, CinemArts: Film and Art History, Classical Hollywood, Comedy and Humor Studies, Critical Media Pedagogies, Fan and Audience Studies, Performance and Stardom, Sound and Music Studies, and Women in Screen History Scholarly Interest Groups)

Joshua Goodstein

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@jbgdstscholar

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