Mainstreaming Gays: Beyond Queer Niche

This talk is part of the REAL TALK series, co-organized by the Women's Center and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.  

In this talk, Dr. Ng draws on her  book Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television (Rutgers UP, 2023) to ask: how has the mainstreaming of LGBTQ content and producers occurred, and what has it meant for media production and culture more broadly? Through the lens of scholarship on convergence culture, media platforms, and production, she identifies multiple converging trends: the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ narratives within commercial media. Certain U.S. television networks played key roles via not only their linear programming, but also through bringing in a new cohort of queer digital content creators and facilitating new spaces for queer interaction online. Exemplifying significant shifts from legacy media to the streaming era, these developments constituted the ground from which recent developments for LGBTQ content and queer sociality online have emerged. Yet, as both current programming decisions by streaming services and ongoing culture wars demonstrate, substantial integrations into the mainstream have not fully countered continuing precarities for queer expression and participation.

Eve Ng is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Media Arts and Studies, and a core faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio University. She completed a Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and her scholarship examines LGBTQ media, digital cultures, and constructions of national identity. Besides Mainstreaming Gays , she is also the author of Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) .