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.
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Queer Migration and Digital Media
Andrew DJ Shield
Article
Queer People’s Communication With Families of Origin
Cimmiaron Alvarez and Kristina M. Scharp
Communicating with one’s family of origin requires considerable effort for queer people (e.g., LGBTQ+; queer is used as an encompassing term to include all gender and sexual identities that are not both cis and heterosexual). Queer people must decide if they want to disclose their gender and/or sexual identities, to whom they want to disclose, how they want to communicate, and anticipate the ways their family members may react. Immediate family members, such as parents and siblings, typically play an important role in queer people’s lives and are consequently some of the first people to whom queer people talk about their gender and/or sexual identities. Yet not all these disclosures are met with positive reactions from family members. Research suggests that queer people perceive their families’ reactions range from complete acceptance to total rejection. Thus, it is often the case that queer people must cope with multiple sources of stigma. From the family members’ perspective, parents and siblings also report having varied reactions to the queer person’s initial disclosure that require them to engage in sense-making. Thus, in addition to the communicative burden of queer people, their families may also have to share in the communicative work to communicate with people outside the family or (re)construct their family identity. All this communicative labor simultaneously reflects and constructs larger overarching ideologies surrounding gender and sexuality.
Article
Kuaer Theory
Ryan M. Lescure
Although queer theory was profoundly influenced by the womanist feminism of the 1980s and its emphasis on the ways in which intersectionality affects lived experience, popular queer theorizing generally lost this as it became more popular in academic contexts during the 1990s. Generally, the popular queer scholarship that was being published in the 1990s did not pay much attention to the diversity of queer experiences and subjectivities. Because many popular queer theorists at the time were White, affluent, cisgender, and based in the United States, their scholarship, while anti-heteronormative, tended to reflect their privileged racial, socioeconomic, gendered, national, and cultural standpoints. Subsequently, this scholarship tended to construct a singular, definitive, and universal queer subject position as White, affluent, cisgender, and based in the United States.
Wenshu Lee’s kuaer theory is an example of one of the first significant theoretical challenges to queer theory’s problematic universalizing tendencies. Initially advanced in 2003, kuaer theory is influenced by postcolonialism, womanism, and E. Patrick Johnson’s quare studies, which Lee characterizes as having advanced queer theory in a similar way that womanism did for feminism. Finding inspiration in the writing of Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa, kuaer theory applies womanist concepts to expand on the foundation built by Johnson’s quare studies, which calls for queer theorists to focus on the particularity and diversity of sexualities as well as the ways in which sexualities relate to and are shaped by race, gender, socioeconomic class, and culture. Kuaer theory agrees with and advocates for all of these things, but it notably adds a transnational perspective and emphasizes that queer theorists must also highlight the relationships between sexualities and nation, nationality, power, and culture at the local, national, and transnational levels. Kuaer theory notes that queerness, queer activism, and queer knowledges are not exclusive to the United States or to the Western world. Because of this, kuaer theory encourages queer theorists to emphasize the local and intersectional particularities of people’s sexual experiences and subjectivities while simultaneously being critical of the ways in which queer theory itself often reproduces imperialism and cultural hierarchies at the global level.
Kuaer theory continues to be influential among queer theorists, especially for its critique of queer theory’s often implicit reproduction of hierarchies. Like quare studies, kuaer theory is often cited by queer theorists who challenge queer theory’s continued general inattention to intersectionality and to the multiplicity of queer subjectivities. Finally, kuaer theory’s emphasis on transnational and transcultural perspectives as well as its criticism of queer theory’s imperialistic consequences has proven to be a substantial influence on critical intercultural communication and the emerging field of queer intercultural communication.
Article
Disidentification
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.
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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.
Article
Queer Comics
KC Councilor
Queer comics have been a staple of LGBTQIA+ culture, from independent and underground comics beginning in the late 1960s to web comics in the current digital age. Comics are a uniquely queer art form, as comics scholar Hillary Chute has argued, consistently marginalized in the art world. Queer comics have also principally been produced by and for queer audiences, with mainstream recognition not being their primary goal. This marginalization has, in some sense, been a benefit, as these comics have not been captive to the pressures of capitalist aesthetics. This makes queer comics a rich historical archive for understanding queer life and queer communities. Collections of queer comics from the late 1960s and onward have recently been published, making large archives of work widely available. The Queer Zine Archive Project online also houses a large volume of underground and self-published material.
There are some affordances inherent to the medium of comics which make it a distinctly powerful medium for queer self-expression and representation. In comics, the passage of time is represented through the space of the page, which makes complex expressions of queer temporality possible. The form is also quite intimate, particularly hand-drawn comics, which retain their original form rather than being translated into type. The reader plays a significant role in the construction of meaning in comics, as what happens between panels in the “gutter” (and is thus not pictured) is as much a part of the story as what is pictured within the panels. In addition to the value of reading queer stories in comic form, incorporating making comics and other creative practices into pedagogy is a powerful way to engage in queer worldmaking.
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 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.
Article
Social Support and LGBTQ+ Individuals and Communities
Áine M. Humble
Social support is an important resource that can help reduce stressful situations or buffer the impact of stressful situations for LGBTQ+ individuals. Many definitions of social support exist, but researchers often focus on emotional, informational, or practical support provided to a person. Social support is communicated by people close to a person as well as through institutional practices and policies and in communities. General trends around the world show increasing support for sexual-minority individuals—and to a lesser extent gender-minority individuals—but there are many countries still hostile to LGBTQ+ individuals. A number of individual-level and country-level variables are related to positive attitudes toward LGBTQ+ individuals.
Social support is operationalized in many ways in quantitative research on LGBTQ+ individuals, usually used as a predictor of health outcomes. Some quantitative measures look at general social support, whereas others study social support within particular settings, or very specific ways in which support is communicated. Measures of social support specific to LGBTQ+ populations have been developed, such as The Gay and Lesbian Acceptance and Support Index. Research also looks at support at the community level—the broader community (often referred to as community climate) as well as LGBTQ+ communities. Qualitative research is valuable for exploring what social support means to various groups and for understanding how different social identities interact with each other.
Many factors influence expectations and experiences of social support; thus, research should be contextualized. Rather than studying LGBTQ+ as a group, subgroups can be studied, along with intersectional research. When this is carried out, unique findings can appear. For example, lesbians in adulthood can include ex-partners and ex-lovers in their social support networks, and Black lesbian parents describe complex ways in which they interact with their families and religious communities. Different life course changes such as same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ parenting provide opportunities to explore if and how social support is communicated to LGBTQ+ individuals. Who support is received from is also a key area of interest—families of origin, chosen families, friends, work colleagues, LGBTQ+ communities and broader communities, and so on. Later-life circumstances of LGBTQ+ individuals need focus, as these individuals often have smaller social support networks due to lifetime discrimination and cumulative life course experiences. Political situations involving elevated anti-gay rhetoric are also relevant contexts in which to study how social support can ameliorate minority stress. Research is starting to look at social support in formal organizations, many of which have developed guidelines for developing inclusive environments for sexual- and gender-minority groups.
Article
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.
Article
LGBTQ+ Workers
Elizabeth K. Eger, Morgan L. Litrenta, Sierra R. Kane, and Lace D. Senegal
LGBTQ+ people face unique organizational communication dilemmas at work. In the United States, LGBTQ+ workers communicate their gender, sexuality, and other intersecting identities and experiences through complex interactions with coworkers, supervisors, customers, publics, organizations, and institutions. They also utilize specific communication strategies to navigate exclusionary policies and practices and organize for intersectional justice. Five central research themes for LGBTQ+ workers in the current literature include (a) workplace discrimination, (b) disclosure at work, (c) navigating interpersonal relationships at work, (d) inclusive and exclusive policies, and (e) intersectional work experiences and organizing.
First, the lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and violence in organizations, including from coworkers, managers, and customers, present a plethora of challenges from organizational entry to exit. LGBTQ+ workers face high levels of unemployment and underemployment and experience frequent microaggressions. Queer, trans, and intersex workers also experience prevalent workplace discrimination, uncertainty, and systemic barriers when attempting to use fluctuating national and state laws for workplace protections. Second, such discrimination creates unique risks that LGBTQ+ workers must navigate when it comes to disclosing their identities at work. The complexities of workplace disclosure of LGBTQ+ identities and experiences become apparent through closeting, passing, and outing communication. These three communication strategies for queer, trans, and intersex survival are often read as secretive or deceptive by heterosexual or cisgender coworkers and managers. Closeting communication may also involve concealing information about personal and family relationships at work and other identity intersections. Third, LGBTQ+ people must navigate workplace relationships, particularly with heterosexual and/or cisgender coworkers and managers and in organizations that assume cisheteronormativity. Fourth, policies structure LGBTQ+ workers’ lives, including both the positive impacts of inclusive policies and discrimination and violence via exclusionary policies. Fifth and finally, intersectionality is crucial to theorize when examining LGBTQ+ workers’ communication. It is not enough to just investigate sexuality or gender identity, as they are interwoven with race, class, disability, religion, nationality, age, and more. Important exemplars also showcase how intersectional organizing can create transformative and empowering experiences for LGBTQ+ people. By centering LGBTQ+ workers, this article examines their unique and complex organizational communication needs and proposes future research.
Article
Homonationalism’s Viral Travels
Hana Masri
First defined by Jasbir Puar in 2007, homonationalism refers to the collusion between LGBTQ subjects or rights discourses and nationalism. This definition contrasts with previous transnational queer and feminist analyses. Homonationalism instead describes a form of national homonormativity and sexual exceptionalism in which some LGBTQ subjects are complicit with, rather than excluded from, nationalism and imperialism. This recognition and incorporation into the nation is predicated on the nation’s production and disposal of populations of racial and sexual others, particularly through Orientalist constructions of undesirable Muslim and Arab sexualities and genders. The literature on homonationalism thus explains how certain queer and trans subjectivities are mobilized in service of modernity’s racial, capitalist, imperial, and colonial projects, such as the U.S. “War on Terror.”
In addition to this original definition, the framework of homonationalism has been expanded to refer to the way LGBTQ rights have become a barometer by which to evaluate nations’ and populations’ right to sovereignty at the global political scale. This includes, for example, discourses that use notions of sexually progressive multiculturalism to justify foreign intervention.
Scholars and activists alike have applied the framework of homonationalism widely, to the degree that the homonationalism has been referred to as a viral concept. Much of this uptake focuses on “pinkwashing,” a manifestation of homonationalism that refers to a nation-state’s promotion of its “gay-friendly” record in order to obscure other types of political violence, including colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. At the same time, homonationalism’s extensive uptake has led to a proliferation of perspectives that complicate, challenge, and expand the concept’s usage; though the conditions it names emerge across contexts, its instantiations vary based on historical and geopolitical context. These differences in application inform critiques of the concept, which tend to focus on the overextension and universalization of the concept at the expense of its clarity, context specificity, and utility for activism seeking to contest homonationalist policies and practices.
Article
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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