Sexuality and Media

Questions about the media - television, film, newspapers, magazines - continue to be important and troubling because of the media's powerful role in representing cultural identities. Questions about identity - sexuality, gender, ethnicity, age - are equally important and troubling because there is no consensus about what we mean by identity. This is particularly so in the case of sexuality and the media. This book explores how the media deals with those cultural identities which are often understood in relation to sex and sexuality. It examines representations of sexuality in relation to the media's role in the construction of, for example, desire, power, exclusion, diversity, sameness and difference, class, and ethnicity. "Sexuality and Media" views sexuality as a plural rather than a singular entity so that lesbian, gay, and queer studies of the media will be discussed in the context of a range of debates reflecting the breadth of theories and sexualities represented in a range of media forms and contexts.
The material is structured around discussion of principal writers, key case studies and formations, and theories, drawing on local-global texts and contexts in order to illustrate the arguments.