LGBTQ representation has dramatically increased on US television over the past two decades. While many media scholars highlight the importance of LGBTQ characters moving from television’s margins to the mainstream, others critique this increase in visibility. They argue that media mainstreaming promotes neoliberalism through post-gay or post-queer sensibilities. This article moves beyond quantitative studies of LGBTQ representation to map and interrogate neoliberal discourses within narrative television produced in the United States. It examines how a specific set of post-gay politics characterized by themes of ‘tolerance, acceptance and genuine love’ mask a troubling politics of normalization. This article demonstrates how these ideas have been reproduced in adult gay and lesbian characters on mainstream US television series, and subsequently negotiated by the gender and sexually diverse youth of contemporary teen television. Taking MTV’s Faking It as a primary case study, this article demonstrates how youth-oriented media both embrace and critique the neoliberal ideology of the post-gay era.
Over the past two decades, television has moved rapidly into an era marked by increased choice, flexibility and greater diversity of representation. Coinciding with this is a rise in new storytelling forms, such as web series, which have gained traction online and via traditional means. These developments have also manifested the phenomenon of the web series to television crossover. This article looks to Starting From … Now (2014–2016), a lesbian-themed web series that was broadcast on SBS2 in 2016 and, subsequently, described as a ‘revolution’ in Australian television. Examining the industrial context and critical reception of the series, this article assesses the validity of this claim. This research elucidates the place of web series in Australia’s shifting television landscape and highlights how Starting From … Now confronts the lack of diversity in Australian TV drama.
With the exception of a small number of contributions to the study of gay and lesbian representation in Australia, the queer history of Australian entertainment television has been left unexamined. This article seeks to address this gap through analysis of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) characters in Australian entertainment television over a 30-year period from 1970 to 2000. The article examines the rise and fall of LGB representation on prime time Australian television from 1970 onwards in order to understand how key shifts in the politics of Australian cultural life have come to influence Australian television broadcasting. Charting the representation of LGB characters on Australian entertainment television, this article seeks to understand the politics of inclusion and exclusion of LGB characters and provides the basis for further research into Australian queer television history.
In this paper, we seek to understand how shipping and anti-fan practices intersect to create meaningful audience engagement and civic discourse about contemporary social and political issues in the “politics of viewing” CW’s adaptation of Riverdale. By examining tagged posts from January 3, 2017 to June 26, 2019, we elicit how fan-rhetoric operates in a digitally networked environment and interrogate the intra-fan rivalries between shippers, anti-shippers, and anti-fans that underpin the Riverdale fandom on Tumblr. In doing so, we begin to sketch out a taxonomy of shipping-specific anti-fan practices, extending Gray’s work into different types and modes of anti-fandom to consider the role shipping plays within consumption practices, fandom stratification, and the production of civic discourse online.
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