Making It Better: LGBT Youth and New Pedagogies of Media Production

Youth media pedagogy has always been bound up with questions of agency and concerns about the impact of structural demands on what is produced. Recent constructions of this problematic suggest a tension between institutional funding structures and discourses that position the millennial generation as inherently skilled to use and benefit from working with digital media production technologies. LGBT youth in particular have been positioned at the center of a variety of public health, social justice and educational campaigns that encourage them to produce public service announcement videos (PSAs). These videos are often used as a technique of empowerment, which is predicated on the assumption that participation in the production process engenders self-expression and self-reflection. Yet, the practices of production suggest that what drives youth to make such videos is structured as much by professionalizing discourses as the desire to express.;This dissertation turns a critical eye toward the common utilization of digital media production as identity work, community building and as part of an ongoing effort to garner resources for LGBT youth in the early 2000s. Working directly with a community of LGBT teen filmmakers in a weekly media workshop that I designed, I examine the dynamics of their video production choices in response to a national corporation's prompt to produce an anti-gay-bullying public service announcement. This in-situ approach enables me to detail how adult expectations for youth to produce media content may ultimately mask resource needs and homogenize representations of the LGBT youth population. Contrasting prominent discourses that describe this generation of young people as “digital natives” who express themselves most naturally through their media use, and youth access to media production technologies as a primary concern, I suggest new approaches to youth media pedagogy that account for a more complex relationship to production. The study offers a nuanced theorization of media practice that emphasizes intersubjective exchange during the production process as a priority over the creation of specific types of content thought to be empowering for its producers.