Screening Homonormativity and Queer Resistance: Irish LGBTQ Community Responses to Mainstream Film and Television Representation

Abstract

Visibility in media and society has been a central concern for Western LGBTQ activists for many decades. Seeing LGBTQ people on screen has frequently been positioned as an essential tool to force mainstream, heteronormative society to recognise LGBTQ experiences, and to allow isolated LGBTQ people to connect to a community and form their queer identity. These ideas shaped discourse about media in the 2000s, a period which saw the rise and commercialisation of overt LGBTQ visibility in mainstream film and television. While much of this media representation has been explored in depth in literary and media studies, there have been far fewer audience reception studies which attempt to understand the complex and diverse ways in which LGBTQ people decode the media they consume. This thesis highlights audience perspectives by taking the Irish LGBTQ community periodical Gay Community News (GCN) as a case study. It analyses its editorial and reader-submitted content relating to LGBTQ representation in screen media, placing these discussions within the context of changes in Irish society. Through this, it highlights the persistent homonormativity which was present in discourse about visibility across this period, along with the tension within the LGBTQ community between politics of assimilation and liberation.