Visibility as Paradox: Representation and Simultaneous Contrast

Abstract

Since the 1960s, queers have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the twenty-first century on the prevailing media landscape. And yet visibility, like other semantic and semiotic forms, contains its own contradictions. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, and converting radicalism into a market niche. Signaling the existence of queer persons may aim for inclusion in public discourse, but, through simultaneous contrast, the assertion contains its inevitable opposition:Queers are different and cannot go unremarked