Queer Media Temporalities.pdf

2013

This paper is an intersectional feminist analysis of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. It firstly examines it as a reality television format and demonstrate how it operates as a pastiche of the reality television genre and queer culture. It then analyses the construction and performance of racialised gender by examining the contestants and events on the show. Finally, it proves how the show’s representation positively impacts the LGBT community and contributes to feminist discourse around transgender issues. In doing so, this thesis argues that the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race creates valuable representation for the LGBT community, and promotes female empowerment, but that this progressiveness is undercut by a privileging of white femininity.

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.

Celebrity Studies, 2020

Following its move to VH1 in 2017, Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) was positioned to capture a larger audience than ever before, boasting the strongest field of competitors in its ‘herstory’. This article maps the career trajectory of Season 9 winner Sasha Velour to determine how she distinguishes herself from previous champions. While winners of RPDR are expected to possess the virtues of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, Velour’s articulation of fame post RPDR has been informed by charisma and uniqueness, coupled with a consistent performance of an ‘authentic’ persona. Since winning Season 9, Velour has been an outspoken advocate for the transgender community and the need to diversify drag, in addition to drawing attention from the mainstream fashion industry for her art and style. Drawing inspiration from RPDR’s virtues, I argue that the performance of charisma and uniqueness are essential to interpreting the success of the drag celebrity persona as part of the ‘fame cycle’ beyond RPDR. Velour’s star image is distinctive for centring art and activist performance as vital to her public persona across transmedia platforms, allowing for the promotion of positive change for the LGBTQIA community worldwide.

At a time when America is increasingly regarded as a “graying nation,” but aging LGBTQ persons often remain marginalized in discourses of aging, the TV series Transparent takes portrayals of queer aging in new directions. Transparent not only redresses this invisibility of older LGBTQ persons, but also questions heteronormative, linear understandings of life courses. The show queers the cultural constructs of aging and temporality in significant ways: by emphasizing the complex intersections of aging, sexuality, and gender identity embodied by the show’s aging transgender protagonist; by foregrounding the ways in which various members of the Pfefferman family (especially Maura’s daughter Ali) challenge linear trajectories of the life course; and by introducing, in Season 2, a narrative queering of time that interweaves the past with the present.

This paper explores the turns that LGBTQ activism has taken since the emergence of digital television and its convergence with other digital and new media outlets. As a case study, this paper takes an episode from the popular television series RuPaul's Drag Race. The episode in question was regarded as being transphobic by a large group of online LGBTQ activists. The debates that followed the airing of this episode and which were mostly staged on digital and online media, point towards a transformation of queer activism to which traditional media outlets have yet to respond.

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 6(2), pp. 96-117, 2013

To start this dialogue, guest editor Karma R. Chávez posed a series of general and unbinding questions to participants about the meanings of queer theory and its relationship with questions of culture. The dialogue unfolded over the course of three weeks in an online forum and covered several important themes. First, participants engaged questions surrounding the meaning of queer, and its relationship to different cultural and linguistic contexts, especially with regard to diaspora, settler colonialism, and postcoloniality. Second, participants considered the interplay between queer and trans theories, which led to considerations of the body, memory, and homonormativity. Third, after the “coming out” of the U.S. actress Jodie Foster, participants had a lively discussion about the politics of visibility, responsibility, and accountability for different LGBTQ subjects. The dialogue concluded with final meditations.

Miguel Hernández Communication Journal , 2024

This study explores the implications of media visibility in the evolution of public opinion about trans people in the Spanish context. We focus on the socio-cultural impact of the TV series 'Veneno' (2020, Atresmedia) in relation to the breaking down of the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1993) on trans issues. Based on Esteban Muñoz's (2020) theoretical approach to queer temporalities, we conducted a 'close reading' analysis (Brummett 2018) of the diachronic narrative of the television series. Through a linear observation of the past, present and future of media representation and its relationship with the real-life situation of trans people, an evolution is detected from ostracism and fetishization in the past, to a future shift towards greater normalization and livable life forms. But the results also reveal a spiral of meanings that interconnect with different temporalities and contexts, reflecting the non-linear nature of queer temporalities. Additionally, the paper discusses how this series, due to its media impact, has contributed to socio-political public debate on the need to address the rights of trans people in modern-day Spanish society. Finally, its impact not only relies on improving trans visibility by portraying trans narratives, but we also discuss how the series is playing an important role in queering the media industry itself, ensuring trans people to work both in front and behind the cameras.

Wyatt, Justin. “The Life Cycle of Transparent: Envisioning Queer Space, Time and Business Practice.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 16, Winter 2018, pp. 80–96. www. alphavillejournal.com/Issue16/ArticleWyatt.pdf., 2018

Abstract: The queerness of the series Transparent (2014–2019), both textually and extratextually, offers a paradigm for understanding just how flexible and revolutionary digital TV can be. Queerness becomes a mechanism freeing both the television text and the business practices supporting it. The result is a radically reformed life cycle for both the television text and the attendant commercial structures. Launched in 2014 from Amazon Studios, Jill Soloway’s Transparent suggests that narrative ruptures in the life cycle are as significant as the technological or business shifts. Unlike the traditional US broadcast/cable model, the economics of the show merely reflect Amazon Prime’s desire to be both a means of delivery and an original content provider. In this way, original series add value to the company and hopefully the stock price. Business practice, methods and revenue are reformed, allowing for television “product” that need not adhere to the traditional models of commercial television. Narratively, the radical way through which Soloway connects the two disparate stories in Season Two requires viewers to set aside their expectations on cause and effect in television storytelling. Time, space, and causation are also altered within Soloway’s text. Certainly, there are specific links in terms of the characters’ lineage, but the creators of Transparent also seemingly want us to consider “life cycle” in a much different and queerer way than is usual for television programming.

2019

This conference aims at finding and comparing multiple paths in order to examine television shows through a queer lens. In a ​ Cinema Journal article published in 2014, Lynne Joyrich underlines the paradox at the heart of the expression " queer television. " On the one hand, queer can be defined as a challenge to and disruption of hegemonic forms and representations that go beyond binary distinctions within sexuality and gender, and is attached to multiple and transitioning identities). On the other, television, as a mass medium, is extremely coded and linked to capitalist forms of power, having therefore troubles conveying queer themes and sensibilities. Indeed, " queer " and " television " can, at first glance, appear to be incompatible. For example, production studies highlight the need for TV series to avoid cancellation and get renewed, season after season, for as long as possible. Queer theory subverts this neoliberal type of productivity, making it possible to explore the link between the illusion of success and the lack of a future (Edelman 2005) for certain cultural objects. As Jack Halberstam points out, television seriality could also be a queer territory because of its multiple, ever-transforming nature: following this path, we should investigate the forms, technologies, and fan practices that could potentially open up new, innovative, and even radical ways of thinking about television. By choosing to focus on fiction television seriality (other genres could be considered as well), we want to understand how queer theory can help determine certain specificities and contradictions in television, an ever-evolving medium that has been searching for an identity since its inception. One field of enquiry is the presence of new LGBTQ+ protagonists in a context marked by an abundance of available titles and the fragmentation of TV markets. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the increased role of new representations of minorities has been a way for networks and, recently, online distribution services, to compete (Doty 2010). Moreover, the multiplication of online platforms such as VOD (following cable channels such as HBO) are challenging the rigid hegemonic television industry (from ABC to CBS, Fox or NBC). This transformation is creating new ways to perceive seriality and its productions, is enabling the creations of queer, trans, non-binary subjects, and is making room for alternative ways of storytelling. Furthermore, the participation of fans in the construction of queer identity has, for certain series, garnered unprecedented visibility, on social networks and fan spaces online (Lothian et al. 2007, Stein 2015, Busse and Lothian 2017). Often, these practices balance out the lack of minority representation on the small screen and contribute in shaping alternative models of creativity. We propose, therefore, to examine the relevance of a queer axis as it relates to television by analyzing queer protagonists, forms, platforms, fan interpretations and rewritings which put