Media/Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents by Kevin G. Barnhurst

Abstract

The field of new media studies interrogates the processes and implications of a burgeoning technological landscape amid questions of identity, agency, and visibility. No longer do we live in a world where “representation” can be understood merely as what we can hear on the radio or see on television or in the cinema; new media studies focuses instead on the rapidly multiplying opportunities for people to use media in their everyday lives as a result of the increasing frequency of technological breakthroughs and cultural transformations. It has only recently gained momentum as a salient academic discipline, so it is no surprise that queer modulations within the discipline are few and far between. Kevin G. Barnhurst’s Media/Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents provides 13 critical essays by contemporary media scholars, cultural critics, and even journalists that inaugurate queerness—in varying manifestations—to the realm of new media studies. The book aims—and in many ways succeeds—to fill the gap between media studies and queer studies through discussions of the paradoxes of queer visibility. The book is organized under four main topics: history, the professional, the popular, and technology. As this interand transdisciplinary constitution might suggest, this volume will prove useful for scholars and instructors in a range of disciplines, including traditional media studies (radio/television/film), cultural studies, rhetoric studies, and of course gender studies; however, this volume also provides material for those general readers who have an interest both in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)/queer media representations and in uses of new or digital media by queer people in their everyday lives. Barnhurst argues in his introduction that the paradoxes of queer visibility correspond to positive aspects of queer life—progress, accrual of capital, cultural acceptance, and digital prowess—aspects that are both realized and surrendered as a result of queer visibility. However, following Foucault’s views on so-called binary divisions, Barnhurst advises readers to think about new ways of thinking about visibility and its discontents: “Queers must find different ways of not saying such things as these: organizing our stories around the closet, ministering professionally to our invisibility, celebrating our popularity, and hoping for a technological,