| This project examines the courtship of sexual minority publics by the contemporary media industries in the context of digital convergence. I consider the explicit targeting of queer audiences via film, television, and online media as an outgrowth of corporate consolidation and the development of new media platforms. Here, the politics of difference are utilized to generate capital. Media forms like niche-oriented film, multi-platform cable, and post-network television court audiences with an array of feelings about public sphere concerns. This traffic in sociopolitical dialogue differs based on delivery technology, narrative genre, and institutional context, shaping media production and distribution wherever the signs of difference---sexual, but also racial and ethnic---target identity publics in search of profit. These consumer appeals mark the slippery terrain of the political in the context of neoliberal governance, where emotions are deployed in the spirit of enabling self-actualization among audiences, as well as facilitating a sense of communal, metropolitan, or national "belonging." In examining these processes through attention to press discourses, I make a crucial break from previous scholarship on questions of identity as they relate to film, television, and the internet. I root the analysis in archival research in locally-published, advertiser-supported magazines, historicizing convergence media practices and identifying a cultural logic for more recent queer media in the commercial spaces of American urban centers. These publications describe---and, in some sense, form---public venues that enable the generation of capital and the circulation of affects. Thus, niche-oriented cinema, narrowcast television, and online portals manufacture emotions for queer publics that are similar to those made available in urban public cultures. In an effort to analyze the changes wrought by convergence in a way that is more attuned to the affective labors of media professionals and the conflicted pleasures of media consumers, I underscore how LGBT media forms court queer publics by generating feelings of empowerment and attachment through the terms of commerce. I call this process "gay consumer citizenship," marking off the processes by which media forms court queer publics explicitly, engaging in a bounded dialogue on social and political issues. |
