Digital Drag: Queer Potentiality in the Age of Digital Television

RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture, 2017

O’Halloran argues that RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) – as a reality television show which thrives on conflict as entertainment – provides a unique site of analysis for the concept of queer community. This is despite its distance from the now consolidated academic sense of queer as “anti-normative”. Challenging the assumption that there is a “common essence” among queer people, RPDR shows that difference (along axes of class, race, size and more) and antagonism can result in politically productive encounters with others. O’Halloran looks crucially at the example of the “Female or She-Male” controversy on Season Six as an example of how RPDR’s online, affective communities (e.g. via Facebook) can enable productive contestation and conversation around key issues such as transphobia and trans representation on RPDR.

Convergence , 2024

This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when studying the politics of sexual representation in contemporary television programming. Using a corpus of four LGBTQ+-themed programs that represent queer and trans sexualities and HIV/AIDS, the paper argues that funding mechanisms play a constitutive role in determining the kinds of sexual diversity that can circulate via streaming technologies. Comparing and contrasting content created for SVODs, BVODs, and video-sharing platforms, the essay considers the impact that the economic diversity of television's multiplatform ecology has on the sexual diversity of content that circulates there. Purposefully combining an analysis of online TV with social media entertainment, the essay casts 'streaming television' as a wide, varied category whose relationship to questions of representational diversity is more complex than existing scholarship on these issues sometimes suggests. Situating its analysis in the literatures of platform studies, media industry studies, and television's politics of LGBTQ + representation, the essay shifts the purview of 'diversity' away from representations of identity and toward diversities of funding mechanisms and diversities of sexual acts and practices. The essay argues for the necessity of textual analysis to properly articulate the relationship between platforms and the politics of sexual representation in the content that they circulate.

Logo, a U.S. network that launched in 2005 as an explicitly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) channel, has been implementing a rebranding strategy that it labels gaystreaming. Drawing from Logo's internal documents and interviews with Logo staff, I situate the development, discourses, and effects of gaystreaming against LGBT content elsewhere, shifts toward multiplatform programming, and LGBT mainstreaming. Alongside industrial changes in media production, the goal of attracting heterosexual women, imagined to share particular affinities with gay men, has been the key to driving Logo toward taste-and style-based reality programming. Although Logo's Web sites currently offer broader content than the channel, overall gaystreaming has remarginalized queer subjects whom Logo's earlier programming partially addressed, comprising a homonormativity predicated on discourses of consumerism, progress, and integration.

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2018

Since the turn of the millennium, queer characters and storylines on US television have received increasing and public recognition. LGBT characters play more significant parts in programs directed at a mainstream audience; series from Queer As Folk to Looking put a spotlight on queer communities; while "niche" shows like Rick & Steve specifically target gay viewers. At the same time, LGBT representation continues to be restricted both by producers' concerns about audience reactions and social norms and stereotypes regarding acceptable forms of queerness. Edited by Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Queer TV in the 21 st Century brings together twelve essays about LGBT visibility on US television after the millennial turn. The collection defines queer television primarily in terms of representation and audiences, as opposed to more theoretical approaches that consider television's queer aesthetics or temporality. 1 Inevitably, it overlaps in focus somewhat with other anthologies on contemporary queer screen culture, 2 but it also includes contributions on shows that have rarely been discussed in recent scholarship. The result is an interesting mix of examples across distribution platforms (broadcast, cable, premium, and pay-on-demand) and genres (sitcom, drama, reality TV, and infotainment) that tells the story of queer televisual representation over the past two decades. Organized chronologically, the articles offer thematic intersections. Several essays demonstrate how representation of LGBT themes and characters in series for general audiences often oscillates

Information, Communication & Society, 2020

This article intends to contribute to a novel research area-the construction of critical transgender narratives on Youtubeexamining how some Spanish trans youtubers shift the focus from the 'fleshy metamorphosis' [Barnett, J. T. (2015). Fleshy metamorphosis: Temporal pedagogies of transsexual counterpublics. In L. G. Spencer & J. C. Capuzza (Eds.), Transgender communication studies: Histories, trends, and trajectories (pp. 155-172). Lexington], to becoming trans 'media-bodies' [Raun,T. (2010). Screen-births: Exploring the transformative potential intrans video blogs on YouTube. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 7(2), 113-130]. We examine the channel Lost in Transition, by Spanish transgender advocate Elsa Ruiz Cómica. In contrast to other trans youtubers, who focus mostly on 'passing' as the ultimate trans achievement, Elsa creates alternative narratives. We will argue that her practices emerge as a new political subject, disobedient to the legal and biomedical framing of transgenderism as a disorder. Our main conclusion is that Youtube is a site of 'digital trans activism' [Raun, T. (2016). Out online. Trans self-representation and community building on YouTube. Routledge.], where non-binary youtubers can perform the nonconforming subaltern body [

In Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age, F. Hollis Griffin offers an analysis of LGBTQ media creation, circulation, and consumption in the broader context of neoliberal capitalism, with a special focus on the processes of commercialization and, to a lesser extent, individualization, and nationalism. It is a detailed, culturally and historically informed account that covers a diverse range of media developments spanning from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s in the United States. The book includes a discussion of advertiser-supported local gay and lesbian magazines in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco (chapter 1); happy-ending directto-video movies of the second wave of the New Queer Cinema (chapter 2); LGBTQ identity-based cable TV channels Logo, Here TV, and Q Television Network (chapter 3); and network TV sitcoms built around a gay or lesbian main character (chapter 4), as well as gay and lesbian dating apps together with marketing discourses and usergenerated content related to the apps (chapter 5). Yet, given that only one of the chapters is exclusively devoted to the analysis of digital media (other chapters include only brief reflections on the topic), the subtitle of the book, Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age, is arguably somewhat misleading.

Within communities formed by queer women of color, the performance of masculinity and femininity (or butch/femme) becomes incredibly important when thinking about the role of visibility/invisibility in the construction of a sexual identity. While femme lesbians are many times hidden in plain sight, the gender performance of masculine presenting women is conflated with a queer identity of some sort. In this sense, many lesbians who perform a masculine gender presentation must negotiate a politics of recognition when deciding to deal with risking their safety by performing an identity that is visually recognized as queer. While these issues of safety and threat tend to become salient on the street, these issues also re-occur in mediated spaces in which the performance of gender takes on different forms of visibility. For this project, I analyze the performance of gender as it is articulated and responded to within queer of color web series and commenting communities. In both of these spaces, the discourse around the construction of masculinity and femininity speaks to the decisions that these women make (and the responses to those decisions from community outsiders and insiders) when it comes to the performance of race, gender, and sexuality. By performing a discourse and reception analysis of the content and community that encompass two queer of color web series on YouTube (Between Women and The Peculiar Kind), I think about the ways in which a politics of recognition plays out in discourse around and the representation of queer identity in digital media and online spaces.

Ada a Journal of Gender New Media and Technology, 2014

The SF Golden Girls have been producing live performances of The Golden Girls episodes in drag since 2005, creating an iterative form of fan productivity that consistently resonates with San Francisco audiences. This essay considers the cultural significance of the SF Golden Girls’ live performances as a case study in how queer participatory culture can change the meanings of a residual media object. I argue that the participatory engagement between the audience members and the drag queen performers make The Golden Girls a collective and visible site of queer television heritage, and that producing The Golden Girls Live in drag also offers different logics of representation and engagement than television. These live performances are significant because The Golden Girls has become a symbol of television heritage, and performing episodes in drag explicitly queers a television program that has become a site of cultural memory and historical meaning. Additionally, these performances are staged in December as The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes, which restructures television heritage to create a new continuity between the past and present and construct a queered Christmas ritual that is familiar and imbued with historical consciousness.

Cinema Journal, 2014