Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016

In this article, we present a critical rhetorical analysis of mainstream news coverage of the Soulforce Equality Ride, an annual bus tour composed of mostly queer and trans Christian students who protest Christian colleges and universities with anti-queer or anti-trans policies. We argue that much mainstream news coverage of the Equality Ride rhetorically functions to disarticulate queer and Christian identities by: marginalizing the activists, overemphasizing the activists’ arrests, and framing Christian colleges and universities as hospitable and welcoming environments for the activists. By disarticulating queer and Christian identities, the news stories discussed in this article undermine without overcoming the discursive labour of Soulforce activists who both embody and perform queer Christianity. Thus, although mainstream news coverage does not undo the articulatory work of the Soulforce activists, it does demonstrate that queer Christianity is a rhetorical achievement that can only be maintained through continuous discursive struggle.

The past decade has witnessed significant gains for gay men and lesbians in the United States, a development lauded as liberal progress and decried as an infringement on religious rights. Meanwhile, a Mormon polygamy cottage industry that addresses cultural anxieties about sexuality and religion has appeared in US media. Although these two trends may seem only slightly related, we argue that they herald the dawn of ‘post-homophobia’ as a discursive framework for incorporating the legacy of LGBTQ+ social movements. This article analyses how both Sister Wives and news coverage of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) police who can become an intelligible US citizen and on what sexual and religious grounds. Although post-homophobia makes space for alternative familial arrangements, it recentres white, middle-class, Christian heterosexuality as the rightful heirs to sexual minority politics. Under the guise of familial pluralism and religious freedom, such portrayals ultimately shore up mono/heteronormativity and the neo-Orientalism that undergirds the US War on Terrorism.

The over conspicuousness of Uganda’s homophobia in international media of the twenty-first century is highly commendable for foregrounding the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Although this medium establishes its space as an agent of human rights activism and as a record of what happened to homosexuals in Uganda, it is important to interrogate the process involved in producing it, as well as what this mediated index forecloses as it signifies the severe abuse of human rights of homosexuals in Uganda. Focusing on three filmic documentaries on Uganda’s homophobia, I argue this media hypervisibility is a global phenomenon – a transnational media collective implicated in rebranding and networking historical transnational processes, tropes and ideologies that have not only produced conditions necessary for homophobia to thrive in Uganda, but also established Uganda’s anti-homosexuality violence as the new signature of Africa’s ‘Darkness’.

Examining a selection of Young Adult (YA) novels through lenses of visibility, recognition and otherness, and looking at the historical progression of queer YA literature as documented by Michael Cart and Christine Jenkins, this article looks to better understand the (im)possibility of ‘just happening to be’ in literature for young readers. Online conversations, academic discussions and articles have called for more YA literature in which characters ‘just happen to be gay’, but such an expectation is troubled by the existence of an already well-established idea of normal, thus requiring a coming-out moment that negates a notion of just happening to be. The author seeks to trouble the connection between these expectations of characters who just happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and what is possible within the realm of fiction and written text.

This article argues that we are currently experiencing a renaissance of New Queer Cinema (NQC). The original NQC occurred in the early 1990s, which saw a wave of queer films that were successful on the mainstream international film festival circuit, at venues such as Cannes and Sundance. Queer film scholars, such as Michele Aaron and B. Ruby Rich, have argued that films like Paris is Burning (Livingston, 1991), Poison (Haynes, 1991) and Swoon (Kalin, 1992) were united by their sense of defiance. They represented the marginalized within the contemporary LGBT communities. This article looks at recent films such as Weekend (Haigh, 2011), Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013), Appropriate Behaviour (Akhavan, 2014), Pariah (Rees, 2011) and the work of Xavier Dolan as being successful queer-themed films that meet the criteria outlined by scholars of NQC. Their success will be determined by their representation in both queer and non-queer film festival circuits and beyond. They respond to the state of contemporary independent cinema and utilize film form to allow for the accessibility of their queer characters. In their own way, they are defiant against mainstream queer representations and demonstrate a resurgence of films that service a community that is in need of queer intellectual stimulation.

Reality television is rarely subversive, but occasionally a programme enters the popular culture Zeitgeist that not just contributes to the genre, but rather exposes it. Launched in 2009, Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race presents a case study on how occasionally even commercial television can serve as a type of culture jamming. This article offers a critical analysis of RuPaul’s Drag Race and argues that the typical reality competition format is both exploited and exposed as a type of culture jamming that is uniquely queer. Through interviews with queer audiences, this article also looks at how audiences understand and react to promotional realities.

ETHEREAL QUEER: TELEVISION, HISTORICITY, DESIRE, AMY VILLAREJO (2014) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 203 pp., ISBN: 9780822354956, p/bk, $23.95

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, DIRECTED BY RAWSON MARSHALL THURBER (2008) Los Angeles: Groundswell Productions

BEAT THE DEVIL, DIRECTED BY JOHN HUSTON, SCREENPLAY BY TRUMAN CAPOTE, STARRING HUMPHREY BOGART (1953) Los Angeles: Santana Pictures