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University of New Hampshire
Linguistics
2013
Mentor: Dr. Kevin Healey
Fairies, Fags, and Straight-Acting Gays: Gay Masculinities in Primetime Television.
With LGTBQ+ issues such as adoption, parenting, and marriage shown in many “gay-friendly” television series, celebrations of progressiveness have focused on the visibility of gay men, rather than how they are made visible. In response, this research highlights a sample of series from major television networks and hones on the issues of gay masculinity. Utilizing the ideas and methods of critical discourse analysis and queer theory, this research contemplates how popular public discourses about sexual identity are changing. To what extent are they changing in ways that uplift the dignity of these identities? To what extent are they changing in ways that reinforce and reproduce existing inequalities and imbalances in social power? How are these issues negotiated in the discourse of popular, primetime television?