Our televisions, our selves
Subtitle: popular (in)visibility, marginalized identities and the politics of "Queer as Folk"
By: by Wendy Kathleen Peters.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9780494220351
Subjects: Queer as folk (Television program : United States).; Television programs for gays.; Gay men on television.; Lesbians in mass media.; Gays in popular culture.; Gay men -- Identity.; Lesbians -- Identity.; Gender identity.; Market segmentation.
Description: What happens when groups who have been marginalized within popular culture become privileged enough to gain complex televisual representation? The U.S. cable television show Queer As Folk (QAF) aired in Canada from 2000 to 2005 depicting a White, middle-class community of gays and lesbians. The show's popularity makes it a promising site to study gay men's emergence into complex televisual representation. First, I outline a brief history of gay and lesbian representation on television and explore tensions that arise when popular visibility of marginalized identities is entangled in commodity culture---when communities of resistance become "niche markets." I then conduct a critical textual analysis, using Hall's notion of the preferred reading, to argue that QAF offered a depiction of White, middle-class gay men that transgressed against the ideal sexual citizen, while couching its transgressions within White supremacy, the superiority of the middle and upper-classes, and male privilege. Finally, to counter this relatively closed reading of the series, I offer an audience reception study of forty avid QAF viewers who participated in this study through an email-circulated survey, focus groups and personal interviews. I explore how viewers "use" QAF outside the time-space of viewing to build their personal identities as gays, lesbians, queers and gay-positive straights, to participate in "conversational communities," and as a source of knowledge about communities or practices they do not have personal experience with. I trace the negotiations viewers make as they view the show as simultaneously "over-the-top, unreal entertainment" and "a real depiction of queer life" that acts as a valid source of information about "gay culture." Additionally, I highlight how viewers read "critically" in rather different ways, and interpret the same QAF image as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic depending on the intertextual comparisons they make and the "real world" knowledge they bring to bear on the representation. This dissertation explores the political economy of "gay TV" in the early 2000s, offers a critical and qualitative textual analysis of QAF, and details viewers' readings of the series that exceed and complicate the binaries of oppositional and dominant, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, demanding a more complex frame for analysis.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-01, Section: A, page: 0017.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-302).

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.