This book
challenges ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment, cultural transformation, and social progress. Via research with queer teen media makers and analysis of youth-produced videos and media campaigns, Berliner unsettles assumptions that having a "voice" and visibility equate to securing rights
Producing Queer Youth challenges popular ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment, cultural transformation, and social progress. Based on over three years of participant action research with queer teen media-makers and textual analysis of hundreds of youth-produced videos and popular media campaigns, the book unsettles assumptions that having a "voice" and gaining visibility and recognition necessarily equate to securing rights and resources. Instead, Berliner offers a nuanced picture of openings that emerge for youth media producers as they negotiate the structures of funding and publicity and manage their identities with digital self-representations. Examining youth media practices within broader communication history and critical media pedagogy, she forwards an approach to media production that re-centers the process of making as the site of potential learning and social connection. Ultimately, she reframes digital media participation as a struggle forrather than, in itself, evidence ofpower.
Introduction
1. The Problem with Youth Voices
2. "Look at Me, Im Doing
Fine!": The Conundrum of Legibility, Visibility, and Identity Management in
Queer Viral Videos
3. Vernacular Voices: Business Gets Personal in Public
Service Announcements
4. "I Cant Talk When Im Supposed to Say Something":
Negotiating Expression in a Queer-Youth-Produced Anti-Bullying Video
Conclusion: Out of the Closet and into the Tweets
Lauren S. Berliner is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, USA.