Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender 2014 Abstracts
Saying Goodbye to Men: Southern Feminists Publishing News While Challenging Patriarchy • Jose Araiza • In 1975, a lesbian separatist newsletter named Goodbye to All That (GTAT) was published in Austin, Texas, to challenge patriarchy in the left. This textual analysis guided by standpoint feminist theory analyzed how the women struggled to define feminism for themselves. While GTAT was similar to lesbian publications of the same era, GTAT covered the topics of sex, dyke separatism, and motherhood in a unique fashion that could be partially attributed to their Southern heritage.
“Look at Keelin and Caster Now!”: The Olympic Body In Resistance to Hegemonic Norms • Sim Butler, University of Alabama; Kim Bissell • Disability scholars (Lindemann, 2010; Longmore, 2003; Garland-Thompson, 2011; McRuer & Mollow, 2012) argue that the cultural articulation of which bodies are “normal” segregates, regulates, and demeans people whose bodies are deemed disabled, while elevating other bodies as most enviable. Keelin Godsey, a transgendered hammer thrower, and Caster Semenya, a sprinter whose identity as a female was officially and publically scrutinized, represent a pair of non-normative bodies with Olympic aspirations. The qualification process of Godsey and Semenya during the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games (LSOG) highlights one of the many challenges created in the construction, mediation, and reaction to athlete’s bodies and to society’s perceptions of able-bodiedness. This project seeks to examine the role of athletic competition as a means of resistance to normative constructions of the body through a critical/cultural rhetorical analysis of the qualification process of Caster Semenya and Keelin Godsey. Continuing the connections made by West (2010) and McRuer and Mollow (2012), we ask how narratives of non-normative body constructions might resist or maintain hegemonic constructions of athletic bodies within sport. Given that athletic competition stands as a public measure of ability, situations like those embedded in the 2012 LSOG could create spaces to call into question the social construction of able-bodiedness in a number of ways and is part of the impetus for the current project. These and other implications are considered.
Sport Journalists’ Framing of Gay NBA Player Jason Collins • Edward Kian, Oklahoma State University; Danny Shipka, Oklahoma State University • A textual analysis examined popular U.S. newspapers and websites’ framing of Jason Collins’ coming out as the first ‘active’ gay athlete in a popular U.S. professional men’s teamsport. Journalists framed Collins’ outing as historic and those criticizing Collins as antiquated outliers. Whereas Collins was praised as a hero, journalists noted he might never play again, mitigating his impact. Overall, media framed sport as an inclusive institution for gays, countering most scholarship on homosexuality in sport.
Incidental contact with same-sex couples in non-traditional news content: An examination of exemplification and parasocial contact effects • Jessica Myrick, Indiana University; Rhonda Gibson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • A news report about the lack of insurance availability for non-married couples, presented in news blog format, was manipulated to create versions differing in exemplar type (straight unmarried couple, same-sex unmarried couple) and story perspective (first person, third person). Readers evaluated the quality of the news article and estimated the number of American companies that offer health insurance benefits to domestic partners and the percentage of the population that identifies as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Respondents also completed measures of intergroup anxiety, empathy, social distance, and attitudes toward GLBT individuals, in addition to measures of behavioral intentions related to support for changes in health insurance public policy. Exemplification effects on estimates of the prevalence of sexual minorities were not found; however, those viewing same-sex exemplars were more likely to indicate willingness to take action to support changes in health insurance policy for domestic partners than were those viewing straight exemplars. Stories using straight exemplars and presented in the third person and those using same-sex exemplars and presented in the first person elicited higher levels of empathy than did third-person stories with same-sex exemplars and first-person stories with straight exemplars. Implications for journalists and public policy message creators are discussed.
Moral Panic in a Pandemic: A Historical Analysis of HIV Coverage and the America Responds to AIDS Campaign in 1987 • Chelsea Reynolds, University of Minnesota • This article presents a historical media analysis of the Reagan administration’s HIV/AIDS prevention efforts during 1987. It positions Reagan’s reticence surrounding HIV education within cultural, political, and mediated contexts using Cohen’s 1972 definition of moral panic as the driving framework. This paper argues that despite health authorities’ push for media to integrate risk behaviors into HIV prevention messages, Reagan and the CDC focused on scapegoat populations rather than on behavioral interventions.
Framing Same-sex Marriage in Taiwan: The Persuasive Appeal Frame • Mengchieh Jacie Yang; JhuCin Jhang, University of Texas at Austin • The current study focuses on how news media coverage same-sex marriage issues in Taiwan. With a framing perspective and news articles collected from Yahoo News Taiwan, the study found that international news stories significantly outnumbered those of the local news. Local news articles on same-sex marriage usually started with an episodic frame, but were supported by thematic quotes that rely heavily on several gender equality advocacy groups. The dominant frame the authors found in most news articles covering same-sex marriage in Taiwan was the Persuasive Appeal Frame. The Persuasive Appeal Frame includes three appeals based on Aristotle’s (Rhetoric) framework: the authoritative appeal, reasoning appeal, and emotional appeal. Implications and suggestions are also discussed.
Framing Gay Marriage in Leading U.S. Newspapers and TV Networks • Yue Zheng, University of South Carolina • Using a quantitatively analysis of 410 news stories from six newspapers and three TV networks from 2004 to 2013, this study explored how Mass media organized the gay marriage stories, what issue attributes they presented to support/oppose gay marriage, and what story tone it was. The study also examined the different visibility of the news frame between newspaper and television, between liberal and conservative newspapers, as well as across time period.
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