3. Amy’s case & fictional
representation
1. Visibility ≠ progay
stances
2. Rural places are rarely
depicted
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262985/
4.
5. “online representations… provide rural young
people with materials for crafting what it
means to ‘come out’ as LGBTQ or
questioning in rural contexts (1165).”
6. 19-month ethnographic study
→email, what else?
“in situ” approach
Name – age – region (sexual orientation,
race)
1. Amy, age 15, a white teenager living in… KY
2. John, a 19-year-old white middle class college student
3. Darrin, a gay-identifying 17-year-old from an agricultural
town
7. “These images teach rural youth to look
anywhere but homeward for LGBTQ
identities (1165).”
“…the presumed properties of the
technologies themselves to the exclusion of
the social contexts that give technologies
meaning (1166).”
8. Media as an escape/ media as spaces: “unable
to explore how rural queer and questioning
youth engage and transform media… (1167)”
“online spaces… are intimately interwoven
with the construction of the offline world
(Baym, 2006 [Gray, 2009])
9. “relationships formed within the exterior gay
community lead the users to the interior CMC
gay community, where they, in turn, develop
new relationships which are nurtured and
developed outside the bounds of CMC (Shaw,
1997 [Mowlabocus, 2010]).”
10. New Childhood Studies criticizes the
“developmental paradigm that frames young
people’s identity practices as playful
experimentation (1169).”
11. 1. Urban vs. Rural queer and questioning youth
2. “collective labor”: identity as work shared
among many
• Independent, self-determined
• Urban-based resources &
social services
Urban
• interdependent
• Queer adult advocates & non-
LGBTQ allies
Rural
12. “[realness] is the way that people…
appropriate the real and its effects
(Halberstam, 2005 [Gray, 2009])
Discursive practices: audience member’s
experiences (Mittell, 2001, [Gray, 2009])
“people telling stories to each other…
constructing and negotiating social identity.
(Bauman, 1986 [Gray, 2009])
13.
14.
15. Family and “reference groups”
Connect to a larger network
“our inevitable alignments with multiple
audiences lead us… to violate the norms of
one reference group no matter what [we] do
(Shibutani, 1962 [Gray, 2009])
→Brandon: queer realness vs. rural racism
16. “These genres of queer realness [online
coming-out stories and electronic personal
ads] expand their sense of place, home, and
belonging within queer social worlds (1182)”
17. How are online and offline interwoven? Some
examples you can think of?
Can we apply the theories to their online
experiences, e.g. participation framework?
Is tellership/readership different online?
Can we think of it as an act of performativity?
Editor's Notes
Like movies and TV shows, gay characters, increasing visibility does not equate progay stances in the political climates
This sentence points out three aspects from which we can look further;
In situ approach, the situation, it is situated in certain social contexts, how it is embedded
They don’t necessarily want to leave their hometowns, the family, the places, the networks
