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Saturday, November 12
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GEC07
LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe: Situated Case Studies
A. Dhoest
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1
University of Antwerp, Department of Communication Studies, Antwerp, Belgium
Focussing on the intersection between gender and sexuality, this panel explores the manifold ways in which media matter to LGBTQs across Europe. Both
traditional mass media such as television and, more recently, digital and social media play a significant role not only in representing LGBTQs but also in
providing themwith materials and spaces for the exploration and expression of identifications as well as engagement in diverse forms of social interaction.
However, literature on these issues tends to focus on the US and other Anglophone countries. Hence, this panel presents European cases, avoiding univer‑
salising statements and stressing the cultural and historical specificity of LGBTQ experiences. As a whole, the panel discusses a variety of experiences across
Europe, representing a wide range of countries: Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Sweden. In these papers, diverse media are addressed, from television
to music and various online media including online communities and blogs. The papers take a media-decentred approach, not analysing media in isolation
but focusing on their significance within a particular cultural context. The panel as a whole deals with the various connections between LGBTQs and media,
ranging from LGBTQs being the object of representations (Kerrigan) and discussions (Evolvi), to their consumption (Roth,Wasserbauer) and creation (Svens‑
son) of media content. Each of these roles entails a form of agency and empowerment, within certain structuring limitations related not only to a particular
society with certain LGBTQ rights and forms of self-organisation, but also to particular media with certain affordances. While the panel as a whole uses
the acronym 'LGBTQ' as an umbrella term to refer to sexual and gender minorities, individual papers use a variety of terms to refer to the various groups they
discuss in terms of gender (male/female) and sexuality (lesbian, gay, queer, ...). Here, again, the panel presents a diverse and inclusive view, also opening
up the discussion to non-binary gender and sexual identities. Methodologically, too, the panel collection is all but uniform, as a wide and innovative range
of qualitative methods is used, including historical analysis, in-depth and oral history interviews, netnography and discourse analysis.Thus, the panel offers
a good overview of the possible ways to approach the interaction between media and LGBTQs, and again it celebrates the diversity of the field. Throughout
all this situated diversity, the panel does make a few central points which run across the different papers: that media do greatly matter to a social minority
like LGBTQs, across Europe; that they have done so in the past, often in more limited ways, and continue to do so in the present, in ever expanding but also
challenging ways; that national and cultural contexts still matter, in spite of - or rather: in conjunction with - globalising tendencies; and that we need
a range of methods to better grasp the ever expanding technological opportunities available to LGBTQs in terms of representation, self-expression and
connectivity.
PN 293
Homodomesticity – Normative or Subversive? Ireland’s First Public Broadcast of a Homosexual Couple
P. Kerrigan
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1
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland
In 1980, Irish state broadcaster RTÉ interviewed a gay couple living in County Cork, Arthur Leahy and Laurie Steele. The interview was a first, as it was one
of the first depictions of gay people on Irish television. Not only that, but this was one of the first moments that Irish television depicted a co-habiting
homosexual couple living together, providing markers for homosexual couples in both visual and linguistic terms. The broadcast acted as one of the first
cases in Irish media history to see the cultural transmission of a homosexual, creating meaning surrounding the sexual orientation. This was also a brave
move for RTÉ, as Arthur and Laurie’s sexual relationship constituted a criminal offence under sections of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and
the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. The significance of this was the fact that broadcasting Laurie and Arthur brought a new symbolic structure, habitus
and practice regarding relationships, traditionally heterosexual, into Irish people’s homes. The language, symbols and lifestyle presented with this historic
broadcast were incompatible with the way the Catholic Church had envisaged Ireland. The broadcast encouraged self-realisation and self-expression, in
contrast to the message of the Church, which Tom Inglis (1998) refers to as‘self-abnegation or denial’. This paper will argue that the most interesting aspect
of this valuable historical source is how it explores the everyday life of this gay couple within their own domestic sphere.The social milieu of Irish society was
traditionally based on the heterosexual family unit, but I will illuminate how the media and physically seeing a broadcast of two co-habiting men and their
own type of domesticity contradicts with the wider society around them and provided a new exploration of everyday lives in 1980 (for both gay and straight
people). References: Inglis, T. (1998). Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press.
PN 294
Internet Use in Queer-Lesbian Coming-Out Experiences in Germany: Dis/Continuities of Agency and Marginalisation
U. Roth
1
1
University of Münster, Münster, Germany
This paper deals with the role of the internet in coming-out processes of queer-lesbian women in Germany. It shows how the digitalization of knowledge
and communication can be an instrument to encounter feelings of fear, rejection and discomfort, which are often part of coming-out experiences (Butler
1993, Wolf 2004). While queer-lesbian ways of living remain stigmatized in German society (Lenz et al. 2012), especially the access to online content
about queer-lesbian lives can create feelings of belonging and reduce internalized prejudices. However, my study also indicates that heterocentric dis‑
courses and subjectivations are not suspended online, but govern offline as well as online activities. Referring to qualitative audience studies and cultural
studies (e.g. Morley 1992, Livingstone 2002) this paper conceptualizes media users as agents who actively engage in media dependent on their everyday
life experiences. It “contextualized media engagement as part of a broader social terrain of experience” (Gray 2014, 173). Empirically the study draws on
in-depth interviews with eight women between 18 and 26 years, who identify as queer and/or lesbian and live in urban as well as in rural areas. The em‑
pirical data shows that once the interviewees realized their feelings for girls or women, they developed a huge urge for knowledge about queer-lesbian
lives. This knowledge – often explicitly produced by and for other queer-lesbian women – became accessible online. In engagement with this knowledge
the interviewees encountered the stigmatization of their desires. However, the possibility to get in touch with other queer-lesbian people online and try