Queer(y)ing the Sydney Star Observer: Queer Representation in 'Queer' Media

Queerying the Sydney Star Observer: Queer Representation in 'Queer' Media

Bachelor of Communication (Honours)

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the sovereignty of the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of the land that I live on.

Thankyou to Belinda Cooper, my inspiration. Thankyou to Belinda Morrissey for your wisdom, guidance and brilliant mind. Thankyou to Mum, Gran, Pop, Adam and Andrew for your love, patience and support.

Abstract

Australians of minority sexes, genders and sexualities have little, if any, access to widely distributed media. The Sydney Star Observer (SSO) is Australia’s leading gay and lesbian newspaper. The SSO aims to provide news and information to a range of minority sexes, genders and sexualities. However this is not the case. Instead, the majority of the queer community is ignored in the SSO, which focuses on and markets to mainly a white, affluent, gay audience, thus contributing little to the plight of minority sexes, genders and sexualities across Australia.

This thesis investigates queer representation in the SSO. It aims to determine who is represented in the SSO, how they are represented and why they are represented as such. The thesis provides an alternative model to the way the SSO community and the SSO citizen are currently represented in order to better meet its aims.

The work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler is used to understand what queer is and the possibilities that queer enables. Research into the lives of people of minority sexes, genders and sexualities provide evidence as to why representation of a range of minority sexes, gender and sexualities is important. An overview on ‘queer’ media provides an insight into the form ‘queer’ media tends to adopt and assists in explaining why the SSO takes its current form.

The research employs Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore the complexities of queer theory and identity in an attempt to understand how these impact on queer representation in the SSO. Content analysis is used to prove the relevancy of the thesis statement and assists in identifying themes for discourse analysis.

The analysis of the SSO community reveals a community founded on caring ideals that touts equality, however, equality is not truly achieved due to the limited focus on the rights and care of the gay, white male. This community is essentialist, enabling participation for a limited few.

An examination of citizenship and the SSO citizen, using Alan McKee’s frame of a gay consumer citizenship, reveals that the SSO produces a consumer citizenship and a gay, white male citizen. This SSO citizen must possess a number of qualities, all closely associated with consumerism, in order to participate in the SSO’s citizenship.

Due to the limited community model, the limited ideas of the citizen and of citizenship, adopted by the SSO, the paper produces an exclusionary formulation of community and citizenship which undermines ideals of equality touted by the paper. These limitations also result in the failure of the SSO to meet its stated aims and do little to represent and provide news and information for others of minority sexes, genders and sexualities.

Submitted!

I submitted my thesis today. The sense that it is completed is yet to kick in. I suspect it will somewhere in between the opening of the bottle of sparkly and the finishing of the bottle of sparkly, on Saturday night.

We shall have our thesis marks on the 16th of November and our course grades on the 24th.

Then, to await the offer of a PhD place and a shiny, shiny $20 grand/year scholarship.

For now, I'm trying to relax. It's been a stressed couple of weeks with the addition of multiple PhD applications as well as completing my thesis.

Now, as promised...the acknowledgements and abstract [See above post].

Friends who would like to see more of the thesis, just let me know.

"Well if you're not going to talk to me I'm going to talk to my orange" - Adam (my 14-year-old brother).

You're nearly there!

That's what my research supervisor said about my thesis, yesterday.
I've got to do a bit of a proof read and chuck in a few references tomorrow.

There's a brief sentence in the conclusion that I'm not sure of, but my research supervisor will help me out with that.

So, I've gotta send her one last draft tomorrow and there might be a bit more tweaking here and there, but, yes I am nearly there!

The last few weeks have been very busy, dealing with numerous PhD and scholarship application while completing my thesis.

I shall also be completing the applications this week.

I plan to get muchly pissed on Saturday night.

And then we wait...for grades and (hopefully) shiny, shiny scholarship offers!

Andy and Pop come out.

Andy has my car at the mo' because his bike chucked a tanty and the Skyline still isn't on the road. My car has a fantastic queer pride flag on the back. Ppl might think Andy's queer. I'm a little amused but hope he doesn't fall victim to any nasty homophobes.

The other day Pop was looking at some of my activist badges sitting on the bench. He picked up the 'Shhh...nobody knows I'm queer' one and put in on. He asked if he could wear it to his mates places. I was muchly amused. The next day he asked if he could wear it again. Maybe all his self cross-dressing references are starting to make sense...

"Well if you're not going to talk to me I'm going to talk to my orange" - Adam (my 14-year-old brother).

Ticker Tocker

"Well if you're not going to talk to me I'm going to talk to my orange" - Adam (my 14-year-old brother).

Jey - A RiotACT webwhore.

JB over at The RiotACT has updated the website's 'bylines' - the little tag lines under the web banner, usually made up of midly amusing comments, that change each time you reload the page.
And I have a byline! woOt! It's not particularly amusing or witty, or even that much to get excited over, but hey, I'm amused.

Check out this post for the round up of the new bylines.

VYBerlinaV8's is a favourite of mine.

"Well if you're not going to talk to me I'm going to talk to my orange" - Adam (my 14-year-old brother).