Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2017

Oppression and hostility is still evident towards LGBT athletes within modern sport organizations, where hegemonic masculinities contribute to the opposition to LGBT members of the athletic community. Given the homophobia that continues to impact sport, the aim of this study is to ascertain, through the lens of grounded theory, what discourses are used to address the coming out of professional athletes in online news sites and the hegemonic power that is reflected through that discourse. Through the analysis, four themes emerged as significant. One particular theme stood out as the most substantial: the locker room seen as a space where masculinity is negotiated, suggesting the possibility that many masculinities exist within that milieu. The study’s findings highlight the urgency that is needed in order to make sport a safe and non-hostile space for all athletes.

In the 2010 book The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made the claim that ‘users have one identity’. Through a critical theoretical analysis of a series of case studies of people being outed by Facebook, this article argues that ‘one identity’ and Facebook’s use of algorithms to drive profits are fundamentally incongruous with prevailing intersectional scholarship. The case studies articulate a theoretical framework that ties intersectional conceptions of gender and sexuality to social media and privacy. By aligning intersectional and privacy theories, the article argues that ‘one identity’ constitutes a violation of privacy norms as conceptualized by Helen Nissenbaum’s framework of contextual integrity. The article concludes that Facebook is anathema to the privacy and real life experiences of its users, which cannot fit into static categories and which change over time, mitigating the potential for the performance of fluid and intersectional identities.

As trans people become more visible, form stronger communities, and continue to find new platforms to tell trans stories, our conversations surrounding sex and gender expand, become more nuanced, and we are able to articulate new ways of understanding and embodying gender. This article begins with a discussion of three autobiographical texts by trans-identified men: Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man (2004), Matt Kailey’s Just Add Hormones (2005) and Max Wolf Valerio’s The Testosterone Files (2006). I argue that these texts all belong to a ‘second wave’ of trans activism and advocacy that was emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time that the authors began socially and physically transitioning. This ‘second wave’ of trans activists moved away from dominant heteronormative narratives of trans identity of the ‘first wave’ that relied on respectability politics, but continued to build on the idea of a clear, cohesive and enduring sense of gender identity. I then move on to interrogate the idea of a ‘third wave’ of trans discourse through an analysis of two blogs maintained on Tumblr.com by authors who originally identified as binary trans men, but whose experiences with moments of ‘unintelligibility’ in social and discursive contexts lead them to question the idea of a clear, cohesive and enduring sense of gender identity.

The year 2014 has been dubbed the ‘trans tipping point’, a new era of acceptance towards trans and gender-nonconforming identities. In addition, in recent years, children’s animated film has seen an influx of characters and storylines that appear to celebrate gender diversity. Using inductive and deductive thematic analysis, we examine the gendered messages in top-grossing children’s animated films from 2012 to 2015. Drawing from our analysis, we argue that such alleged gender diversity applies only to a narrow subset of characters in children’s animated film – and these same characters also often function to reinforce oppressive ideas about gender, race and sexuality. Ultimately, despite the visibility of gender diverse characters in and outside children’s film, we caution against premature celebrations that would regard such visibility as progress.

This article focuses on North American gay comics, especially the ‘gay ghetto’ subgenre, and on the alternative gay comics that have been created in response to the genre’s conventions. Gay comics have received little scholarly attention and this article attempts to begin redressing this balance, as well as turning attention to the contrasts between different genres within the field of gay comics. Gay ghetto comics and cartoons construct a dominant gay habitus, representing the gay community as relatively stable and unified, while the alternative gay male comics discussed critique the dominant gay habitus and construct instead an alternative gay – or ‘queer’ – habitus. The article focuses on the work on Robert Kirby, an influential cartoonist and editor of gay comics anthologies, and particularly on his story ‘Private Club’, in order to explore some of the typical themes and concerns of alternative gay ghetto comics.

This article examines how Showtime’s Queer as Folk uses the space of the kitchen as a way of staging a negotiation and, at times, contestation of the normative image of gay domesticity that was emerging in American television during the early to mid-2000s. Through a close analysis of the programme’s representation of queer architecture, food preparation and misuse of kitchens, this discussion highlights the ways in which Queer as Folk complicates the assimilationist perspective of gay kitchens as a heteronormative, wholesome, family-oriented space. This article first traces the ways in which the kitchen functions as a locus of gay identity and domesticity in mainstream American television and then proceeds to unpack the ways in which kitchens in Queer as Folk comply with or challenge dominant narratives of gay domesticity. It will be shown that the programme’s use of kitchens pushes viewers to recognize the ways in which different models of gay home life are negotiated through spatial means.

QUEER YOUTH AND MEDIA CULTURES, CHRISTOPHER PULLEN (ED.) (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 296 pp., ISBN: 9781137383549, h/bk, $100.00, ISBN: 9781349480562, p/bk, $95.00

TRANSPARENT, JILL SOLOWAY (2014–PRESENT), SANTA MONICA: AMAZON STUDIOS

GAMING IN COLOR, PHILIP JONES (2015), UNITED STATES: DEVOLVER DIGITAL FILMS

QUEER REPRESENTATION, VISIBILITY, AND RACE IN AMERICAN FILM AND TELEVISION: SCREENING THE CLOSET, MELANIE E. S. KOHNEN (2016) New York: Routledge, 182 pp., ISBN: 9780415894142, h/bk, $160.00

HUNG LIKE A FLY, WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY MARGA GÓMEZ (1997) Recorded Live at Josie’s Cabaret, San Francisco Distributed by West Lake Village, CA: Uproar Entertainment