Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives presents fifteen chapters that address how the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities are depicted in the media. This collection focuses on how the LGBT community has been silenced or given voice through the media. Through a study of queer media images, this book scrutinizes LGBT media representations and how these representations contribute to a dialogue about civil rights for this marginalized community. While the communication discipline has been open to the LGBT community, there has been an absence of published research and a marginalizing or tokenizing of the queer voice. Through a study of media representations, this unique collection provides a snapshot into the issues surrounding LGBT identity during a time when the Defense of Marriage Act is called into question and explores what it means to study images through a queer lens.
Introduction Jane Campbell and Theresa Carilli QUEER IMAGES Chapter 1: Focus on the SpongeBob: The Representational Politics of James Dobson Jason Zingsheim Chapter 2: The Complex Relationship Between (and within) the Suppressed and the Empowered: Contradiction and LGBT Portrayals on The L Word Jennifer Guthrie, Adrianne Kunkel and K. Nicole Hladky Chapter 3: Comic Corrections towards a Family Perfection: (Re)Reading Queer as Folk and Will and Grace Rachel E. Silverman Chapter 4: Revisiting The Celluloid Closet Jane Campbell and Theresa Carilli Chapter 5: To Glee or not to Glee: Exploring the Empowering Voice of the Glee Movement. Lori Montalbano PERFORMANCES OF SEXUALITY AND GENDER Chapter 6: A Pregnant Pause, a Transgender Look: Thomas Beatie in the Maternity Pose Kristin Norwood Chapter 7: The Rhetoric of Sexual Experimentation: A Critical Examination of Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl Brittani Hidahl and Richard D. Besel Chapter 8: Queer Male TV Commentators: Kinjo-no-Obasan in Advanced Capitalism Kimiko Akita LIVING IN THE MARGINS Chapter 9: The Construction of Queer and the Conferring of Voice: Empowering and Disempowering Portrayals of Transgenderism on TransGeneration K. Nicole Hladky Chapter 10: "Born This Way": Biology and Sexuality in Lady Gaga's Pro-LGBT Media Shannon Weber Chapter 11: First But (Nearly) Forgotten: Why You Know Milk but not Kozachenko Bruce Drushel QUEER ISSUES Chapter 12: "Is she a man? Is she a transvestite?": Critiquing the Coverage of Intersex Athletes Rick Kenney and Kimiko Akita Chapter 13: The Commercial Closet: How Gay-Specific Media and the Images of "the Closet" Erases the LGBT Community from the Mainstream Gaze Kristin Comeforo Chapter 14: "Should We Stop Believin'?": Glee and The Culture of Essentialist Identity Discourse John Wolf and Valarie Schweisberger Chapter 15: "The play's the thing": Representations of heteronormative sexuality in a popular children's TV sitcom Zoe Kenney
