Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: LGBTQ studies
- Status: Published
Description
Aside from uplifting and tearing down the mood of a young LGBTQ+ kid, journalistic media has the potential to alter the way audiences understand and react to individuals of the LGBTQ+ community. Looking at the rhetorical approaches, frameworks, and expanded narratives of news sources, this project engages with the concepts of same-sex marriage, lifestyles, bans, and children in education in order to attain an understanding of what media messages are being shared, how they are being communicated, and what the implications of such rhetoric are. Summary of the findings:
• Same-sex marriage as the win that cannot be repeated.
Infamously known as the central legal battle for the LGBTQ+ community, same-sex marriage finds itself in many political speeches, campaigns, and social commentaries. Interestingly, after being legalized through a Supreme Court decision in the United States, Same-Sex Marriage finds itself framed as the social inevitability that should not be repeated in politics or any legal shift. In other words, “the gays have won this battle, but not the war.”
• There are risks around the “LGBTQ+ lifestyle” and its careful catering to an elite minority and the mediation through bans.
The risks of the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle” date back far, with many connotations being attached to being LGBTQ+ (AIDS epidemics, etc.). In modern journalism, many media outlets portray LGBTQ+ individuals to be a tiny minority (.001% according to some) that demands the whole society to adhere to their requests. This framework portrays the LGBTQ+ community as oppressors and obsessed advocates that can never “seem to get enough” (ex: more than just marriage). The bans are framed as the neutralizing factor to the catering.
• LGBTQ+ children and topics in academic and social spaces are the extreme degree.
When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and conversations as they revolve around children, media outlets have some of the most passionate opinions about them. Often portrayed as “the line that shouldn’t be crossed,” LGBTQ+ issues, as they find themselves in schools and other spaces, are thus portrayed as bearable to a certain degree, never completely. Claims of indoctrination are also presented prominently even when institutional efforts are to protect LGBTQ+ kids.
• Same-sex marriage as the win that cannot be repeated.
Infamously known as the central legal battle for the LGBTQ+ community, same-sex marriage finds itself in many political speeches, campaigns, and social commentaries. Interestingly, after being legalized through a Supreme Court decision in the United States, Same-Sex Marriage finds itself framed as the social inevitability that should not be repeated in politics or any legal shift. In other words, “the gays have won this battle, but not the war.”
• There are risks around the “LGBTQ+ lifestyle” and its careful catering to an elite minority and the mediation through bans.
The risks of the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle” date back far, with many connotations being attached to being LGBTQ+ (AIDS epidemics, etc.). In modern journalism, many media outlets portray LGBTQ+ individuals to be a tiny minority (.001% according to some) that demands the whole society to adhere to their requests. This framework portrays the LGBTQ+ community as oppressors and obsessed advocates that can never “seem to get enough” (ex: more than just marriage). The bans are framed as the neutralizing factor to the catering.
• LGBTQ+ children and topics in academic and social spaces are the extreme degree.
When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and conversations as they revolve around children, media outlets have some of the most passionate opinions about them. Often portrayed as “the line that shouldn’t be crossed,” LGBTQ+ issues, as they find themselves in schools and other spaces, are thus portrayed as bearable to a certain degree, never completely. Claims of indoctrination are also presented prominently even when institutional efforts are to protect LGBTQ+ kids.
ContributorsNieto Calderon, Ramon Antonio (Author) / Himberg, Julia (Thesis director) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
There is currently a proliferation of images of transgender youth in popular discourse, many of which reflect the threat to capitalist heteronormativity that transgender young people pose to contemporary U.S. society. This veritable explosion in media visibility of transgender youth must be critically examined. This dissertation explores media economies of transgender youth visibility by examining media and self-represented narratives by and about transgender young people in contemporary U.S. popular discourse to uncover where, and how, certain young transgender bodies become endowed with value in the service of the neoliberal multicultural U.S. nation-state. As normative transgender youth become increasingly visible as signifiers of the progress of the tolerant U.S. nation, transgender youth who are positioned further from the intelligible field of U.S. citizenship are erased.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
ContributorsReinke, Rachel Anne (Author) / Switzer, Heather D. (Thesis advisor) / Aizura, Aren (Committee member) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation project examines the cultural labor of the drag queen in the United States (US). I explore how the drag queen can be understood as a heuristic to understand the stakes and limits of belonging and exceptionalism. Inclusion in our social and national belonging in the US allows for legibility and safety, however, when exceptional or token figures become the path towards achieving belonging, it can leave out those who are unable to conform, which are often the most vulnerable folks. I argue that attending to the drag queen’s trajectory, we can trace the ways that multiply-marginalized bodies navigate attempts to include, subsume, and erase their existence by the nation-state while simultaneously celebrating and consuming them in the realm of media and consumer culture. In the first chapter I introduce the project, the context and the stakes involved. Chapter two examines representations of drag queens in films to unpack how these representations have layered over time for American audiences, and positions these films as necessary building blocks for queer semiosis for viewers to return to and engage with. Chapter three analyzes RuPaul and RuPaul’s Drag Race to outline RuPaul labor as an exceptional subject, focusing on his investment in homonormative politics and labor supporting homonationalist projects. Chapter four centers questions of trans* identity and race, specifically Blackness to analyze how Drag Race renders certain bodies and performances legitimate and legible, constructing proper drag citizens. Chapter five utilizes ethnographic methods to center local drag communities, focusing on The Rock and drag performers in Phoenix, Arizona to analyze how performers navigate shifting media discourses of drag and construct a queer performance space all their own.
ContributorsCollier, Cassandra M (Author) / Anderson, Lisa M. (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Marlon M (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Much of the literature around coming out narratives is concerned with monosexual coming out experiences. While some recent literature has expanded to include discussions of non-monosexual experiences, there is a lack of research surrounding the coming out narratives of non-monosexual individuals specifically. This thesis aims to investigate such coming out narratives. The coming out narrative genre as a whole has been examined by several researchers across several years, highlighting a variety of monosexual coming out experiences. This project aims to utilize past research of coming out narratives to build a framework of common themes within the genre and employ this framework as a basis of comparison between monosexual and non-monosexual coming out narratives. Since the experiences of non-monosexual members of the queer community are not being looked at within the coming out narrative genre, it is crucial to highlight non-monosexual experiences in narrative research such as this. Data for this study comes from several publicly available online coming out narratives from YouTube, with the final total equaling 12 narratives. This study finds that there are distinct differences between the coming out narratives of monosexual and non-monosexual narratives and, as such, provides evidence of unique lived experiences for non-monosexual individuals when coming out.
ContributorsHill, Taylor (Author) / Prior, Matthew (Thesis advisor) / SturtzSreetharan, Cindi (Thesis advisor) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022