From Dorian’s closet to Elektra’s trunk:Visibility, trauma and gender euphoria in <i>Pose</i>

In recent years, queer identities, lives and stories have been integrated into popular culture to an extent that would have been unimaginable until relatively recently. A key part of this attempt to make sense of queerness in the present is the quest for a shared queer past. A trend in recent film and television has been the revisiting and reclaiming of stories that have been erased from mainstream media and from official historical accounts. This links to what might be seen as a wider ‘post-traumatic turn’ in popular culture, in which the traumas of the past are revisited and processed through media in order to understand how they continue to haunt and structure material reality in the present. The link between trauma and representation is particularly important in relation to trans subjects, who have been disproportionately subject to ‘trauma porn’ in mainstream media: in film and tabloid news accounts and through a pathologizing medical gaze. This article focuses on FX’s Pose to consider how contemporary representations of trans people of colour rework and challenge this dominant narrative by invoking images of gender euphoria. By focusing on the figure of drag mother Elektra Abundance, and particularly its reworking of the ‘true crime’ story of real-life drag queen Dorian Corey, I argue that Pose constitutes an important step in attempting to reconcile the need to affirm and reclaim lived experiences of trauma, but to do so in a way that does justice to the creative and intellectual labour of trans, non-binary and gender-non-conforming people of colour. Recycling, reframing and rethinking a broad archive of historic media texts, I argue, poses a challenge both to mainstream notions of visibility and to queer media studies

Only the bad gyal could do this:Rihanna, rape-revenge narratives, and the cultural politics of White Feminism

In July 2015, Rihanna released a seven-minute long video for her new single, entitled Bitch Better Have My Money (more widely known as BBHMM), whose violent imagery would divide feminist media commentators for its representation of graphic and sexualised violence against a white couple. The resulting commentary would become the focus of much popular and academic feminist debate over the intersectional gendered and racialised politics of popular culture, in particular coming to define what has been termed ‘White Feminism’, in particular intersecting with debates about rape culture and the extent to which celebrity culture operates to secure consent to social relations of violence and inequality. BBHMM is not the first time Rihanna’s work has been considered in relation to these debates: not only has she herself been very publicly outed as a survivor of male violence, she has previously dealt with themes of rape and revenge in an earlier video, 2010’s Man Down, and in her lyrics. In this article, I read these two videos through the lens of feminist film theory, in particular focussing on the ways in which Rihanna’s output fits in a wider history of the figure of the ‘angry girl’ in rape-revenge cinema. In doing so, I explore how such representations mobilise affective responses of shame, identification and complicity that are played out in feminist responses to her work, and how these reproduce themes of surveillance and victim-blaming that potentially operate to silence women of colour’s experience of violence

Rethinking marginality in new queer television

Rethinking marginality in new queer television is a self-reflection on how this Special Issue of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture took form. Throughout this editorial, we examine trends in current queer theory and reflect on the changes occurring in both the depictions of queer representations and the dissemination of television itself. We conclude by offering a survey into the variety of television that is covered by the issue, from Pose and Vida to Killing Eve, Hollywood, Broad City, Star Trek, She-Ra and BoJack Horseman. There is a broad variety of demographics and genre that further demonstrate the importance of this issue

Sexualisation, or the queer feminist provocations of Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular culture. Evoking concerns around young women and ‘sexualisation’, Cyrus emerges as a convergent signifier of sexualised media content and the girl-at-risk. As Cyrus is repeatedly invoked in these debates, she comes to function as the bad object of young femininity. Arguing, however, that Cyrus troubles the sexualisation thesis in the provocations of her creative practice, I suggest that this contested media figure exceeds the frames through which she is read. Thus, I ask: what kinds of insights might be possible if we were to transform the terms on which we approach this figure? Considering a selection of the images and performances that constitute the Cyrus archive, this article proposes a reading of Cyrus as performative provocation. Mobilising an existing sensibility of queer feminist struggle, Cyrus emerges as a disruptive, albeit contradictory, figure. Questions of privilege, limit and possibility emerge in this discussion, as well as what constitutes feminist struggle

Haunted Bodies:Visual Cultures of Anorexia

Thin bodies have been the centre of much controversy in recent years. Feminist critiques of popular culture, as well as popular feminist movements, have called attention to the ways in which oppressive ideals of feminine beauty have increasingly become associated with an idealisation of extreme thinness. In particular, the extent to which the prevalence of eating disorders can be linked to media representations of very thin (‘size zero’) models and celebrities has been the subject of much discussion. This article explores the relationship between bodies, images and cultural representations of thinness across a range of media sites including political campaigns, commercial television, celebrity magazines, catwalk and high street fashion, and digital cultures, exploring how anorexic and size-zero bodies are gendered, racialised and pathologised in contemporary media cultures

Interview: Anne-Marie Fortier

This paper is an edited version of an email interview conducted by Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsman with Anne-Marie Fortier, the author of Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (Routledge, 2008). Fortier’s work has been informative in the development of some of the arguments explored in this special issue; in their conversation Ferreday and Kuntsman asked her to comment on the ideas of haunting, racial imaginaries, nostalgia, national anxieties, political feelings and hopes for the future

Digital relationships and feminist hope

Any critical rethinking of relationships in the digital age involves, in some sense, a ‘speaking back’. Perhaps more than any other area of studies related to digital media and technologies, this is an area that has historically been characterised by unsubstantiated speculation and sweeping claims which seem almost calculated, in hindsight, to cause consternation to feminists and sociologists alike. Indeed, the study of relationality and subjectivity in online contexts is one area where we might want to be critical of the very notion of a ‘digital age’. The question for feminist theories of the digital is rather, how do we avoid the notion that the digital represents a huge social revolution which demands an equal transformation in sociological thinking, when so much of what we see in digital spaces remains so dispiritingly familiar? And how does one do this without becoming as negative and reductive as that sentence would seem to suggest

Writing Sex Work Online:The Case of Belle de Jour

This paper investigates the media representation of sex work. Taking the case of the blogger Belle de Jour as a starting point, it considers sex blogging in the context of wider debates within feminist theory and cultural studies to consider under what circumstances experience becomes re-presented as authentic or otherwise in popular narratives of sex work. It engages with the layers of mystery and demystification, stigma and resistance that surround online narratives of sexual labour and to challenge the notion that accounts of sex work, need to be universally ‘representative’ in order to be heard