Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story

Mary L. GrayIndiana University2009, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Outline

Introduction Objective Method & Data Media & Technology Critical Youth Studies Queer Realness Conclusion Q&A/ Discussion

Introduction

Amy’s case & fictional representation

1. Visibility ≠ progay stances

2. Rural places are rarely depicted

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262985/

→Looking (Fictional Representation)

Objective

“online representations… provide rural young people with materials for crafting what it means to ‘come out’ as LGBTQ or questioning in rural contexts (1165).”

Method & Data

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… KY2. John, a 19-year-old white middle class college

student3. Darrin, a gay-identifying 17-year-old from an

agricultural town

Media & Technology

“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).”

Media & Technology

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])

→Gaydar Culture

“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]).”

Critical Youth Studies

New Childhood Studies criticizes the “developmental paradigm that frames young people’s identity practices as playful experimentation (1169).”

Critical Youth Studies

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 alliesRural

Queer Realness

“[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])

→www.gay.com/

→www.glhv.org.au/website-link/mogenic

Queer Realness

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

Conclusion

“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)”

Q&A/ Discussion

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?

Thank you!