This article offers a joint reading of two cultural texts that reflect the contest over victim-oriented characterizations of queer youth in contemporary culture. The first text is a representation of queer youth taken from the popular UK television series Shameless (2004). The second text is an online discussion about representations of gay and lesbian characters on television that was recently posted on the Queer Youth Network website. Through my reading of these two texts, I explore the rise of explicit mainstream representations of gay and lesbian characters and the emergence of an identifiable queer youth audience as key characteristics of the contemporary 'after-queer' moment. Through a reflection on the queer youth analytical techniques observable on the Queer Youth Network site, I conclude by outlining some key implications for future educational research in the field of youth, sexuality and popular culture. This article examines different representations of the queer youth as victim. Many young people continue to experience abuse, discrimination and disadvantage because of their real or perceived same-sex-attraction. The victim trope persists as a powerful frame for queer youth experience, both in homophobic and anti-homophobic representations. Researchers in queer studies have argued that an effect of the reliance on the victim trope has been to actively undermine or de-emphasize queer youth agency by universalizing understandings of the queer youth as a subject who needs to be saved by external (often institutional and adult) agents (e.g. see Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt 2004). Following this queer critique, this article asks: in what ways is this contest over the tropological conflation of queer youth with victim manifest in contemporary cultural representations of queer youth? And, how does this contest inform the analytical readings of such representations by queer young people?These questions situate this article within an explicitly after-queer moment in that they acknowledge and are enabled by two key developments since the early 1990s 'queer moment' (for discussion of the emergence of the 'queer moment', see Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005). First, there has been a spike in representations of gay and lesbian characters in mainstream British-and American-produced popular culture, to the extent that Australia's highest-circulation tabloid saw fit in 2009 to devote a feature to the recent history of gay and lesbian characters in television (Vickery 2009). The arrival of 'out' gay and lesbian characters in mainstream television programming *Email: daniel.marshall@deakin.edu.au 66 D. Marshall thus provides an important context for examining contests over the representation of the queer youth as victim.Second, over roughly the same period there has been a rise in an identifiable queer youth audience. In part, this has been linked to a revenue-led expansion and diversification of the youth market. It has also been enabled by the rise of formalized queer youth communities across many countries including...
In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms’ responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which the complexities of sexuality and desire are obscured in order to cultivate notions of a ‘good’ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer sexual citizen. However, despite normative work of classification seeking to distinguish between sexuality and sex, we argue that the high-profile failures of these classification systems create the conditions for users to draw attention to, rather than firm, these messy boundaries.
Drawing on findings from a study of two social generations of gender and sexuality diverse Australians, this paper offers a critical analysis of expectations and experiences of inclusive health care for LGBTQ+ youth. Data were collected by means of individual and focus group interviews with people from two different social generations who grew up in regional or urban Australia: those born in the 1970s (n=50) and those born in the 1990s (n=71). Data were analysed inductively to develop insights into what inclusive health care meant, and what this revealed about the potential for fostering belonging in health care settings. Findings raise critical questions about how inclusiveness of care might best be understood in encounters between gender and sexual minorities and health professionals. In particular, forms of 'inclusivity labour' were observed across the social generations, both in terms of the work involved in seeking to locate supportive services, and in assessing the performance of clinicians in health care settings, with implications for the continued engagement of LGBTQ+ young people with essential forms of care. Mobilising contemporary forms of inclusivity labour, including attention to the affective dimensions of health care engagement, has the potential to promote both better health and more meaningful experiences of belonging for gender and sexual minorities.
“Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the field's future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies.
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