This book explores how the social and technical integration of mainstream social media into gay men’s digital cultures since the mid 2000s has played out in the lives of young gay men, looking at how these convergences have influenced more recent iterations of gay men’s digital culture. Focusing on platforms such as Gaydar, Facebook, Grindr and Instagram, Cassidy highlights the ways that identity and privacy management issues experienced in this context have helped to generate a culture of participatory reluctance within gay men’s digital environments.
LGBT Identity and Online New Media examines constructions of LGBT identity within new media. The contributors consider the effects, issues, influences, benefits and disadvantages of these new media phenomena with respect to the construction of LGBT identities. A wide range of mainstream and independent new media are analyzed, including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, gay men’s health websites, message boards, and Craigslist ads, among others. This is a pioneering interdisciplinary collection that is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and technology.
This critical introduction to gay and lesbian identity within the media explores the concept of 'new storytelling'. The case studies look at film, television and online media, focusing on the narrative potential of individual storytellers who, as producers, writers and performers, challenge identity concerns and offer new expressions of liberty.
This book explores the concept of homonormativity and examines how the politics of homonormativity has shaped the lives and practices of gay men living primarily in the UK. The book adopts a case study approach in order to examine how homonormativity is shaping relationships within gay male culture, and between this culture and mainstream society. The book features chapters on same-sex marriage, HIV treatment, dating and hook-up culture, sexualized drug use and the world of work. Throughout these chapters, the book develops a conversation regarding the role that neoliberalism has played in defining gay male identities and practices in the UK and USA. If homonormativity is understood as the sexual politics of neoliberalism, this book considers to what extent those sexual politics pervade gay men’s sense of self, their relationships with each other, their experience of the spaces they occupy in everyday life, and the identities they inhabit in the workplace.blematizing the concept of homonormativity.
This edited collection illuminates the scope with which identities and intimacies interact on a wide range of social media platforms. A varied range of international scholars examine the contexts of very different social media spaces, with topics ranging from whitewashing and memes, parental discourses in online activities, Spotify as an intimate social media platform, neoliberalisation of feminist discourses, digital sex work, social media wars in trans debates and ‘BimboTok’. The focus is on their acceleration and impact due to the specificities of social media in relation to identities, intimacies within the broad ‘political’ sphere. The geographic range of case study material reflects the global impact of social media, and includes data from Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the USA. This enlightening and rigorous collection will be of key interest to scholars in media studies and gender studies, and to scholars and professionals of social media. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
What does it mean to be a gay man living in the suburbs? Do you identify primarily as gay, or suburban, or some combination of the two? For that matter, how does anyone decide what his or her identity is? In this first-ever ethnography of American gay suburbanites, Wayne H. Brekhus demonstrates that who one is depends at least in part on where and when one is. For many urban gay men, being homosexual is key to their identity because they live, work, and socialize in almost exclusively gay circles. Brekhus calls such men "lifestylers" or peacocks. Chameleons or "commuters," on the other hand, live and work in conventional suburban settings, but lead intense gay social and sexual lives outside the suburbs. Centaurs, meanwhile, or "integrators," mix typical suburban jobs and homes with low-key gay social and sexual activities. In other words, lifestylers see homosexuality as something you are, commuters as something you do, and integrators as part of yourself. Ultimately, Brekhus shows that lifestyling, commuting, and integrating embody competing identity strategies that occur not only among gay men but across a broad range of social categories. What results, then, is an innovative work that will interest sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and students of gay culture.
A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling—and perhaps unable—to fully comprehend and honor it? While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore—the first gay bookstore in the country—or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.
This book examines the complex and multidimensional relationship between culture and social media, and its specific impact on issues of identity and social movements, in a globalized world. Contemporary cyber culture involves communication among people who are culturally, nationally, and linguistically similar or radically different. Social media becomes a space for mediated cultural information transfer which can either facilitate a vibrant public sphere or create cultural and social cleavages. Contributors of the book come from diverse cultural backgrounds to provide a comprehensive analysis of how these social media exchanges allow members of traditionally oppressed groups find their voices, cultivate communities, and construct their cultural identities in multiple ways. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of media and new media studies, intercultural communication, especially critical intercultural communication, and academics studying social identity and social movements.
This book focuses on the social psychological aspects of gay men’s lives and provides a cutting-edge examination of topics including sexual orientation, sexual behavior, identity, relationships, prejudice, and health. The Social Psychology of Gay Men forces us to re-think existing theory and research, much of which has taken heterosexuality for granted. With identity process theory at its heart, this book advocates a social psychology of gay men which incorporates three levels of analysis – the psychological, interpersonal and societal. The book promises not only a deeper understanding of gay men’s lives but also pathways for enhancing wellbeing, intergroup relations and equality in this key population. This illuminating and thought-provoking text is an invaluable resource not only for psychologists, but for students, scholars and practitioners working in the area of gay men’s life.
This book considers mass media and contemporary cultural trends to examine masculinity at a point of unprecedented change. While sexual and gender politics have always been fraught, the long unexamined privilege associated with masculinity is now subject to intense scrutiny marked by a host of complex factors. As past markers of masculine norms have been challenged on cultural, social, and economic fronts, men occupy public space ever aware that how they interact with others is questioned and questionable. What does manhood mean? Who is included in its dominant formations? What performances signify membership in the club? How are men reading this contemporary moment and to what extent does cultural literacy inform, maintain, or challenge normative male identities and subsequent performances? This work examines such questions through language and symbolic meaning, and challenges its readers to critically examine what men know and how they understand and embody gender and sexuality in a post-millennial society. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cultural Politics of Men’s Identity in the New Millennium: Literacies of Masculinity crosses academic disciplines and will be highly relevant in composition/rhetoric, gender studies, masculinity studies, and cross-curricular courses that take up popular/contemporary culture as well as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It has been designed with both undergraduate and graduate students in mind.
