Military families in the United States reflect diverse family forms. They include not only “traditional” families but also single service members, women service members, dual-career couples, service member mothers, single-parent service members, service members of color, cohabitating military service members (i.e., nonmarried couples), LGB service members, and transgender service members. However, the research primarily reflects white, heterosexual, cisgender, different sexed, married couples who are able-bodied with biological children as well as postpositivist and interpretivist perspectives; trends that parallel interpersonal and family communication studies broadly speaking. Given calls for new approaches within these areas, and in particular military family communication research, scholars should consider “queering” the study of military family communication by including individuals who identify as queer but also varying the research theoretically. Studies that bring attention to different types of military families (e.g., LGBTQ+ military families) would make significant contributions to the scholarship and make these families as well as their unique experiences visible.
Informed by calls for critical military studies and the critical interpersonal and family communication framework (CIFC), recommendations are offered for future queer military family communication inquiry. First, a brief history of queer families in the military as well as the current state of military family communication scholarship are presented. Next, the CIFC framework, discourse dependence, and relational dialectics theory are discussed as conceptual paths for engaging in critical military family communication studies.
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Queering the Study of U.S. Military Family Communication
Erin Sahlstein Parcell and Danielle C. Romo
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Queer Safe Spaces and Communication
Lital Pascar, Yossi David, Gilly Hartal, and Brandon William Epstein
Historically, organizations and individuals have (un)consciously produced safe spaces out of various backgrounds and in myriad ways. Specifically, queer safe spaces represent a significant construct within queer discourses and practices that articulate the need for physical, psychological, rhetoric, virtual, and imagined safety. In this context, safety means being protected from heteronormative and patriarchal violence that shapes the everyday lives and subjectivities of queer and LGBT+ individuals in public and private spaces. Whether these are offline, online, physical, or educational settings, queer safe spaces are defined as relational and deliberative spaces in which unsafety cannot be completely undone. Queer safe spaces then provide refuge for activism, social and personal transformation, facilitation thereof for productive spaces of dialogue, and identity construction. Even though the term “queer safe space” is commonly used, it remains undertheorized and no comprehensive understanding of queer safe spaces, their social role, or the practices involved in producing them exists. This article therefore defines queer safe spaces by encompassing the use of a critical perspective to foreground their qualities and fallacies as well as their inherent dilemmas and contradictions.
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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.
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Chinese Pink Markets
Terrie Siang-Ting Wong
Starting from the late 20th century, domestic and multinational corporations begun actively promoting their products and services to Chinese tongzhi communities at local LGBTQ events such as the ShanghaiPRIDE, Taiwan Pride Week, and the Hong Kong Pride Parade. In recent years, consumer brands are eager to market themselves as tongzhi friendly, for example, by displaying the pride colors in advertising. In the People’s Republic of China (henceforth PRC and China), businesses are offering services that exclusively serve the needs of Chinese tongzhi, such as overseas wedding packages, travel services, surrogate services, and assisting in permanent overseas migration. In the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (henceforth Hong Kong) and the Republic of China (henceforth Taiwan), the pink market features a well-established network of gay and lesbian disco clubs, bars, and bookstores. In addition to brick-and-mortar businesses, the Chinese pink market also has a strong online presence in the form of gay and lesbian dating apps. In short, the Chinese pink market includes all activities in contemporary Chinese societies that aim to profit from the needs and desires of individuals who experience same-sex attraction.
Research on the Chinese pink markets to date has primarily focused on using a political economy perspective to investigate tongzhi subject formation, specifically focusing on queer subjects as consumers. Aspects of the Chinese pink markets that have been studied include product/service offerings, profit mechanisms, and marketing messages. In contrast to the financial institutions and business owners that promote the pink economy as progress for local tongzhi communities in the form of increased visibility and improved quality of life, there is a distinct ambivalence towards the Chinese pink market amongst the scholarly community. Literature on all three Chinese pink markets—China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—trouble the notion that tongzhi visibility in the pink economy unequivocally heralds positive social change for local tongzhi subjects. Scholars writing on all three Chinese pink markets are also united in their rejection of a global queering reading of tongzhi subjectivity and subject formation.
Despite these common research trajectories, there are also divergences in the literature on each of the Chinese pink markets. For example, research on the China pink market entails a vibrant debate on what should be the “proper relationship” between tongzhi businesses, LGBTQ NGOs, and the state; these questions are of less interest in research on the Hong Kong and Taiwan pink markets. Given the uniqueness of state regulations as well as the different economic histories and policies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, future research should consider the Chinese pink market as a multi-location, multicultural, and multi-layered site of study with diverse developments in queer identity, consciousness, and politics.
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Coming Out in Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives
Yachao Li
In a heteronormative society, coming out to others, or sexual orientation disclosure, is a unique and crucial experience for many sexual minority individuals. Past theoretical models of sexual identity development often view coming out as a milestone that profoundly influences sexual minority people. Existing studies related to sexual orientation disclosure have mainly explored the processes and outcomes of people’s coming-out decisions or outness levels. However, coming out is inherently a communication behavior. The message content and processes of coming out remain understudied. Emerging studies have attempted to address the research void. Scholars have examined different types of coming-out conversations and patterns of those interactions. They also explored the contents and disclosure strategies of coming out, as well as motivations and antecedents to varying levels of sexual orientation disclosure. Results indicate that while coming-out conversations may unfold differently, explicit disclosure is the mostly used coming-out strategy. In addition, disclosure goals, coupled with personal factors such as internalized homophobia and relational factors like relational power, predict disclosure message contents (what people say) and features (how people say it), which in turn predict disclosure receivers’ reactions and disclosers’ personal and relational outcomes. Future studies should continue investigating the message contents, features, and outcomes of coming out. Researchers should also focus more on marginalized members’ coming-out experiences, and conduct longitudinal and experimental studies to understand the long-term effects of different coming-out messages and experiences.
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Cultural Productions of Queer Asia
Shinsuke Eguchi
Queer Asia, which critiques the multidimensional flows of power (e.g., globalization, market capitalism, state capitalism, and/or Western queer formation), is a process of reimagining historically specific and culturally saturated nuances of minoritized sexualities and genders in and across Asia and Asian diasporas. This process redirects attention to cultural productions of Queer Asia as disjunctive modernities. By this means, contemporary global capitalism enables a paradoxically contested space of temporality through which new geopolitical imaginaries of minoritized sexualities and genders can emerge. Consequently, Queer Asia troubles, remixes, and remaps how the logic of Whiteness that operates as a global, colonial, imperial, and capitalist power homogenizes culturally heterogeneous paradigms of minoritized sexualities and genders through LGBTQIA+ identities, discourses, and politics. Three topics—identifications and affinities, relationalities and spatialities, and media and popular culture—represent indefinite and unlimited possibilities of Queer Asia. Accordingly, examining these topics in light of the cultural productions of Queer Asia provides possible pathways to expand the current circumferences of queer studies in communication, which is known as a very White, Western, and US-American discipline.
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Gay Aging and Discourses of Future
Dustin Goltz
The understandings about age—the values and assumptions placed upon age and aging persons—mark a culturally and politically constructed discourse. For LGBTQ populations, aging is mapped with a unique set of stories, scripts, and narratives that work to frame and constrain how they are trained to see, read, and assign meanings. Coupled with scripts and myths that work to define the process and experience of LGBTQ aging—what it is to be an “older,” “younger,” or “aging” queer—is the cultural scripting of the queer future (i.e., “What’s ahead?” “What do you expect from your life?” “What is to come?”). As a communicative process and a symbolic construction, no one knows what the future is or what one’s future will be. Yet, the queer future has historically been scripted in mainstream discourses (film, literature, religion, and cultural mythology) as a space of pain, loss, and tragedy—“a harder path” equated with sadness, turmoil, and punishment. Cautionary tales of the dirty old man, the sad pathetic fool, the invisible spinster, the lesbian vampire, and the queer monster are recurring themes that work to denigrate aging queer lives and shore up the story of heteronormative correctness. This cultural script works to frame how mainstream culture understands LGBTQ populations but also frames and constrains how LGBTQ populations might view themselves, understand their future and aging bodies, and shape their investment in health, self-care, and longevity. The cultural scripts perpetuated in media and discourse, however, do not so easily line up with social science research on queer populations. Examining the meaning-making dimensions of gay aging and future offers an interdisciplinary approach that brings together sociology, gerontology, performance studies, and media criticism with the field of human communication.
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HIV/AIDS: The Queer Communication of HIV in the LGBTQ Community
Andrew R. Spieldenner and Bolivar X. Nieto
After four decades of living, organizing, and even dying in the HIV epidemic, individuals, communities, and institutions have been disrupted. The disease that would become known as HIV was first diagnosed among gay men in Los Angeles and New York in 1983. The epidemic in the United States began in a few communities—gay and bisexual men, trans people, injection drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitian immigrants—all communities already stigmatized in society. The lack of knowledge, scientific research, and effective treatment fueled a new kind of stigma focused on HIV as a disease and the assumption of HIV infection. Community organizing—especially in those groups first identified in HIV—would provide life-saving services, community centers, and advocacy before governments would respond. HIV became a global pandemic revealing vast differences in health infrastructures and access to medicines. The emergence of effective HIV treatment began a different narrative about the disease—from automatic death to addressing how to live and age with the disease. The institutionalization of the HIV industry, which includes community activists, health care clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, has been vital to firming up health services and advocacy groups. The impact of HIV on queer communication has stretched across understandings of health, community, organizations, and policies. In addition, HIV has made more visible queer practices of the body, disability, and dying in particular contrast to middle-class, hetero, White, cisgender, and able-bodied expectations.
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Jotería Studies and/in Communication
Luis M. Andrade
In recent decades, Communication scholars have drawn from and added to the subdiscipline of Jotería Studies, a relatively modern branch of gender and queer studies that draws from history, sociology, ethnic studies, and other fields. Jotería Studies provide a glimpse into the lives of Jotería, a unique group and subculture that includes Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, and mestiza/o/x noncisheteronormative and/or gender-nonconforming persons. Latina/o/x are terms that loosely refer to persons from Latin America, Chicana/o/x loosely refer to people with Mexican origins and/or part of a collective movement from the 1960s/1970s that was rooted in indigenous and/or Mexica ancestry and mythologies, and mestiza/o/x loosely refer to people that have mixed identities as Mexican, Latin American, indigenous, and/or white/Spanish. The use of x signifies gender nonconformance since the “-a” and “-o” are gendered terms. Of interest to scholars are the ways that Jotería communities survive oppressive conditions, despite the constant persecution of the subgroup by modern/colonial gender, racist, classist, ableist, and other oppressive institutions.
As Jotería Studies arose in the United States, scholars in Communication research started integrating the unique epistemologies and methodologies of the subdiscipline into their own studies in unique and fascinating ways. Communication scholars add to or draw from the myriad definitions for the term Jotería and its different variations, the histories of the subdiscipline, and Jotería Studies methodologies. As Communication and Jotería Studies converge, complement, or diverge, future directions and potential applications of Jotería Studies in Communication remain.
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Black Gay Men in Television Comedy
Cameron Lynn Brown and Alfred L. Martin Jr.
Approaches to studying Black gay men within television typically center examinations of the textual features of particular representations. In general, scholars focus on Black gayness vis-à-vis historic stereotypes, often focusing on hegemonic femininity as an analytic framework for cataloguing stereotypes of Black gay characters. Across White-/multicultural-cast sitcoms, Black-cast sitcoms, and sketch comedy, one of the difficulties associated with engaging with television and its engagement with the intersections of Blackness and gayness is that communication scholars often engage with media texts rhetorically. In that rhetorical treatment, there is often an elision of not only the specificities of television form but also the contours of genre. Thus, when examining Black gayness in television, that examination will look different depending on whether Black gayness appears on a “prestige” drama on a premium cable network or streaming platform, a sitcom with a principally Black or White cast, or a sketch comedy series.
