This book traces the turbulent history of queer visibility in the Irish media to explore the processes by which a regionally based media system shaped queer identities within a highly conservative and religious population. The book details the emergence of an LGBTQ rights movement in Ireland and charts how this burgeoning movement utilised the media for the liberatory potential of advancing LGBTQ rights. However, mainstream media institutions also exploited queer identities for economic purposes, which, coupled with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, disrupted the mainstreaming goals of queer visibility. Drawing on industrial, societal and production culture determinants, the author identifies the shifting contours of queer visibility in the Irish media, uncovering the longstanding relationship between LGBTQ organising and the Irish media. This book is suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and LGBTQ studies.

This thematically-arranged study traces the emergence of visible gay and lesbian communities across the Republic of Ireland and their impact on public perceptions of homosexuality. Along the way it explores the critical and hidden activism of lesbian women, the role of rural provincial activists, the importance of interactions with international gay and lesbian organisations and the extent to which HIV and AIDS impacted the gay rights campaign. Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973-93 focuses in particular on activists' efforts to engage with the different religious organisations in Ireland, the Trade Union movement, Irish political parties and the media, and how these efforts in turn shaped the strategies and activities of gay and lesbian organisations. McDonagh argues that gay and lesbian activists mounted an effective campaign to improve both the legal and social climate for Ireland's gay and lesbian citizens. In doing so, gay and lesbian individuals were important agents of social and political change in the Republic of Ireland in the period from the 1970s to the early 1990s, particularly in relation to Irish sexual mores. The book also helps to contextualise the changes in perceptions of homosexuality that have taken place in recent years and encourages scholars of Irish history to further explore the contribution of Ireland's LGBTQ+ community in transforming Irish society in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe. This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people’s constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people’s practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education.

This edited collection provides an invaluable resource of seventeen chapters from a wide range of academic disciplines. These chapters place sex and sexualities in Ireland in historical context and take the reader through the structural changes that have transformed the expression of sexuality in Ireland from one of self-denial to self-expression. The collection does not however unquestionably assume a linear narrative of progress: new issues and challenges are also addressed throughout. This book will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of disciplines including sociology, social policy, history, media, gender studies and psychology. The collection is divided into six separate but interlinked thematic sections: Sexualities in Historical Irish Contexts, Young Adults, Sexual Health, and Education, Sexual Practices and Health, Minority Sexualities and Genders, Sex Work in Ireland and Activism and Contestation.

This pioneering collection provides, for the first time, an international and transdisciplinary reflection on youth, history and queer sexualities and genders. Since the 1970s there has been an explosion in research focusing on LGBTQ history and on the lives of LGBTQ young people, but these two research areas have seldom been brought together explicitly. Bridging LGBTQ historical scholarship and contemporary queer youth cultural studies, this book marks out pathways for thinking more about youth in LGBTQ history and more about history in contemporary understandings of LGBTQ youth. Examining histories from the nineteenth century through to the recent past, contributors examine queer youth histories in continental Europe, Britain, the United States of America, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Amidst the moments of seismic change in LGBTQ history in Ireland lie the stories of ordinary people, who did extraordinary things to change queer Ireland and Irish culture.

The first comprehensive survey of LGBTQ fiction in contemporary Ireland. Before Ireland decriminalized same-sex sexual activity in 1993, the nation was essentially devoid of an LGBTQ literary tradition, due to the political and cultural dominance of conservative, censorious ideology. Though the situation has drastically changed in some ways since then--the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote, Ireland is today hailed as a beacon of equal rights--there is still much work to be done to fully claim parity, visibility, and recognition for all LGBTQ artists. ​ Queer Whispers is the first comprehensive survey of Irish LGBTQ fiction, spanning the late 1970s through today. The book foregrounds the cultural contribution of Irish writers whose subversive, dissident voices not only challenged the homophobia and heteronormative values of pre-1993 Ireland but also continue to interrogate the persistent discrimination in today's seemingly more liberal atmosphere. Through analyses of representative novels and short stories, José Carregal addresses a host of social issues--lesbian invisibility, same-sex parenthood, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, among many others--and considers how authors pushed for broader awareness of the oppression of LGBTQ people in contemporary Ireland. The writing explored in Queer Whispers consistently exposes the limitations imposed by cultural and political silence, while simultaneously articulating new forms of recognition and resilience in the face of queer Ireland's continued struggles.

A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling—and perhaps unable—to fully comprehend and honor it? While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore—the first gay bookstore in the country—or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.

This book focuses on the ways in which North American Muslim women artists "talk back" to dominant discourses about Muslim identity and work to counter mainstream stereotypes and representations. It examines the possibilities of constructing discourses of resistance to domination. Against a backdrop of dominant media representations of oppressed and passive Muslim women, the media interventions of the exceptional women artists whose voices are showcased in this book, demonstrate that Muslim women are diverse and autonomous agents who have, historically, and continue contemporarily, to fight against all forms of injustice including those that seek to circumscribe their realities and experiences. To explore expressions and articulations of alternative discourses, this book analyzes the media texts of exceptional women artists: the stand-up comedy of Palestinian-American Maysoon Zayid, the cinematic interventions of Iranian-American Shirin Neshat, and the television comedy of Pakistani-Canadian Zarqa Nawaz. Using a methodology consisting of a textual analysis grounded in the theoretical framework of postcolonial theory and informed by gender studies and alternative media research, the analysis is supplemented with semi-structured interviews with the artists. This book is suitable for scholars and students in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Politics.