R Cover
Biographic Data
| ID | 17552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Cover |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Cover |
| SIGNATURE | COVER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8815-2126 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 244 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Minorities, Advocates and Digital Harms
This paper reports findings from a study of the wellbeing, support and remedy guidance needs among minority communities subject to digital harms. The study developed and tested six guidance documents specifically for minority populations: online abuse and harassment; disinformation; scams; doxxing, deepfakes and how to report digital harms. Organizations which provide support services and/or advocate for minority groups—CALD and migrant communiti…
The generationalism of digital wellbeing
As social media’s prevalence in everyday life continues to grow, so too do concerns about how to facilitate digital wellbeing. In response to the recognized increase in digital harms, governments and researchers have deployed digital wellbeing as a mechanism to describe self-care practices. This has had the effect of representing the digital ecology as a setting of substantial risk. This article critiques some of the ways in which digital wellbei…
Infrastructures of interdependency in queer mobility and migration to South Australia
This article examines how informal care practices and infrastructures shape the settlement and long-term belonging of gender- and sexuality-diverse people who migrated internally to Adelaide, South Australia, from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Challenging dominant narratives that frame queer mobility as oriented towards major metropolitan centres and driven by individualised opportunity, the article foregrounds care as a collective, relational, a…
Unearthing extraction
Media infrastructures sustain the evolving cultures of extraction. Their unfolding propels the quest for raw materials across the bounty of the natural and social world, from the excavations of coal and gold to wind and server farming, data and cryptocurrency mining and varied other exploitative approaches to resource-taking and value-making. To highlight how the strategic development of media infrastructures aligns the drive for extraction aroun…
Reporting online abuse to platforms
Evidence suggests that the rate of reporting abuse, harassment and problematic content to platforms is substantially low. This article assesses the extent to which platform interfaces may contribute to discouraging the use of reporting as a remedy to online harms. Using a walkthrough method, we analyse reporting interfaces for the extent to which they may contribute to a lack of trust in reporting. The study found that reporting interfaces (1) di…
Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies
Emergent identities
Viewing place
This article investigates how viewers born in the 1970s and 1980s recall Australian film and television LGBTQ+ themes, characters and narratives they viewed while they were growing up. Aspects of place and space were centred in these accounts, from memories of watching a shared television in the domestic family setting to the physical artefact of the video tape. Participants emphasised the theme of mobility toward the city and a rural/urban disti…
AI generation of rage bait
With the increasing use of generative AI tools to enhance engagement on social media platforms, we are beginning to see AI-generated content contributing to digital harms, including particularly online abuse. Drawing on digital ethnography case studies, this article investigates the emergence of AI-generated ‘rage bait’ content, a severe form of trolling attempting to invoke users into adversity and outrage. AI-generated rage bait differs from ot…
Restricting young people from digital platforms in Australia
The ethics of welcome in place
Digital harms and penalties
The Australian regulatory framework that relates to the management of contemporary online harms emphasises the role of platforms in managing and policing infractions and has legislated civil penalties for their non-compliance. Although importantly shifting responsibility towards previously-exempt platforms, this approach contrasts with earlier regulatory options in which individual perpetrators were subject to penalties for harms they cause to ot…
Protecting public figures online
Public figures are subject to higher rates of online abuse than other users in part because many digital platforms have significantly higher thresholds for intervening in cases of public figure abuse. Internationally, this higher rate of abuse has led to substantial impacts on public figures' wellbeing and withdrawal from public life. This article presents findings from a study of platform policies to understand how platforms and policy stakehold…
Platform policy and online abuse
Public figures are subject to high rates of online abuse than everyday users. This article presents findings from a study on digital platforms’ higher threshold for protecting public figures in contrast to everyday users. Presenting a summary of extant literature on the experience, impact and harms of online abuse of public figures, we analyse 31 platform terms of service and related policies to understand the extent to which platforms openly dif…
The violence of contesting non-binary, trans and diverse gender identities
LGBTQ+ collecting institutions
This paper presents findings from an Australian Research Council Linkage Project investigating LGBTQ+ memory, migration and collecting institution practices. It analyses the ways in which minority LGBTQ+ collecting institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) have professionalized in recent decades and adopted the use of strategic management documents such as strategic plans, mission statements and annual reports. Analysing documents…
Making Queer content visible
A concept of visibility frames much scholarship and public writing on LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, and underpins diversity reporting and inclusivity measurement. Although visibility is often depicted as a social good, there is a growing critical interest in asking if there are different kinds of visibility, and how these might be differentially valued. This paper reports insights gained from interviews with Australian stakeholder…
Entertaining information
This paper discusses findings from a commissioned evaluation of an Australian government COVID-19 health campaign that utilised third-party influencers to increase the reach of health communication messages among culturally and linguistically diverse young people. Although the campaign was successful, interviews with select influencers and target audience members indicated that the 'serious' tone of the health messaging was less effective and les…
Apprehending digital hostility and online abuse
The experience of digital platforms in the 2020s is often marked by a lack of ethical care: increasing rates of online abuse, trolling and adversarial speech in many cases lead to harmful outcomes including suicidality. Underlying the ineffectiveness of extant regulation and platform policy has been a significant focus on users as individuals rather than as participants in a digital ecology with ethical responsibilities for the care of the other.…
Conveying Covid-19 Health Information with Cald Social Media Influencers
During the COVID-19 global pandemic, young people and culturally and linguistically diverse populations (CALD) were underserved by non-tailored government health messaging. Social media influencers offer a potentially cost-effective and scalable form of health communication for reaching young CALD populations. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of an influencer’s identity authenticity for reaching CALD youth, or how that authenti…
Identity in the Covid-19 Years
Identity in the COVID-19 Years explores the how the COVID-19 pandemic has been represented in media, communication and culture, and the role these changes have played in renewing how we understand identity, engage in social belonging and relate ethically to each other and the world. This book explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on how we perform our identities, engage in social belonging, and communicate with each othe…
Digital hostility, subjectivity and ethics
The experience of hostility, hate speech and adversarial behaviour in everyday online spaces has increased substantially in recent years, with known health and mental health outcomes for users. This paper argues that due to the ‘massified’ form of contemporary hostility experienced in the internet ‘pile on’, a new framework for understanding and remedying hostility is required. This paper draws on Judith Butler’s theories of identity to present a…
Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights
Global anniversaries and cultural rupture
This paper analyses the role of anniversaries of global events or crises to understand how their practice of memorial storytelling manages and governs cultural narratives of crises in ways that obscure more productive approaches to resistance.Drawing on the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022) as a call for new cultural approaches to anniversaries, this paper investigates their productive role in new imaginar…
Minorities, Advocates and Digital Harms
This paper reports findings from a study of the wellbeing, support and remedy guidance needs among minority communities subject to digital harms. The study developed and tested six guidance documents specifically for minority populations: online abuse and harassment; disinformation; scams; doxxing, deepfakes and how to report digital harms. Organizations which provide support services and/or advocate for minority groups—CALD and migrant communiti…
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies brings together over 175 critical essays to redraw the boundaries of this rapidly evolving and dynamically complex area. Global in scope, wide-ranging in its inclusion of topics, and edited by an international team of the world's best scholars, this is the definitive resource for the field. Includes more than 175 essays written by over 200 leading and emerging scholars from across the globe Arranged…
Audience inter/active
This article examines the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms - historical and contemporary - can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as mythically ‘finished’ products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire …
Restricted modes
In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms’ responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which th…
The Naked Subject
This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from bo…
Conditions of Living
Despite the increasing social tolerance accorded nonheterosexual persons in many Western countries, queer youth suicide rates remain high. This opens the need to question not only how broad social conditions continue to make lives unlivable for many queer youth but whether queer community formations and representations that emerge within a tolerance framework provide supportive environments for fostering youth resilience. This article presents a …
Heterosexuality and Race in the Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey
This article argues that race and class are central aspects of sexual citizenship in a Australia. It does so by investigating representations of heterosexuality that were produced and circulated during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Engaging with feminist and critical race theorists, we position same-sex marriage as not exceptional but part of a wider distribution of sexual citizenship within Australia's ongoing settler colonial histor…
Object(ive)s of desire
In light of recent debates around same-sex marriage, this article examines the way in which the cultural concept of the coupled relationship is culturally produced. By showing how coupledom is constituted in a dichotomy against casual sex in contemporary discourses of sexuality, it is argued that same-sex marriage claims uphold a narrow view of social-sexual relations. The article goes on to explore how this dichotomy is articulated in a range of…
Bodies, movements and desires
Gay and lesbian discourse has a markedly complex relationship with the contemporary understanding of stereotypes as symbolic and connotative codes fixing an image to a set of prescribed behaviours.In its political and advocacy modes it frequently denounces the stereotyping of lesbians and gay men, arguing that stereotyping is a reduction of unique individuality and diversity into wrongful notions of group behaviour.According to Richard Dyer, a st…
Vulnerability and the discourse of ‘forgotten people’
Contemporary populist political rhetoric often makes use of a concept of a ‘forgotten people’ or a ‘silent majority’, who are constructed as a subset of population and often utilized as an electoral base by populist leaders, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The concept emerged in the Twentieth Century and has undergone substantial re-configuration alongside other cultural emerges of the past fifty ye…
Queer generations
This article reflects on the concept of ‘queer generations’ as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts ‘queer’ and ‘generations’ in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main the…
Critical suicide studies, between methodology and ethics
Critical Suicide Studies developed across the 2010s as a means to theorise and intervene in suicide from perspectives alternative to the 'mainstream' of suicidology.What the critical approach understands as 'mainstream' or 'traditional' suicidology can be characterised as originating in two key ways: a North American ego-psychological framework that posited suicide as an individual act resulting from poor mental health (Shneidman, 1985), and a Eu…
Progress in question
In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and i…
Queer Youth Resilience
Introduction Discourses of queer youth suicide regularly represent non-heterosexual young men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen; Marshall; Driver 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the internet (Smith & Gray 74; Wexler et al. 566; Hillier & Harrison; Bryson & McIntosh). I…
Material/queer theory
This paper examines the return to an anticapitalist approach within lesbian/gay and queer antihomophobic activist struggles. Arguing that notions of queer identity are governed by a triumvirate of approaches which take into account economic structuration variously, I make a case for a stronger link between marxian and queer theory approaches by discussing the ways in which queer performative identities are constituted within a matrix of coherence…
Some Cunts
This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are governed by motifs of ownership--who has the 'right' to make the 'right' kind of signification, whose significatory powers can be considered to be dominant, and what sorts of ethical considerations can be applied to the granting of meaning and implication. By examining contemporary political graffiti, issues of globalisation and debates over the figurati…
Apprehending digital hostility and online abuse
The experience of digital platforms in the 2020s is often marked by a lack of ethical care: increasing rates of online abuse, trolling and adversarial speech in many cases lead to harmful outcomes including suicidality. Underlying the ineffectiveness of extant regulation and platform policy has been a significant focus on users as individuals rather than as participants in a digital ecology with ethical responsibilities for the care of the other.…
Deepfake culture
Deepfakes draw on algorithmic powers, machine learning and modern capabilities for processing information to allow users to insert the face, body, and visual information about a real-world person into a false setting, producing highly convincing videos that appear to be a ‘true’ record. Emerging on the scene in the past half-decade, deepfake applications have become an object of widespread social concern and calls for regulation, ostensibly to pr…
Digital hostility
Digital hostility has verifiably increased over the past decades among adult users of social media and online forums. Both an extension of, and different from, cyberbullying, digital hostility has become a framing factor in the reduction of quality of public debate at a social level and, at an individual level, has been cited as responsible for withdrawal, disconnection and negative impact on health and mental health. This paper draws on digital …
Marriage Equality
Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diver…
Memorialising queer community
Following the development of online sites dedicated to the preservation of individuals' photographic and textual memorialisation of cities, a number of archiving sites using Facebook have been developed that cater to the interactive and co-creative practice of memorialising LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) city-based communities, events and public spaces (e.g. Lost Gay Perth and Lost Gay Melbourne). Such minority community pr…
Sex and ambivalence
In popular and academic discourse, sexual identity is regularly linked to a concept of sexual engagement with others. Recent thinking on sexuality has, however, opened up the possibility of understanding ‘identity’ in ways different from sexual behaviour. This paper considers data from the Australian Queer Generations project, in which findings indicate that young Australian participants express complex ambivalences towards sex and sexual express…
Undoing attitudes
In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitud…
Competing contestations of the norm
This article investigates competing ways in which challenges to normativity are produced in young people’s discourse on sexual identity in online settings particularly in terms of the production of ‘contested belonging.’ It is interested in how some competing discourses that emerge are taken up through having or being given ‘voice’ while other alternative frameworks of identity are not. The article is interested in juxtaposing emerging challenges…
Visual Heteromasculinities Online
This article presents a critical account of heterosexual men's online sex webcam performances in terms of the capacity for challenging or disrupting heteronormativity and opening the field for the representation of a greater range of heterosexualities. Using a narrative analysis of selected examples of heterosexual performances on visual sex sites, it is argued that a deeply felt attachment to heterosexual identity coexists in complex, critical, …
Making Queer content visible
A concept of visibility frames much scholarship and public writing on LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, and underpins diversity reporting and inclusivity measurement. Although visibility is often depicted as a social good, there is a growing critical interest in asking if there are different kinds of visibility, and how these might be differentially valued. This paper reports insights gained from interviews with Australian stakeholder…
Some Cunts
This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are governed by motifs of ownership--who has the 'right' to make the 'right' kind of signification, whose significatory powers can be considered to be dominant, and what sorts of ethical considerations can be applied to the granting of meaning and implication. By examining contemporary political graffiti, issues of globalisation and debates over the figurati…
Re-Sourcing Queer Subjectivities
With most critical discussions of lesbian/gay identities and media focusing on mass-circulation representation, visibility and stereotyping, the lesbian/gay community small press has remained neglected, particularly as it plays a role in the constitution of the performative lesbian/gay subject. This paper brings queer theory and communication theories closer together by focusing on both the reading positions inculcating subjective performativity …
The Naked Subject
This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from bo…
New media theory
New media forms open many possibilities not only for the development of “new media theory”, but also for re-conceiving previous media relationships. Digital, non-linear and interactive media forms such as electronic games allow increased possibilities for participation in the construction of narratives, although such media are also produced with various constraints over the extent of participation. This paper examines how new, emerging theories o…
Bodies, movements and desires
Gay and lesbian discourse has a markedly complex relationship with the contemporary understanding of stereotypes as symbolic and connotative codes fixing an image to a set of prescribed behaviours.In its political and advocacy modes it frequently denounces the stereotyping of lesbians and gay men, arguing that stereotyping is a reduction of unique individuality and diversity into wrongful notions of group behaviour.According to Richard Dyer, a st…
Material/queer theory
This paper examines the return to an anticapitalist approach within lesbian/gay and queer antihomophobic activist struggles. Arguing that notions of queer identity are governed by a triumvirate of approaches which take into account economic structuration variously, I make a case for a stronger link between marxian and queer theory approaches by discussing the ways in which queer performative identities are constituted within a matrix of coherence…
Digital Addiction
This paper examines the ways in which a concept of 'digital addiction' is produced in academic discourse, news media and contemporary popular culture. Digital addiction is used here as a collective term for the phenomena of internet/online addiction and addiction to electronic games. By showing how these are produced individually and together in the popular imaginary, the paper explores several of the ways in which the digital is likened to chemi…
Not to Be Toyed With’
When asked what story he would never tell on Buffy, Angel or Firefly, series creator Joss Whedon answered with ‘“Wow, smoking pot is wrong, I see that now!”’ (Whedon, 2003). Many North American tel
DVD Time
DVD use and the reported purchase of DVD players have grown markedly in recent years, and in 2002 Lyall Johnson claimed this was growing at the rate of 80 per cent annually. As a digital narrative format, it provides a means of viewing televisual products alternative to broadcast traditions and, significantly, beyond the 'timeshifted' video cassette in its analogue and serial format. From a perspective which considers the aesthetics of television…
Audience inter/active
This article examines the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms - historical and contemporary - can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as mythically ‘finished’ products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire …
Object(ive)s of desire
In light of recent debates around same-sex marriage, this article examines the way in which the cultural concept of the coupled relationship is culturally produced. By showing how coupledom is constituted in a dichotomy against casual sex in contemporary discourses of sexuality, it is argued that same-sex marriage claims uphold a narrow view of social-sexual relations. The article goes on to explore how this dichotomy is articulated in a range of…
Biopolitics and the Baby Bonus
This paper explores some recent issues impacting on Australia's public imagination of a national identity. Utilizing an analysis that draws on Foucault's concept of biopolitics as a mechanism of governance, the paper examines how notions of Australian national identity develop through distinct but discursively-related fields: (1) policies and public discourse on the Australian Commonwealth Government's promotion of fertility through the Baby Bonu…
Community print media
This article presents findings from a small-scale pilot study of community (print) media in South Australia serving minority ethnic and migrant communities. The study undertook to determine the extent to which community press publishers, editors, staff and others involved in production held views about the relationship between local ethnic print news media and communities, with particular regard to the ways in which communities are understood in …
Mediating Suicide
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies brings together over 175 critical essays to redraw the boundaries of this rapidly evolving and dynamically complex area. Global in scope, wide-ranging in its inclusion of topics, and edited by an international team of the world's best scholars, this is the definitive resource for the field. Includes more than 175 essays written by over 200 leading and emerging scholars from across the globe Arranged…
Transforming Scandal
Between May 2010 and March 2011, a sex scandal involving members of the St Kilda Football Club, other AFL stakeholders and a young woman was played out in both traditional media and online sites. The scandal involved claims of pregnancy to a player, the online distribution of nude and sexual images of several footballers, and an affair with a much older player-manager. This article examines the series of incidents comprising the scandal with a vi…
Suspended ethics and the team
Men's elite team sports in Australia have recently been the subject of considerable public scrutiny subsequent to a series of instances of group sexual violence against women. Both scholarship and policy work have noted how homosocial institutions such as sporting teams have a greater likelihood of gender-based violence and have proposed the need for more ethical relations. This article explores some of the ways in which group sexual assault can …
Conditions of Living
Despite the increasing social tolerance accorded nonheterosexual persons in many Western countries, queer youth suicide rates remain high. This opens the need to question not only how broad social conditions continue to make lives unlivable for many queer youth but whether queer community formations and representations that emerge within a tolerance framework provide supportive environments for fostering youth resilience. This article presents a …
Undoing attitudes
In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitud…
Queer Youth Resilience
Introduction Discourses of queer youth suicide regularly represent non-heterosexual young men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen; Marshall; Driver 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the internet (Smith & Gray 74; Wexler et al. 566; Hillier & Harrison; Bryson & McIntosh). I…
Mobility, belonging and bodies
The figure of the temporary migrant is one which puts into question the forms through which public sphere sensibilities on mobility, belonging and sociality are forged. This article argues that the temporary migrant can be a site of anxiety resulting from the perceived complexity of flows of mobility in a trans- and/or post-national context in which migration is not necessarily always permanent, social mobility does not occur within the site of t…
Identity Offline and Online
Visual Heteromasculinities Online
This article presents a critical account of heterosexual men's online sex webcam performances in terms of the capacity for challenging or disrupting heteronormativity and opening the field for the representation of a greater range of heterosexualities. Using a narrative analysis of selected examples of heterosexual performances on visual sex sites, it is argued that a deeply felt attachment to heterosexual identity coexists in complex, critical, …
Suicides of the Marginalised
Suicides among marginalised groups are one of the few occasions in which self-harm and suicide are framed as having cultural, social, environental, historical or structural causes. Suicidology, psychology and public discourse typically understand suicide causality to be grounded in individualised psychic pain and pathology, disavowing the social, cultural, environmental and linguistic contexts. However, public discourse on suicides of 'marginalis…
Progress in question
In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and i…
Sociology (70 works) · Political science (54 works) · Gender Studies (44 works) · Law (38 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Art (28 works) · Gender Studies (28 works) · Politics (28 works) · Aesthetics (25 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (24 works)