Lgbtqs Media And Culture In Europe

Media matter, particularly to social minorities like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Rather than one homogenised idea of the ‘global gay’, what we find today is a range of historically and culturally specific expressions of gender and sexuality, which are reflected and explored across an ever increasing range of media outlets. This collection zooms in on a number of facets of this kaleidoscope, each chapter discussing the intersection of a particular European context and a particular medium with its affordances and limitations. While traditional mass media form the starting point of this book, the primary focus is on digital media such as blogs, social media and online dating sites. All contributions are based on recent, original empirical research, using a plethora of qualitative methods to offer a holistic view on the ways media matter to particular LGBTQ individuals and communities. Together the chapters cover the diversity of European countries and regions, of LGBTQ communities, and of the contemporary media ecology. Resisting the urge to extrapolate, they argue for specificity, contextualisation and a provincialized understanding of the connections between media, culture, gender and sexuality.

Media matter, particularly to social minorities like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Rather than one homogenised idea of the ‘global gay’, what we find today is a range of historically and culturally specific expressions of gender and sexuality, which are reflected and explored across an ever increasing range of media outlets. This collection zooms in on a number of facets of this kaleidoscope, each chapter discussing the intersection of a particular European context and a particular medium with its affordances and limitations. While traditional mass media form the starting point of this book, the primary focus is on digital media such as blogs, social media and online dating sites. All contributions are based on recent, original empirical research, using a plethora of qualitative methods to offer a holistic view on the ways media matter to particular LGBTQ individuals and communities. Together the chapters cover the diversity of European countries and regions, of LGBTQ communities, and of the contemporary media ecology. Resisting the urge to extrapolate, they argue for specificity, contextualisation and a provincialized understanding of the connections between media, culture, gender and sexuality.

This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe. This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people’s constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people’s practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education.

This book traces the turbulent history of queer visibility in the Irish media to explore the processes by which a regionally based media system shaped queer identities within a highly conservative and religious population. The book details the emergence of an LGBTQ rights movement in Ireland and charts how this burgeoning movement utilised the media for the liberatory potential of advancing LGBTQ rights. However, mainstream media institutions also exploited queer identities for economic purposes, which, coupled with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, disrupted the mainstreaming goals of queer visibility. Drawing on industrial, societal and production culture determinants, the author identifies the shifting contours of queer visibility in the Irish media, uncovering the longstanding relationship between LGBTQ organising and the Irish media. This book is suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and LGBTQ studies.

This book explores how queerness and representations of queerness in media and culture are responding to the shifting socio-political, cultural and legal conditions in post-Soviet Russia, especially in the light of the so-called ‘antigay’ law of 2013. Based on extensive original research, the book outlines developments historically both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union and provides the background to the 2013 law. It discusses the proliferating alternative visions of gender and sexuality, which are increasingly prevalent in contemporary Russia. The book considers how these are represented in film, personal diaries, photography, theatre, protest art, fashion and creative industries, web series, news media and how they relate to the ‘traditional values’ rhetoric. Overall, the book provides a rich and detailed, yet complex insight into the developing nature of queerness in contemporary Russia.

This is the first volume on the studies of queer identities in Europe to adopt a strong focus on the history of the Baltic region among other countries in Central and East Europe. It unites work by researchers of different European countries that deals with various representations of the queer culture over a period of more than one hundred years. A significant part of the book is dedicated to belletristics, with the contributors offering readings of it with knowledge about ideas circulating in public discourse that have been influential for new discoveries in history, art history, culture studies, communication studies, theology, and narratology, among other fields.

How have radical print cultures fostered and preserved queer lived experience from the 1960s to the present? What alternative stories about queer life across Europe can visual material reveal? Queer Print in Europe is the first book devoted to the exploration of queer print cultures in Europe, following the birth of an international gay rights movement in the late 1960s. By unearthing these ephemeral paper documents from archives and personal collections, including materials that have been out of circulation since they were first distributed, this book examines how the production and dissemination of queer print intersected with the emergence of LGBTQ+ activism within specific national contexts. This vital contribution to queer history explores borders and political movements, and the ways in which these materials contributed, through their international circulation, to the creation of a 'post-national' queer community. Illustrated throughout with examples of manifestos, flyers, posters, zines and other forms of print media, it features interviews with those responsible for making, distributing or archiving queer print, alongside a series of new theoretical essays that set particular publications and the individuals and groups that produced them in context. The book isolates specific instances of queer print media and scrutinises their design aesthetics, identifying both the significant contribution that queer print has made to histories of LGBTQ+ struggle and to the history of print design.

This collection explores the representation and performance of queer youth in media cultures, primarily examining TV, film and online new media. Specific themes of investigation include the context of queer youth suicide and educational strategies to avert this within online new media, and the significance of coming out videos produced online.

Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates them against the stories we typically tell about Europe and its watershed moments in the post 1945 period. The book considers the degree to which the iconic events of 1945, 1968 and 1989 influenced the social and sexual climate of the ensuing decades, raising questions about the form and structure of the 1960s sexual revolution, and forcing us to think about how we define sexual liberalization - and where, how and on whose terms it occurs. An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet. By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.

This book presents the main findings of an empirical exploration of media discourses on social representations of “otherness” in seven European countries. It focuses on the analysis of press discourses produced over a fifteen-year period (2000–2015) on three contemporary figures of otherness that challenge the identity of European societies, question the attitudes towards diversity, and pose significant challenges for policy-makers: immigration, Islam, and LGBT. The book provides a comprehensive and articulate map of how national media addresses such themes from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, revealing patterns of continuity and discontinuity across time and space. Lastly, it discusses these patterns in the light of their cultural meanings and their influence on social and political collective behaviours.