Queering Gender, Art & Culture in an Age of Media Convergence (original) (raw)
Related papers
Queering New Media Art: looking back, looking forward
Media-N, 2018
On February, 23 2018, during the National College of Art Association Conference in Los Angeles, Richard Rhinehart, Liss LaFleur and I co-chaired a panel titled “Queering New Media Art and Asking Questions about Nothing”. This panel was presented within the New Media Caucus’ Media Lounge day of events. Based on my presentation that day, this essay will use my personal experiences with the New Media Caucus and academia in the last twenty years to explore the relationships amongst art, new media, and queerness, expose some problems with these terms, and potentially provide one of many ways out of perpetuating their continuous entanglement.
International Journal of Communication, 2008
That this review has warrant to exist at all is something of a cause for celebration: insofar that a journal wants to review three books on queer media; that at least three scholarly collections on queer media have been published in a year; and recent years have seen production of queer media with enough plenitude to justify the three collections. However, as several contributors to these volumes suggest, this historical moment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans media visibility is not without issues. Certainly it is a testament to the influence of queer theory, not to mention feminist and critical race theories, that the proliferation of representations of sexual and gender variance is not uncritically embraced. Yet queer theory’s gangly maturation is reflected in the varied quality of these books. To indulge in a gaudy flourish of metaphor, the institutionalization of queer theory runs on tracks nearby the explosion of LGBT media hypervisibility, both eyeing each other warily from lounge-car windows as their trains depart from Marginalization Station to . . . somewhere else. These three books represent different paths charted through media queerscapes, a trio of analytical Baedekers to our moment of queer überexposure. Useful, yes, necessary, certainly, but I cannot help but find it sadly telling when one describes itself as “not radical” and another pleads that “queer is still a force to be reckoned with.”
Queer Race: a Decolonial Approach to the Study of Gender and Media
This course aims to develop a decolonial approach to the study of gender and media, one which explores the reiterative representation of non-normative subjects as less human ‘other’ by means of concomitantly employing sexuality and race as epistemic categories which connote ‘deviance’. Understood as signifying everything other than the ‘norm’ in any given society, the term ‘queer’ is thus employed to sheds light on the multiple ways of being and belonging in the world which are otherwise denied intelligibility. By examining selected case studies from the USA, China and Australia, this course chiefly illustrates how condensed modes of scientific and aesthetic knowledge production have denied positive significance to queer ways of being and belonging by means of representing them as either backward or irrational, pathological or bestial. Conversely, cases of ‘moral panics’ from these same geopolitical realities will be studied to show how alleged transgressions of the norms yielded by the gendered patriarchal imperative to be ‘straight’ uphold forms of social division and domination along the line of race, ethnicity and national identity. As this course will demonstrate, public debates on minority groups’ sexuality bespeak of dominant groups’ investment into the hetero-patriarchal paradigm (i.e. the monogamous couple and nuclear family) not just because this stands as a measure of normality but also, and more importantly, because it works as the mark itself of civilisation.
This essay explores human bodies as producing and being produced by mediating and mediated technologies. Drawing from media theorists who are attentive to the body, I engage a queer lens—a queer body—to explore the 1925 silent film, Madame Behave, in order to elicit the transformative possibilities that film can have on audience bodies and desires. I consider the time period within which Madame Behave was produced to focus on the practice of montage as a political tactic that challenges normative social constructs. Considering how LGBTQI bodies have experienced surveillance and regulation for centuries, I argue that engaging film—moving images—as affective border-crossing terrains can pique desires beyond the constraints of the frame to introduce multiply-situated and dynamic subjects. I argue that such a dynamic multiplicity can move viewers to renegotiate their relationships to filmic subjects, to the theater space, and to the screen. The queering at play functions to shift and multiply the focus from the optic to the haptic in order to include more sensual practices so that the body and all of its interconnected parts are working as participants in film. KEYWORDS: mediated/mediating technologies; haptic visuality; queer; embodiment; affect; multiply-situated
The common account is that, until recently, queer representation was characterised by invisibility, which itself reflected silence, phobia, shame and the closet, reinforcing the marginality and negativity of queer experience. But this is only part of the story. This chapter provides an introduction to three contexts in which, for those who could detect them, queer sexualities appeared quite visibly in modern Western European and Anglophone representation. The first of these, nineteenth-century sexology, offered elaborate descriptions of persons we would today recognise as queer. Many of the most enduring characteristics of modern representations of queerness can be traced back to this historical moment. The second context, studio-era Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1960s, furnished those nineteenth-century ideas with an aural, visual and narrative language that vividly brought queerness to life, projected it onto the cinema screen and distributed it widely. In spite of the taboos and industrial prohibitions against the representation of ‘sex perversion’ during this period, Classical Hollywood, a chief myth manufacturer of the twentieth century, forged enduring stereotypes. These two ‘pre-visibility’ moments have been especially powerful influences not only on Western representations of queer sexualities, but across the globe. In the current ‘post-closet’ age of increased and diversified queer visibility, in which media production and consumption is dispersed, segmented and often transnational, the legacies of these earlier moments are nonetheless apparent. The closing section of this chapter provides some observations on contemporary representations of queer sexualities and concludes by reflecting on the question: where are we, now that we are so prolifically represented?
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016
As we transition into a cybersocial world of infinite 'glocal' intersections, much of our perceptions about beauty and body have come to be regulated by the reductive standards of the popular global media, mediated mostly in the US, that seek to gratify specific heterosexist, hypermasculine/ hyperfeminine notions about body image. To create stringently specified standards for men and women is to automatically confine the body into the duality of the masculine and the feminine, thus repressing the self-expression of alternate sexualities and genders. Situating our discourse within the critical paradigm gender performativity, this paper will navigate the processes involved in the visualization and performance of the queer body in Hollywood and American show business and chart the evolution of LGBTQ representations in media. Amidst the pervasive politico-cultural preoccupation with the body, can gender performance through queer bodies truly reach their full potential and self-expressivity, specifically in societies that impose normative regulations and restrictive labels on standards of beauty? Where, then, is the queer, transgendered body situated within the predominantly masculine culture of visual narcissism and cisgender body hysteria? The de-objectification of traditional body images in media, thus, becomes a vital agenda in queer studies. This paper will further interrogate the possibility of a postgender representational mode that can subvert the traditional binaries of the body and accommodate sexual/gender alterities within, what Habermas calls, the "media-steered subsystems".