Dislike-Minded

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. ~Andre Cavalcante, author of Struggling for Ordinary: Media and Transgender Belonging in Everyday Life

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. ~Suzanne Scott, author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

In Dislike-Minded, [Gray] makes a deeply compelling argument to stare directly into the face of an idea that we find distasteful and inappropriate, but in the name of bettering ourselves, through an entertaining, yet thoroughly complex piece of research that is indeed worthy of its name. ~Communication Design Quarterly