Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer 2018 Abstracts
No Men in Women’s Bathrooms: Encoding/Decoding in Activist Strategic Communication • Erica Ciszek • In November 2015, Houston, Texas voters defeated an anti-discrimination referendum, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which protected people from discrimination on the basis of 15 categories. Both proponents and opponents of the ordinance planned and executed strategic communication efforts, representing an instance where public relations intersects with activism, public opinion, and policy. This article presents Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model as one response that although it may be seen as a relic of cultural studies, it holds theoretical and empirical value in the examination of contemporary message creation and dissemination in public relations practice. Based on the perspectives of 27 proponents of the ordinance, this article analyzes strategic communication failure within the framework of encoding/decoding.
Who “Framed” Ramchandra Siras?: News Discourses of a Controversial Outing Case in India • Khadija Ejaz; Leigh Moscowitz • In 2010, a professor in India was forcibly outed as gay when he was filmed being intimate with another man. Analysis of Indian English-language newspapers revealed that journalists drew upon a law which criminalizes homosexuality and framed sexuality as essentialized with respect to the Indian constitution, consent, location, and morality. At the same time, findings reflected dominant Western notions of sexuality despite what initially appears to be supportive discourses of alternate indigenous sexualities in India.
Audience Perceptions of LGBTQ Television Characters • Aryana Gooley, California State University, Sacramento • Much of the existing research surrounding television audience studies employs an empirical approach; however, there have been minimal efforts to examine television audiences’ perceptions more in-depth to move beyond existing generalizations. With an effort to contribute to the existing vein of literature on the LGBTQ community through qualitative television audience research, the purpose of this study is to examine how television audiences perceive the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) characters on television.
HIV and Anniversary Journalism: Susceptibility and Severity Messaging in News Coverage of World AIDS Day • Josh Grimm; Joseph Schwartz • The purpose of this study was to analyze the frequency of statements about population susceptibility and threat severity of HIV/AIDS. Using a coding scheme derived from the Extended Parallel Process Model, we analyzed 219 articles of World AIDS Day news coverage from 1988 through 2017. Our results show that while susceptibility did change over time, coverage minimized the impact the disease has had on men who have sex with men (MSM).
The Digital Couch: The Therapeutic Potential of a “Gay Hookup App” • Robert Huesca, Trinity U. • The geosocial networking mobile application Grindr has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in the past decade because of its diverse uses and widespread adoption. Yet no study has identified Grindr as a platform whereby HIV positive users have provided support and guidance to people newly diagnosed as HIV positive. Findings from 33 in-depth interviews shed light on this potentially important use of Grindr to contribute to the well-being of people living with HIV.
Media Representation of Transgender Civil Rights Issues: A Quantitative Content Analysis on Media Coverage of the “Bathroom Bill” Controversy • Minjie Li • As the transgender media visibility increases exponentially, new patterns of journalistic reporting and framing of transgender issues immerge in the news media emerge. Taking a quantitative content analysis approach, the present study examines how national mainstream news outlets and LGBTQ news outlet represent a transgender civil right issue, the “bathroom bill” controversy. Theoretically, it focuses on how the news outlets apply power exemplification and issue attribution in their narratives. The content analysis findings suggested that the news media outlets as a whole were significantly more likely to mention societal causes (vs. individual causes) and suggest societal solutions. The mentions of societal consequences, however, did not significantly outnumber the mentions of individual consequences. Compared to the LGBTQ outlets, the mainstream outlets are more likely to mention individual causes, societal consequences, and individual solutions. Moreover, journalists tended to give less persuasive power to cisgender women and transwomen through using indirect quotation.
The rise of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming representation in the media: Impacts on the population • Robyn King, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Richard Mocarski, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Natalie Holt, UNL; William (Sim) Butler, University of Alabama; Debra Hope, University of Nebraska Lincoln; Heather Meyer; Nathan Woodruff, Trans Collaborations • In recent years, the Transgender and Gender Nonconforming (TGNC) population has gained a stronger voice in the media. Although these voices are being heard, there are limits on the type of TGNC representation displayed in media. The current study interviewed 27 TGNC individuals. These interviews exposed how participants view the rise of TGNC media representation. The main themes that emerged were TGNC Awareness and TGNC Identity Discovery and Role-Modeling.
The LGBT activist on social media: Analyzing LGBT activism online in India and Taiwan • PAROMITA PAIN, The University of Texas at Austin; Victoria Chen • Through the lens of framing theory and qualitative interviews, this analysis examines how LGBT activists in India and Taiwan use social media to counter negative portrayals and mobilize audiences for social change. In 2017, same sex marriage was legalized in Taiwan making it the first Asian country to do so. In India, the Right to Privacy controversy shook the country in early 2017. In-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists from various cities in India (30) and Taiwan (30), helped understand how they use SNS (social networking sites) in their activism, the decisions involved in the framing of messages and the advantages and disadvantages of SNS.
“Coming out and going home”: Communication action and regional mobility among the gay supportive families in Taiwan • Hong-Chi Shiau • Despite the historical centrality of western cities as sites of queer cultural settlement, larger global economic and political forces have vociferously shaped, dispersed, and altered dreams of mobility for Taiwanese queers in the age of globalization. Drawn upon five-year ethnographic studies in Taiwan, this study examines how counternarratives were used by families with gay sons to disrupt the dominant homonormative discourse in the Taiwanese society. The nuanced changes in communication action and increasingly common regional migration for the gay youth has made gay youth in Taiwan to “come out and go home quietly.” The transformation has been shaped by multiple economic and social forces at work involving (1) the optimal distance with the biological family, (2) the prospect in the seemingly lucrative “new” and gay-friendly employments and (3) the proper performances of consumption policed and imposed by the gay community in the neoliberal Taiwanese society.
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