Queer(ing) popular music culture is a diverse field. It focuses, on the one hand, on the adjective “queer” and describes and analyzes what makes certain music queer. On the other hand, there is a strong emphasis on the verb “to queer,” on the doing, on how music culture can be made queer. Queer music is directed against not only norms concerning gender and sexuality, but also other intersectionalities correlating to the body and desire, such as disability, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and so forth. Early on, queer music culture stood for “homosexual” musicians, performances, taste, or audiences, but has now opened up toward other identities and queering practices showing the construction of identities in an interplay of dominant power mechanisms (e.g., racialization). To queer music culture is to step outside of binary normative assumptions and dichotomous thinking and to introduce more subtle in-betweens in music, which are directed against the hegemonic power structures at place in music culture and the society in general, and aim to dissolve them.
Queer musical performances and how to queer music culture depend strongly on the cultural and historical context the music is placed in. Two key concepts for the analyses are the performance and performativity (repetition of performances) of gender and sexuality and other intersectional identities. Both concepts are crucial because they form the foundation of queer theory.
In terms of music culture, this means that it is not only about how a musician performs their gender during a show, but also that this gendered performance needs to be repeated over time and in society. For example, members of the same audience could emulate the gendered performance of the musician in their own social life. Gender is performed and performative, as are other kinds of identities such as sexuality and other intersectionalities (race, class, age, dis/ability). Analyzing how a gender/sexuality/class/race performance is done and how it is repeated in everyday life (performativity) helps to find queer acts and gestures. In music culture this means to look at not only musical performances or at the appearance and behavior of the audience during the performance and in their daily lives, but also in doing music culture differently—hence “queering” music culture—and not corresponding to the heteronormative production and consumption scheme. This kind of “queering,” for example, happened in the Riot Grrrl movement when they produced their own labels and escaped the male-dominated studio productions. Other examples are their self-produced zines to spread queer-feminist knowledge or their DIY archives (see History of Queer(ing) Popular Music Culture), and the queering of the production/consumption scheme is also seen in the ballroom culture as explained in the following section. Further musical periods and genres will be examined critically for their queerness: blues and jazz in the early 20th century, glam rock in the 1960s and 1970s, Black hip-hop from the 1990s until now, and contemporary trans music.
Article
Queer(ing) Popular Music Culture
Doris Leibetseder
Article
Queer Intercultural Communication
Gust A. Yep, Ryan M. Lescure, and Sage E. Russo
Queer intercultural communication is an emerging and vibrant area of the communication discipline. The examination of this developing area of inquiry, the preliminary mapping of the field of queer intercultural communication, and its potential guidelines for future research deserve our attention. To do so, there are three sections for examination. First is an integrative view of queer intercultural communication by identifying fundamental components of its major contexts—macro, meso, and micro—and a model for understanding this research. Second is the exploration and examination of these major contexts in terms of theoretical, methodological, and political issues and concerns. Last are potential guidelines for research in queer intercultural communication.
Article
Queer Intercultural Communication: Sexuality and Intercultural Communication
Taisha McMickens, Miranda Dottie Olzman, and Bernadette Marie Calafell
Queer intercultural communication is the study of sexuality in intercultural communication. It is a critical, interdisciplinary field that explores identity (i.e., race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and class) across political, historical, transnational, and social spheres. Queer intercultural communication is grounded in using an intersectional lens and embodiment, and in understanding the way power functions both systemically and individually. Historically, intercultural communication has lagged in including intersectional works that center on queer and transgender voices, theorizings, and methodologies. Queer intercultural communication has worked to expand the voices that are being centered as a way to theorize about potential and hope. As this work continues, scholarship on sexualities must remain open to broadening discourse, theory, and methodologies that are inclusive of multiple stories that evoke queer possibilities.
Article
Queer Memory and Film
Anamarija Horvat
The relationship between queer memory and cinema is a complex one. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) histories have often been and continue to be systematically and deliberately excluded from the “official” memory narratives of nation-states, whether it be within the context of education or other commemorative projects. In order to counter this erasure, activists and artists have worked to preserve and reimagine LGBTQ pasts, creating archives, undertaking historiographic work, and, finally, reimagining queer histories in film and television. While memory remains an underutilized concept in queer studies, authors working in this nascent area of the field have nonetheless examined how the queer past is being commemorated through national, educational, and cinematic technologies of memory.
For example, Scott McKinnon’s work has focused on gay male memories of cinema-going, therein highlighting the role of audience studies for the understanding of gay memory. Like McKinnon, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed have also focused on the gay male community, emphasizing the ways in which film and television can combat the effects of conservative and homonormative politics on how the past is remembered. While Castiglia, Reed, and McKinnon’s work focuses on the memories of gay men, a monograph by the author of this article has analyzed how contemporary film and television represent LGBTQ histories, therein interrogating the role these mediums play in the creation of what can be termed specifically queer memory. Furthermore, while monographs dealing with queer memory are only beginning to appear, a number of single case studies and book chapters have focused on specific cinematic works, and have looked at how they present the LGBTQ past, particularly with respect to activist histories. Authors like Dagmar Brunow have also emphasized the link between queer memory and film preservation, exhibition and distribution, therein pointing toward the ways in which practices of curation shape one’s perception of the past. Taken together, these different approaches to queer filmic memory not only illuminate the relevance of cinema to the ways in which LGBTQ people recall and imagine the past of their own community, but also to the unfixed and continually evolving nature of queer memory itself.
Article
Queer Men’s Bodies and Digital Media
Jamie Hakim
The politics of queer men’s bodies as they relate to digital media are fraught with ambivalence. A very narrowly defined body type is considered the ideal form of beauty in queer men’s cultures in the Global North: white, masculine, able-bodied, lean, muscular, youthful, and hairless. Other body types are also considered beautiful or desirable or both, but this ideal is the norm against which these other types are defined. The politics of this ideal change across contexts. In some, they render anyone who deviates from it less-than-human. In others, the ability to safely express the desire for this body has provided the basis for networks of belonging, pleasure, and experimentation in an otherwise homophobic and transphobic world.
The various developments that digital media have undergone since the penetration of the internet into everyday life have not fundamentally altered the ambivalence of these politics. They have, however, rearticulated them anew in various ways. The exponential proliferation of networked spaces that the internet has provided for minorities to share information and to produce and consume culture has meant a number of different queer male beauty ideals have been given room to flourish. But so too have their related constraints and ambivalences. These ambivalences have intensified as the internet, once defined by amateurish user-generated content, has been captured by the interests of global capitalism. One result has been that its increasingly visual culture has become as normative and aspirational as possible in a bid to increase its profitability. However, room for critical or deconstructive body projects still persists. The hegemonic struggle over queer men’s body politics may have started long ago, but it continues, and digital media is now the terrain where much of it occurs.
Article
Queer Migration and Digital Media
Andrew DJ Shield
Migration—whether international or internal, forced or voluntary—intertwines with digital media, especially for sexual minorities and trans people who seek out platforms catering to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Online networks foster transnational flows of ideas and information, which can enable international travel. The ways that queer people interact on digital media in the 21st century have emerged not only from decades of online subcultures—such as 1990s chatrooms and profile sites—but also from predigital media cultures, such as printed personal ads in gay and lesbian journals. The internet accelerated the growth of media platforms and queer international networks, both of which continued to develop with the advent of mobile phone apps and the proliferation of social media. Online media—from blogs to hashtags to “hook-up” apps—can relate to all aspects of the migration process. Before, during, and after a move, queer migrants access online media for information about LGBTQ laws and norms or for help with the logistics of migration. When in a new country, queer migrants use online media to try to connect with locals. During these interactions, migrants might encounter forms of xenophobia, racism, and exclusion. In spite or because of these experiences, queer migrants utilize digital media to build new networks, such as queer diasporic communities aimed at social or political activities.
Article
Queer Studies and Organizational Communication
Jamie McDonald and Sean C. Kenney
As a subfield, organizational communication has been relatively slow to engage with queer theory. However, a robust literature on queer organizational scholarship has emerged over the past decade, since the 2010s, in both organizational communication and the allied field of critical management studies. Adopting a queer theoretical lens to the study of organizational communication entails queering one’s understandings of organizational life by questioning what is considered to be normal and taken for granted. Engaging with queer theory in organizational communication also implies exposing and critiquing heteronormativity in organizations, viewing difference as a constitutive feature of organizing, adopting an anti-categorical approach to difference, and understanding identity as fluid and performative.
To date, organizational scholars have mobilized queer theory to queer how gender and sexuality are conceptualized in organizational research, queer dominant understandings of leadership, queer the notion of diversity management, queer the “closet” metaphor and understandings of how individuals negotiate the disclosure of nonnormative identities at work, and queer organizational research methods. Moving forward, organizational scholars can continue to advance queer scholarship by mobilizing queer theory to highlight queer voices in empirical research, interrogating whiteness in queer organizational scholarship by centering queer of color subjectivities, and continuing to queer organizational research and queer theory by subjecting both to critical interrogation.
Article
Queer Studies in Critical and Cultural Communication
Isaac N. West
Queer studies in critical and cultural communication studies concerns itself with interrogating the symbolic and material manifestations of desires, sexualities, genders, and bodies in all manners of our lives, including public policy, everyday talk, protests and direct political actions, and media representations. Although the genealogy of this subfield often rehearses queer studies’ emergence as a point of radical rupture from previous theories and perspectives, another mapping of queer studies is possible if it is understood as an evolution of core questions at the heart of communication studies. Queer studies’ mode of inquiry generally involves a double gesture of identifying implicit and/or explicit biases of a communicative norm and promoting alternative ways of being in the world that do not comport with those norms. Indebted to and conversant with critical race, feminist, and lesbian gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, queer studies in critical and cultural communication studies occupies and contests the terrain of its own possibility in its attention to the intended and unintended consequences of privileging one set of cultural arrangements over another. Without any pure vantage point from which one may start or end a cultural analysis, communication scholars have embraced the contingencies afforded by queer studies to imagine otherwise the cultural legitimacy afforded to some bodies and not others; the necessity of sanctioning some sexual desires and not others; the intersectional affordances of sexuality, race, gender, ability, and class; more and less effective modes of dissent from the various normativities governing our behaviors and beliefs; and the necessity of memory politics and their pedagogical implications.
Article
Queer Temporalities
Dustin Goltz
The political and ideological workings of temporality—how our engagement and understanding of time is culturally constructed and assigned meaning—has garnered much attention by queer theorists inside and beyond the field of communication. Specifically, queer temporality, as an interventionist project, interrogates the assumed naturalness of straight temporality, its governing logics, and its foreclosures. Stemming from the work of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman, queer temporality calls for reconsideration of how marriage, children, generativity, and inheritance define and confine cultural expectations of maturation, responsibility, happiness, and future. Additionally, queer temporality seeks to question how time is approached and performed, examining the political elements of these understandings. In short, queer temporality pushes against heteronormativity’s framing and disciplining of time, charting more queer ways to think about history, pace, relationships, notions of success, and the linear segmentation of past/present/future.
Article
Race and Affect in Digital Media Cultures
Donya Alinejad
Media has always been central to the social production and contestation of racial and ethnic difference. The politics of representation has formed the conceptual frame for much of the seminal scholarship examining the role of media in reproducing ideologies of race. Yet, with the advancement of digitally mediated communicative spaces, emerging experiences of interactive social encounters with racial difference compound people’s spatially proximous, “offline” encounters. And the circulation of controversy, together with the changing relationship between counterpublics and mainstream media, further complicates questions of race and media. From online hate speech to hashtagged antiracism movements, ideologies of race and practices of racial and ethnic ordering and discrimination are being reproduced, rethought, and, to some extent, reinvigorated in ways that are unique to the widespread uptake of digital technologies. Race and representation bear revisiting in light of these developments.
In what has been called the “affective turn,” scholars have theorized “nonrepresentational” and affective communications as a way of explaining some of the important developments associated with digital media phenomena, such as online virality and digital attention economies. Affect has helped conceptualize the paracognitive and emotional dimensions of social life, as well as the spatial and material dynamics of mediated experiences of encounter and interaction. Through a discussion of literature at the nexus of affect, media, and race/ethnicity, this article maps and draws relations between longer-running debates on media, representation, and race and more current notions of digital affect and emotion. It suggests that the notion of representation has sustained relevance for understanding how emergent digital media forms produce ideologies of race and ethnic difference.The article also signals where the entwinement of affect and representation suggests productive directions for further understanding of race in relation to a changing range of digital-media technologies and practices.
Article
Race and Digital Discrimination
Seeta Peña Gangadharan
Race and digital discrimination is a topic of interdisciplinary interest that examines the communicative, cultural, and social dimensions of digital technologies in relation to race, racial identity, and racial inequalities, harms, or violence. Intellectual traditions in this area span vast terrain, including those that theorize identity and digitally mediated representation, those that explore social, political, and economic implications of unequal access to technological resources, and those that explore technical underpinnings of racial misidentification in digital systems. The object of inquiry thus varies from racialized interactions in digital spaces, to the nature or extent of access to high-speed broadband infrastructure, to levels of accuracy in computer automated systems. Some research orients toward policy or technical interventions to safeguard civil and human rights of individuals and groups and prevent racial discrimination in the design and use of digital technologies. Other strands of race and digital discrimination scholarship focus on diagnosing the (both recent and distant) past to excavate ways in which race itself functions as a technology.
The variety in approaches to the study of race and digital discrimination has evolved organically. Following a general concern for bias in the design, development, and use of digital technologies, scholarship in the 1990s began to center its attention on the problem of racialized discrimination in computerized, data-driven systems. In the earlier part of the 1990s, scholars writing about surveillance warned about the social, political, and economic consequences of sorting or categorizing individuals into groups. Toward the latter half of the 1990s, several scholars began scrutinizing the incorporation of specific values—and hence bias—into the computational design of technological systems, while others began looking explicitly at racialized interactions among users in virtual community and other online space. Throughout the early 2000s, scholarship—particularly in European and US contexts—race and racialization in different aspects of design, development, and use of digital technologies began to emerge. The advancement and rapid commercialization of new digital technologies—from platforms to AI—has heightened interested in race and digital discrimination alongside social movements and social upheaval in relation to problems of systemic and institutionalized racism. Scholars have also taken interest in examining the ways in which race itself functions as a technology, primarily with attention to race’s discursive power.
The study of race and digital discrimination in all its varieties will remain relevant to issues of social ordering and hierarchy. Scholarship on race and digital discrimination has been instrumental in broadening critical and cultural perspectives on technology. Its ability to expose historically and culturally specific dimensions of race and racial inequality in digital society has helped scholars question modernist assumptions of progress and universal benefit of technological development. This body of work will continue to push discussion and debate on the nature of racialized inequalities in future eras of technological innovation.
Article
Race and Ethnicity in the South Asian American Diaspora
Archana A. Pathak and Shivani Singh
Though not much has been written about the South Asian diaspora and race in the U.S., that which has been written is germinal work. [existing list here] among others are works that serve as the foundations for this essay.
As South Asia is a broad category with complex diversity that is further complicated when exploring the diaspora, it is not truly possible to write about it as a homogeneous group. To effectively explore South Asian U.S. diaspora and its relationship to race, one must examine focuses on South Asian racialization vis-à-vis U.S. laws; the South Asian diaspora’s complexities marked by class, caste, religion, region, nation, migratory generation, migrational cohort, and migratory trajectories; and the ways that they are collapsed, erased, and/or misarticulated, to shape the communities’ racial and ethnic trajectory in the United States. There are, however, connective threads among the diaspora. One such thread is the model minority narrative. This narrative is a highly racialized concept, as articulated by several scholars, including S. Bhatia & A. Ram, A. Bhatt, E. Chou & J. Feagin, S. Koshy, Lopez, Mahalingam and A. Pathak have articulated that this is a highly racialized concept. This narrative has been deployed to evade racial identification in the U.S. Black–White spectrum and the ways in which that deployment collapsed in the face of September 11, 2001, this narrative has often been deployed to evade racial identification in the U.S. Black-White race spectrum. It is important to examine how that deployment collapsed in face of September 11, 2001, which was a watershed moment that brought South Asians and Muslims under scrutiny by dominant groups, especially in terms of race. Up against that scrutiny, it is important examine the interplay of the violence against South Asians and Muslims and the violence against Black/African Americans, especially with the emergence of Black Lives Matter, as these moments illuminate how communities of color both navigate how to stand in solidarity with each other, while confronting how anti-Blackness functions within the South Asian diaspora. These conversations about race and racism in the United States are occurring in concert with conversations of casteism, anti-Dalit discrimination, Islamophobia, and rampant violence against minority groups in South Asia. South Asians are simultaneously confronting their own histories around discrimination and violence as they experience the historical trajectory of racial violence in the United States.
The South Asian diaspora is at a precipice of change regarding how it names itself in terms of race and ethnicity, how it participates in the sociopolitical landscape of the United States, and how it reckons with its own regional histories and oppressions.
Article
Race and Ethnicity in US Media Content and Effects
Dana Mastro
Research empirically investigating the influence of media exposure on issues of race and ethnicity has long documented that media use meaningfully impacts the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors of audience members. Certainly, media are only one among a number of factors that contribute to perceptions regarding (and actions toward) one’s own and other racial/ethnic groups. However, theory and empirical evidence consistently demonstrate that the manner in which racial/ethnic groups are characterized in the media can harm or benefit different groups, depending on the nature of these depictions (alongside other social and psychological determinants). Consequently, it is both practically and theoretically important to both identify how and how often different groups are portrayed across the media landscape as well as to assess the ways in which exposure to this content influences media audiences.
What quantitative content analytic studies have revealed is that there is variation in depictions of race/ethnicity in US media depending on the group, the medium, and the genre. Thus, whereas Blacks have achieved a degree of parity when it comes to the quantity of depictions on primetime U.S. television, there is variation in the quality depending on the genre. Further, the same advances have not been seen for Blacks in news, in film, and across other media forms and platforms. For Latinos, little has changed across decades when it comes to numeric representation in the media. When it comes to the quality of these portrayals, although some of the more egregious media stereotypes have faded, other long-standing media definitions of Latinos remain persistent. For other racial/ethnic groups, few images are presented. Within these infrequent images, a constrained set of characterizations often predominates, such as spiritual American Indians, tech-savvy Asian Americans, and terrorist Muslims.
Exposure to these representations has consequences. Consuming the images and messages associated with racial/ethnic groups in the media contributes to the formation, activation, and application of racial/ethnic cognitions. For racial/ethnic majority group members (i.e., whites), unfavorable media depictions can mean the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes: this can lead to outcomes ranging from unsympathetic policy positions to active or passive harming behaviors. When media characterizations are favorable, more auspicious outcomes emerge. For the racial and ethnic groups being depicted, the effects of exposure again depend on the quantity and quality of portrayals. Negative characterizations prompt shame, anger, and other undesirable emotions and lead to esteem problems. On the other hand, some research indicates that favorable characterizations can serve as a source of group pride, which boosts esteem.
Article
Race and Ethnic Stereotypes in the Media
Srividya Ramasubramanian, Emily Riewestahl, and Anthony Ramirez
There is a long history of scholarship documenting the prevalence of racial and ethnic stereotypes in media and popular culture. This body of literature demonstrates that media stereotypes have changed over time across specific racial/ethnic groups, media formats, and genres. Historically, the bulk of this research has focused on representations in the U.S. mainstream media and on representations of African Americans in popular media. In the last few decades, media scholars have also examined media stereotypes associated with Indigenous groups, Latino/a/x populations, Arabs, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. Recent work has gone beyond traditional media such as television and films to also examine other types of media content such as video games, microblogging sites such as Twitter, and media sharing sites such as YouTube. Emerging research addresses racial biases in AI, algorithms, and media technologies through computational methods and data sciences.
Despite individual variations across groups and media types, the underlying social psychological mechanisms of how, why, and under what circumstances these stereotypes influence audiences has been theorized more broadly. Cultivation, social identity theory, priming, framing, social cognitive theory, and exemplification are popular theoretical perspectives used within media stereotyping literature. Several experimental studies have examined the effects of mediated racial/ethnic stereotypes on individual users’ attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. The lion’s share of these studies has demonstrated that negative stereotypes shape majority audiences’ real-world stereotypical perceptions, social judgments, intergroup emotions, and even public policy opinions. More important, media stereotypes can have negative effects on communities of color by affecting their self-concept, self-esteem, and collective identity in adverse ways. Recent studies have also parsed out the differences between positive and negative stereotypes. They demonstrate that even so-called positive stereotypes often have harmful effects on marginalized groups.
Media scholars are increasingly interested in practical solutions to address media stereotypes. For instance, one content-based strategy has been to study the effects of counter-stereotypic portrayals that challenge stereotypes by presenting stereotype-disconfirming information. Other related measures are encouraging positive role models, implementing media literacy education, and supporting alternative media spaces that are more racially inclusive. The recent scholarship suggests that it is important to be intentional about centering social change, amplifying the voices of marginalized groups, and working toward reducing systemic racism in the media industry and research.
Article
Race and Political Communication in Brazil: The Afro-Brazilian Electorate of Salvador
Antonio José Bacelar da Silva, Adelmo dos Santos Filho, Marieli de Jesus Pereira, and Eduardo Joselito da Costa Ribeiro
Historically, Black candidates running for elected office in Brazil, a country that purports to lack racial divisions, have not been able to pitch to Black voters with a clear racial justice message. The city of Salvador (Bahia), where over 80% of the population is brown or black, is an interesting case in point. In his critique of racial liberalism, Charles Mills repeatedly argued for the importance of engaging with race and racial justice in the political field dominated by white supremacy. Only by making determined effort to deal with white dominance can we fight anti-Black sentiment in specific cultural manifestations. This is a crucial task in the struggles to correct historical racial injustices in democratic governance. For the past thirty years, Blackness and the rights of the Black population have decidedly reemerged as a political emblem throughout Brazil, with an important role in the electoral debate. However, Black candidates who use a racial appeal in their political commnication have obtained comparatively fewer votes. This has been a serious challenge in Black struggles' attempts to reduce the inequality between Blacks and non-Blacks in the electoral field. As a rule, this situation across the country has not been different, since there is no tradition of electoral support for Black politicians among the Black population (Blacks and Browns), even with a majority of demographic representation. In addition to the increased number of Black candidates, compared to the past, recent campaigns by Black candidates have worked to broaden the electoral discourse of defending and promoting social equity, rather than adopting explicit racial appeals. All this to achieve what, Charles Mills has defended as the Blackening of politics in the context of racist liberal politics.
Article
Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Industries
John Sinclair
The term cultural industries was first coined in the 1980s as a comprehensive means to understand production, distribution, and consumption in the traditional information and entertainment industries—press, radio, and television—and others such as film and recorded music. Closely related industries, such as advertising, marketing, and public relations, were also included. With the subsequent popular embrace and commercialization of the internet, especially the social media platforms, the concept was necessarily expanded to incorporate such “new” media of the digital age. The relevance of these cultural industries for racial and ethnic groups living within the nations of the developed world is significant in at least two contexts: national and transnational.
Within the frame of the nation, the issues concern the status of these groups as minorities; and in a global perspective, the groups come to be seen as members of transnational communities, with ties both to a putative nation of origin and to their counterparts in other nations. Most theoretical and research attention has focused on media representations—that is, on how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed in the content of the cultural industries’ outputs, seen both in a national context, such as the perpetuation of stereotypes in news and television series, and globally, as in film. Yet such a focus on representations tends to position minorities as passive victims of the media. Less common is research in which minorities are viewed as active agents producing their own information and entertainment, as they do, with local, national, and even transnational distribution.
Minorities’ own media can range from local community radio to globally available television channels and internet platforms serving vast diasporas, the largest of these being those of non-resident Indians (NRIs) and the Chinese-speaking world (the “Sinosphere”). Each of these provides a case in which the industrial structure of the huge home media market provides the basis for far-flung consumption in all those countries in which members of the respective ethnicities have settled. In situations in which they attain a certain critical mass, such racial and ethnic minorities form a market for the cultural industries and consumer goods industries more broadly.
Also to be taken into account is the phenomenon of racial and ethnic minorities having an impact on the cultural industries of the dominant cultures of the nations in which they dwell. The most striking case in that regard is how African American popular music made the profound cross-over from segregated radio stations and live venues to infuse the commercial mainstream of music recording and performance in the United States and, ultimately, the world. Although such creativity is valued, there remains a diversity issue about the actual participation of racial and other minorities in executive, management, and production roles in the major cultural industries.
Article
Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Racism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ideology, Communication, and Practice
Victor Shnirelman
A racist stance in contemporary Russia is rooted in the Soviet period. Yet, a favorable climate for its blossoming has emerged since the 1990s. Seemingly obsessed with a social class approach, Soviet Marxism’s attitude shifted over the last Soviet decades from social class to ethnicity, that is, from social and economic inequalities to cultural differences. Ethnic groups were viewed by both officials and scholars as well-defined entities with their original cultures and languages as well as “national characters.” They were commonly ascribed with special behavioral stereotypes including negative ones, which were perceived by the general public as inherent attributes of any ethnic person. These beliefs perfectly served the totalitarian regime established in the 1930s, which viewed social–political organization as a hierarchy of peoples–ethnoses. Whereas racial theory associated the fate of both a person and an entire people with race, this fate was mainly a function of ethnicity in the Soviet social practice. Yet, this was veiled by an official internationalism. The Soviet media espoused an anti-racist and anticolonial attitude. Notably, peoples were viewed as ethnic bodies rather than a civil society.
The collapse of censorship and promotion of freedom of speech in the very late 1980s opened a door for an explicit manifestation of xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic sentiments that were hidden earlier. A view of ethnic groups as closed entities with particular outlooks and behavioral stereotypes carved out an image of their cultural incompatibility, which engendered an idea of a natural ethnic inequality and even a “conflict of civilizations.” All these views are inherent in the contemporary cultural racism, which, in contrast to the traditional one, emphasizes culture rather than blood. Cultural racism views an ethnic culture as an inherent one—as though humans appropriate it by birth—that accompanies them unchangeably up to death. Hence, humans appear hostages of the imposed ethnic culture, who are unable to cross its strictly established borders. Adherents of this view believe that a person’s ethnic identity can reveal their mentality and behavior.
Article
Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Communication in Africa: An Intersectional Perspective
Kristin Skare Orgeret
When examining diversity in mediated spheres of communication, crucial questions to be asked would be whose stories are told and through which voices, to be relevant for the widest spectrum of a society and secure an informed citizenry. Approaching questions of access and representation in media and communication, it is valuable to allow for intersecting perspectives. Instead of the binary terms associated with power relations and oppression the intersectional model references the ability of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation (oppressions) to mutually construct one another and ensures a broader scope of relevant representations and mediated stories. Hence it is necessary to combine knowledge from several sources, such as the Négritude movement, feminism, and queer theories. An intersectional approach proves relevant when discussing African contexts where specific historical, cultural, and economic/political contexts play together and the populations are often complex and manifold, as, for example, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign and the media coverage of athlete Caster Semenya show.
Article
Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality
Patricia S. Parker, Jing Jiang, Courtney L. McCluney, and Verónica Caridad Rabelo
Difference in human experience can be parsed in a variety of ways and it is this parsing that provides the entry point to our discussion of “race,” “gender,” “class,” and “sexuality” as foci of study in the field of organizational communication. Social sorting of difference has material consequences, such as whether individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and nations have equal and equitable access to civil/participative liberties, food, clean water, health, housing, education, and meaningful work. Communication perspectives enable researchers to examine how difference is produced, sustained, and transformed through symbolic means. That is, communication organizes difference. In the field of organizational communication the communicative organizing of race, gender, class, and sexuality is examined in everyday social arrangements, such as corporate and not-for-profit organizations, communities, and other institutional contexts locally and globally. Topics of central concern in organizational communication difference studies are those related to work and the political economy of work, such as labor, conflicts between public and private domains, empowerment, and agency.
Research on race, gender, class, and sexuality as communicatively structured difference has progressed in the field of organizational communication from early top-down functionalist approaches, to bottom-up and emergent interpretive/critical/materialist methods, to poststructuralist approaches that deconstruct the very notion of “categories” of difference. More complex intersectional approaches, including queer theory and postcolonial/decolonial theory, are currently gaining traction in the field of organizational communication. These advances signal that difference studies have matured over the last decades as the field moved toward questioning and deconstructing past approaches to knowledge production while finding commensurability across diverse theoretical and research perspectives. These moves open up more possibilities to respond to societal imperatives for understanding difference.
Article
Racial Culture Wars in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore
Daniel P.S. Goh
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore are ethnically and religious diverse countries in Southeast Asia that had established postcolonial multiracial compacts to counter the legacies of colonial racism and pursued inclusive nation-building under authoritarian conditions in the early decades after independence. This contained the rise of political Islam among the majority Javanese and Malays in Indonesia and Malaysia, respectively, and secured racial harmony in Singapore despite the political and economic dominance of the Chinese majority.
Political liberalization after the Asian financial crisis and the democratization of the public sphere with the Internet have led to the decline of the multiracial compacts and the emergence of culture wars between conservatives and progressives over the nation’s values and future. Renewed Islamization pits conservative against moderate Muslims in everyday life and new media spaces while putting heavy pressure on Chinese and Christian minorities as well as the secular state in Indonesia and Malaysia. In Singapore, the spread of conservative Christianity among the Chinese and conservative Islam among the Malays pits conservatives against progressives in the growing civil society sector championing secularism and liberalization in racial, gender, and sexual discourse, with all sides using new media for political mobilization. These trends intersect with the politics of race and racism unleashed by the decline of the multiracial compacts, engendering racial culture wars mixing race and religion.
The recent pervasive spread of social media has intensified the conflicts of the racial culture wars, leading to intergroup violence, prosecution of individuals for insulting religious sensitivities, and heated accusations of racism and of religious and racial sensitivities being offended. Social media is also changing the dynamics of the racial culture wars, collapsing the boundary between the offline world of face-to-face interaction and the online world of viral realities, causing casual everyday remarks and actions to become national controversies. Efforts to promote antiracism and multiculturalism need to move into the social media space in creative and relevant ways to counter the racial culture wars.
