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.
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Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Communication in Africa: An Intersectional Perspective
Kristin Skare Orgeret
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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.
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Representations of Drag Culture
Niall Brennan
Drag may be understood as performing a gender other than one’s self-identified gender. Drag is therefore underpinned by the concept of gender performativity, or acts that naturalize constructs of gender, yet drag complicates gender performativity by imitating and parodying such “natural” performances of gender. Drag is also underpinned by camp, a sensibility combining incongruity, theatricality, and humor emanating from the 1960s gay liberation movement and more recently appropriated by heteronormative culture industries, bringing forth the need to differentiate queer (political) from gay (mainstream) camp deployment. In American popular culture, the focus of this entry, drag most closely approximates cross-dressing as a mainly humorous narrative trope involving a duplicitous cross-dresser (and knowing viewer) and a duped (and often amorous) “victim.” Cross-dressing therefore should be discerned from transvestism, which involves greater subjective investment in performing a gendered other, and from the antiquated terminology of transsexualism, which implies the desire to become a gendered other. In these differences, drag can invoke gender, race, and ethnicity with different levels of performative consequence, such that women and Black men performing drag assume historical and institutional significance differently from (white) men role-playing as women. Lastly, RuPaul’s Drag Race, the American reality/competition television series, has brought drag into global, commercial mainstream culture by establishing drag as a paradigmatic, professionalized set of performances. While Drag Race has moved queer politics into public discourse with greater visibility for LGBTQ+ peoples and communities, the reality series has circumscribed “winning” and “losing” versions of drag and, by consequence, versions of gender performativity, most notably by circumscribing the boundaries of drag between gender performativity and transgender identities.
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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.
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LGBTQ Youth Cultures and Social Media
Olu Jenzen
Research has established that access to the Internet and social media is vital for many lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer + (LGBTQ+) young people. LGBTQ+ social media youth cultures form across platforms and are shaped by a range of media affordances and vernaculars. LGBTQ+ youth use social media for self-expression, connecting with other LGBTQ+ young people, entertainment, activism, and collecting and curating information. Through a digital cultural studies approach, the essay discusses themes of LGBTQ+ youth identity work, communities and networked publics, and youth voice to explore how digital and social media imaginaries and practices produce new forms of socialites. It situates LGBTQ+ youth social media practices in relation to the affective economy and algorithmic exclusion of platforms, as well as in relation to neoliberal paradigms of gender and sexuality and homotolerance.
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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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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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Queer(ing) Popular Music Culture
Doris Leibetseder
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.
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Queer Chinese Media and Pop Culture
Jamie J. Zhao
Earlier generations of Western scholars often regarded nonheterosexual desires, identities, and intimacies in Chinese-speaking contexts as marginalized, stigmatized, and silenced, if not completely invisible, in mainstream mediascapes and pop cultural spaces. However, in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone contexts, queer practices, images, and narratives voiced, either explicitly or implicitly, by media producers, performers, and consumers or fans who do not necessarily self-identify as LGBTQ are common and even proliferating. These manifestations of queer Chinese media and pop culture are diverse and widespread in both online and offline spaces. In the new millennium, with the rise of queer Asian, queer Chinese, and queer Sinophone studies, scholars have strived to move away from Euro-American-centric and Japanese-centric queer media studies and theories when examining queer Chinese-language media and cultural productions. In particular, a growing body of scholarship (in fields such as literary studies, cinema and television studies, and fan studies) has explored intersecting ways of reconceptualizing “queerness” and “Chineseness” to examine gender, sexual, and sociocultural minority cultures in Chinese-language public and pop cultural spaces. Some of the literature has usefully traced the history of the concepts “homosexuality” and “tongzhi” (comrade) in modern and contemporary China, as well as the transcultural transmission and mutations of the meanings of the English term “queer” (ku’er) in Chinese media studies. Differentiating these concepts helps clarify the theorization of and scholarly debates surrounding queer Chinese media and pop culture in the 21st century. A number of scholars have also troubled the meaning and the essentialized identity of “Chineseness” through a queer lens while decolonizing and de-Westernizing queer Chinese media and pop cultural studies. In addition, post-2010 scholarship has paid major attention to Chinese media censorship and regulations (with a close focus on the context of mainland China/the People’s Republic of China/PRC) concerning homosexual and queer content production, circulation, and consumption and how these have been circumvented in both traditional and online media spaces.
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Queering Colonialisms and Empire
Roberta Chevrette
Scholarship engaging queer theory in tandem with the study of colonialism and empire has expanded in recent years. This interdisciplinary area of research draws from queer of color theorizing and women of color feminists who made these links during queer theory’s emergence and development in social movements and within the field of women’s and gender studies. Together, queer of color, (post)colonial, transnational feminist, and Indigenous scholars and activists have highlighted the centrality of gender and sexuality to colonial, settler colonial, and imperial processes. Among the alignments of queer and (post)colonial inquiry are their emphases on social transformation through critique and resistant praxis. In the communication discipline, scholarship queering the study of colonialism and empire has emerged in critical/cultural studies, intercultural communication, rhetoric, media studies, and performance studies. Two broad thematics defining this scholarship are (a) decolonizing queerness by identifying how queer theory, LGBTQ activism, and queer globalizations have reinforced Whiteness and empire; and (b) queering decolonization by identifying how heteropatriarchal, binary, and normative systems of sex, sexuality, and gender contribute to colonial processes of past and present.
