Abstract
Queer teens have finally arrived on television.1 Nowadays, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) teens feature as regular cast members, within varying broadcast, cable and premium content on tele-vision.2 While television’s first daytime soap featuring recurring gay teen themes, One Life to Live (ABC, 1968–2012), premiered the character of Billy Douglas (played by Ryan Phillippe) in the early 1990s, after the character’s departure from the series in 1992 LGBT teens had a slow climb to become common TV characters, despite the popularity of both teen-centric and LGBT-themed content during the following decade. As many scholars (Becker 2006; Gross 2001; Walters 2001) have documented, the 1990s experienced a surge in queer visibility on television that focused primarily on well-adjusted adults as our friends, family and co-workers, mostly assimilated into heteronormative society to maintain the status quo. Ron Becker (2006) has attributed this shift to network and advertiser appeals to the lucrative ‘slumpy demographic’, foregrounding the socially liberal alongside urban minded professionals, while Katherine Sender (2004) adds that the construction of the gay market in the 1990s was a result of both business and political policies that targeted the stereotype of the affluent gay man.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, D.W. 1995. Homosexuality and Narrative. Modern Fiction Studies, 41(3–4), pp. 609–634
Allen, R.C. 1985. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Becker, R. 2006. Gay TV and Straight America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Chambers, S.A. 2009. The Queer Politics of Television. New York: I.B. Tauris.
Davis, G. 2004. ‘Saying It Out Loud’: Revealing Television’s Queer Teens. In G. Davis and K. Dickinson, eds. Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity. London: British Film Institute, pp. 127–140.
Dyer, R. 1993. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge.
Dow, B.J. 2001. Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility. Critical Studies in Media Communications, 18(2), pp. 123–140.
Feuer, J. 1986. Narrative form in American Network Television. In C. MacCabe, ed. High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 101–113.
Geraghty, C. 1991. Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Oxford: Polity Press.
GLAAD. 2014. http://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv13 [Accessed February 12, 2014].
Gledhill, C. 2003. Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera. In S. Hall, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 227–386.
Gross, L. 1996. You’re the First Person I’ve Ever Told: Letters to a Fictional Gay Teen. In M. Bronski, ed. Taking Liberties: Gay Male Essays on Politics, Culture, and Art. New York: Kasak Books, pp. 369–386.
Gross, L. 2001. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gross, L. 2003. The Gay Global Village in Cyberspace. In N. Couldry and J. Curran, eds. Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 259–272.
Gross, L. 2007. Gideon Who will be 25 in the Year 2012: Growing Up Gay Today. International Journal of Communication [Online], pp. 121–138.
Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Hall, S. 2003. The Work of Representation. In S. Hall, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 13–74.
Joyrich, L. 1988. All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. Camera Obscura, 6(116), pp. 128–153.
Kane, M. 2010. Where We are on TV Report: 2010–2011 Season [Online]. Los Angeles: GLAAD. http://www.glaad.org/publications/tvreport10 [Accessed December 20, 2013].
Kazloff, S. 1992. Narrative Theory and Television. In R.C. Allen, ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 67–100.
Marwick, A., Gray, M.L., Ananny, M. 2013. Dolphins Are Just Gay Sharks: Glee and the Queer Case of Transmedia as Text and Object. Television and New Media [Online], pp. 1–21.
McCarthy, A. 2001. Ellen: Making Queer Television History. GLQ, 7(4), 593–620.
Meyer, M.D.E. and Wood, M.M. 2013. Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee. Sexuality and Culture, 17, pp. 434–448.
Mittell, J. 2006. Narrative Complexity in American Contemporary Television. The Velvet Light Trap, 58, pp. 29–40.
Needham, G. 2009. Scheduling Normativity: Television, the Family, and Queer Temporality. In G. Davis, and G. Needham, eds. Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics. London: Routledge, pp. 143–158.
Pullen, C. and Cooper, M., eds. 2010. LGBT Identity and Online New Media. New York: Routledge.
Sender, K. 2004. Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. New York: Columbia University Press.
Walters, S.D. 2001. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Raffi Sarkissian
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sarkissian, R. (2014). Queering TV Conventions: LGBT Teen Narratives on Glee. In: Pullen, C. (eds) Queer Youth and Media Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383556_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383556_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48056-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-38355-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)