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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

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.
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
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The process of pathologizing grief and othering grievers is historically situated in white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and is reproduced socially. ‘Grief norms, gender norms’ explores and complicates the ways that grief and gender are co-constitutive; mediated by social norms; and reinforced through institutions like psychiatry and medicine, workplace policies, and

The process of pathologizing grief and othering grievers is historically situated in white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and is reproduced socially. ‘Grief norms, gender norms’ explores and complicates the ways that grief and gender are co-constitutive; mediated by social norms; and reinforced through institutions like psychiatry and medicine, workplace policies, and public discourses around grief which all work together to create ‘acceptable’ structures of feeling. This dissertation uses a combination of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and digital grief content across two social media sites: Instagram and TikTok in order to explore various sites of this affective social reproduction and the multi-directional impact of gender and grief when studied side by side. This project is made up of three distinct, but thematically related sections: feminine embodied grief and masking; how the Widow is socially reproduced as ‘Other’; and the intimate publics of female grief influencers on Instagram. Each of these chapters explores a different aspect of the shaping of 'acceptable' grief through valences of gendered norms - which are already raced and classed - and explores the ways that those norms socializes individuals of all genders towards expectations about how grief 'should' be experienced and expressed. Feminine embodied grief is experienced beyond linear temporality, and felt sensationally and relationally. This means that grievers experiencing this kind of feminine embodied grief more readily rely on grief masking to 'pass' in non-grieving society. In the third chapter, the experience of the Widow is the primary focus. This chapter examines the social processes that render the Widow as 'Other', socially, and polices the active grief of the Widow through processes of isolation and exclusion. Each widow in this study experienced such othering, including John, whose partner died of AIDS in the 1990s. The end of this chapter explores his experience of ambiguous widowhood. The final chapter takes a wider view and focuses on the intimate publics formed by female grief influencers on Instagram. This chapter highlights two such influencers and the ways that the discourses about grief that they employ both disrupts and reinforces traditional, Western logics about 'acceptable' grief.
ContributorsLacey, Elisabeth (Author) / Switzer, Heather (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Cacciatore, Joanne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023