Media/queered

The relationship between gays and lesbians and the mainstream media has changed dramatically in the last 15 years. Once either excluded from or vilified in mainstream media, the gay and lesbian community has become a “legitimate” market niche in the fragmented world of cable narrowcasting and cyberspace, and openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) media producers are transforming media workplaces. Meanwhile, queer-themed TV shows and movies seem to hold some caché among certain straight audience segments. The growing subfield of queer media studies is beginning to examine the dynamics behind and consequences of this new gay-inclusive media landscape, and Media/Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents provides a broad sample of such work. The chapters, drawn from a seminar held at the University of Illinois at Chicago over the course of the 2004 spring semester, vary widely in topic, methodology, and tone. Edward Alwood, for example, describes how gay activists in the 1950s and 1960s were able to reach a relatively mass audience through independent radio and television public affairs programming. Katherine Sender interviews marketing professionals involved in targeting gay and lesbian consumers to explore the complex negotiations that are made between their professional and sexual identifications. David Phillips places queer theory and surveillance studies in dialogue in an effort to give Internet scholars a framework for analyzing the dynamic relationship between identity categories and technological and regulatory structures. And Bruce Henderson compares Mel Gibson’s 1994 film, The Man Without a Face, to the original 1973 novel to assess the representational politics of the film’s de-gayed narrative. Some articles provide overviews more valuable for a broad readership, while the intellectual focus and language of others will likely better suit an academic audience

Cyberspace · Homosexuality · Lesbian · Mainstream · Mass media · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · The Internet · Transgender · Gender Studies · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Media and Politics