Trans scripts

Abstract

In the Netherlands, transgender people are increasingly becoming the focus of media attention, both in written media and on television. The question we raise in this article is whether the sudden popularity of trans people in the Dutch media can be seen as a moment of interruption and destabilising through which the contours of new paths of gender identification become imaginable, or whether, upon closer scrutiny, the media coverage of trans lives merely or mostly reinforces dominant, binary gender ideologies. We use the concept of ‘transgender scripts’ to explore the particularities of the representation of trans people in three national newspapers as well as two television programmes in the time frame 1991-2016. Trends in media reporting show that, in recent years, it has become more common to speak of transgender persons in affirmative ways. This affirmation, however, seems to come more easily when trans narratives confirm norms of gender, whiteness, youth, and national identity. We, therefore, argue for the inclusion of (sub-cultural) trans perspectives that show the variety in gender identity, including also non-binary identities, as well as cultural background and social and bodily experiences.

Covering inclusion: Frames, themes, and voice in news about LGBTI topics

“…It is not surprising, then, that the body of research investigating LGBTI coverage in mainstream news has grown in recent years, mainly drawing on discourse or content analysis (Billard, 2016; Kerrigan and Pramaggiore, 2021; Olveira-Araujo, 2022). Coverage of LGBTI topics has increased ever since the 1980s, when the AIDS pandemic began (Åkerlund, 2019; Jacobs and Meeusen, 2020; van Den Berg and Marinus, 2017). However, scholars warn that more visibility does not always equal emancipating coverage, as it does not eliminate (covert) homophobia in the news (Lovelock, 2018).…”

Producing Authenticity, Difference and Extremism

“…Based on the recurring patterns that we detected in this phase of close reading, we formulated an archetypical description of types of converts. This step in our method was informed by the formulation of patterns as 'scripts' in research by Van den Berg and Marinus (2017) on the representation of trans people in the media. We refer to these recurring scripts as 'convert figures' and distinguish six such figures: that of the authentic seeker who seeks religion for intrinsic reasons, the exemplary convert who is a model to born believers, the cultural other whose conversion is ascribed more to a cultural shift than a religious one, the victim who was tricked into conversion against their will, the opportunist who converts for personal gain, and the extremist whose strict religious observance is potentially harmful.…”