Frederik Dhaenens

Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory: Slash Fiction, Queer Reading, and Transgressing the Boundaries of Screen Studies, Representations, and Audiences

The popularity of slash fiction, a productive strand of fan fiction in which same-sex television or film characters are subversively made into queer subjects, has grown in recent years. The practice of queer readings, which is about repositioning texts outside the borders of heteronormativity, very much resembles some of the basic premises of queer theory, the post-structural theory that contests strict categorical views on gender and sexuality. Unfortunately, slash fiction as well as audience reception practices do not appear to be high on the agenda of queer film theorists. This article argues that queer-sensitive audiences cannot be ignored in research on queer representations and reception in media studies. Moreover, the authors argue for a multidisciplinary approach that includes queer theory frameworks and insights from audience and reception studies as demonstrated by queer readings of non—queer-coded texts such as slash fiction.

Articulations of queer resistance on the small screen

Despite the increase of gay characters on the small screen, many contemporary media scholars argue that gay representations in Western television productions are governed by heteronormativity. Yet, a few queer theoretically informed media scholars postulate that popular television is able to articulate queer resistance to the privileged position of the heterosexual matrix. With this article, I contribute to the exploration of the resistant potential of Western television fiction for queer resistance. The article presents a queer theoretically informed comprehension of queer resistance on television and postulates that resistance to heteronormativity can be articulated by queer deconstruction strategies, which exposes how heteronormativity operates, and queer reconstruction strategies, which represents queer and viable alternatives to the heteronormal.

Understanding Queer Normality: LGBT+ Representations in Millenial Flemish Television Fiction:

Queer television studies scholarship tends to construct “queerness” and “normality” as incommensurable concepts, defining queer “against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” In this article, we show how this construction is specifically intertwined with highly liberalized media contexts, and generates a fundamentally static understanding and operationalization of the concept of normality in queer television studies. Turning to Flemish television fiction of the late 1990s, we point to a dynamic and open-ended approach toward sexual and gender diversity, and illustrate how televised normality itself can be a queer phenomenon. In doing so, we offer a framework to understand the proliferation of LGBT+ characters and storylines in twenty-first-century Flemish television fiction, and contribute to a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of normalization and television fiction in a western European television industry.

Pink programming across Europe: exploring identity politics at European LGBT film festivals

Abstract LGBT film festivals curate programs that are expected to cater to LGBT identity politics, conform to normative cinematic standards of European film festivals and consider the manifold desires of their target audiences. Since programmers are crucial to this process, the present study investigated European programmers’ approaches to identity politics. The analysis of in-depth expert interviews with 24 film programmers from 17 film festivals in 17 European countries revealed that most programmers aim to create festivals that are as inclusive as possible. They knowingly use traditionalist and queer programming strategies to negotiate between various stakeholders within particular societal contexts. According to the interviewees, using both approaches does not hamper the political and emancipatory work of LGBT film festivals; they are able to program both mainstream films about outdated and overrepresented identities as well as critical films with underrepresented themes. Nonetheless, funding, audiences and societal contexts affect certain programming practices. Many festivals provide entertainment to appease sponsors, generate press coverage and please loyal audiences. Additionally, certain national and urban contexts may affect the way a festival promotes itself and its identity politics to the societies in which it operates.

How queer is 'pink' programming? On the representational politics of an identity-based film program at Film Fest Gent

International film festivals (IFFs) are increasingly taking an interest in offering programs that target LGBT audiences. Since this practice can be understood as an emancipatory and commercial strategy, this article examines the implications of this ambiguity within an IFF’s politics of representation. Drawing on the results from a textual and contextual analysis of the films and programming strategies of the 2014 Film Fest Gent in Belgium, this article argues that an IFF has the potential to engage in moderately queer programming. By offering an identity-based program that makes room for alternative and critical negotiations of identity and intimacy and that looks for ways to offer LGBT content to diverse audiences in various settings, this festival demonstrates how programming LGBT content can be a critical and commercial success without having to rely on homonormative tropes and practices.

Audiences’ Coping Practices with Intrusive Interfaces: Researching Audiences in Algorithmic, Datafied, Platform Societies

People in their role as audiences are increasingly confronted with intrusive digital media technologies that seek to collect personal data, shape people’s media experiences through algorithms and increasingly work towards establishing what is already being called a platform society. This tendency will become even more pertinent in the near future with the Internet of Things permeating many more aspects of our everyday lives. Software interfaces are thus becoming important objects of scientific inquiry. However, even though in their materiality interfaces promote very specific forms of media practices, people’s sense-making and interpretations still need to be considered as part of future audience research. In this context, we propose the idea of audiences’ coping practices when facing intrusive media interfaces in their exploitive, formative, ubiquitous and excluding character. By juxtaposing coping practices with intrusive media we sketch current and projected trends in audience research that focus on the power behind intrusive media on the one side and on people’s sense-making on the other side.

Gendered ageing bodies in popular media culture

Grace and Frankie (2015 to present), the Netflix original about two 70-year-old women who become unlikely friends after their respective husbands confess they have been in love with each other for the last 20 years, was released just a few months before this special issue on ageing and popular media culture was conceived. In its third season now, the series portrays two women who are interested in affective relationships, do not hide their sexual desires, propose new businesses, overcome the difficulties of marriage breakup, and eventually become good friends. The series particularly succeeds in breaking with some of the mainstream ageist representations of women as youthful, sexy and desirable (Kathleen Woodward 2006) and challenges the idea that all women are obsessed with trying to look and act young while being anxious over growing old (Imelda Whelehan 2010; Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne 2014). In the second season, for instance, Grace and Frankie try to market a lubricant that Frankie has created, and later they set up their own company to sell vibrators designed by and for women their age. These subversive images invite audiences not only to look beyond rigid and unquestioned ideas about gender and sexuality but also, most of all, to question ageist assumptions. As in other post-feminist cultural products, contradictions are abundant (Fien Adriaens and Sofie Van Bauwel 2011; Antonio Caballero, Iolanda Tortajada and Cilia Willem, forthcoming), in Grace and Frankie. Still, we see the two protagonists laughing at themselves, for example when Frankie jokes about the fact that Grace tells the doctor that she has never had surgery—thus implying that Grace has undergone cosmetic surgery on numerous occasions—or in the way in which both are aware of their fears and express these in a playful and humorous way. Although there have been other television shows featuring 70-plus women, these positive representations are rare. Grace and Frankie’s characters, despite some stereotyped portrayals (the hippy and the posh lady) and certain conventions (not showing the naked mature female body), somehow question post-feminist popular culture. By putting their finger on the complexities of ageing, the show implicitly makes a point against gendered ageism.

Reading the Boys of Girls

In line with recent scholarship highlighting the dynamic nature of masculinities, this chapter focuses on the representation of men in Girls and the way that the show diverges from the dominant practice of representing men as aspiring to and/or embodying a hegemonic masculine identity. Dhaenens argues that the series deconstructs hegemonic masculinity by depicting men negotiating a variety of discourses of masculinity whilst simultaneously clashing with the mandates of hegemonic masculinity, thereby revealing the various ways that men deal with such an impossible yet legitimated identity position. As such, Girls shows that although men in contemporary US society embody some form of inclusive masculinity, they are still confronted with a hegemonic masculinity governing their gender identities.

Historical, temporal and contemporary trends on gender and media

In this article, we point to the peculiar conjuncture between the increased emancipation of gay men and lesbian women in late 1990s’ Belgium, and the noted impact of the contemporaneous Dutroux affair on the construction of sexual diversity in the country. Approaching the case as a moral panic, we conducted a discourse analysis of the associated coverage in four mainstream Flemish newspapers, focusing on the articulation of homosexuality with child abuse. In doing so, we show how the folk devil is an a posteriori construct, operating as an empty signifier rather than a defined character, rendering it open to recuperation by other discourses. Hence, we illustrate how the conspiratorial construction of the folk devil in the Dutroux affair provided a space to articulate homosexuality with while still refraining from engaging in an explicitly homophobic rhetoric. Finally, we point to how historical contingencies inhibited the presence of moral entrepreneurs, pointing to moral opportunists as discursive agents instead. 1_CJCS_9.2_Vanlee_185-199.indd 185 11/27/17 9:32 AM Florian Vanlee | Sofie Van Bauwel | Frederik Dhaenens 186 Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 1. As a federal state,

Resistant masculinities in alternative R&B? Understanding Frank Ocean and The Weeknd’s representations of gender:

With the emergence of alternative R&B, contemporary R&B and hip hop culture are being confronted with a subgenre that challenges its key characteristics. One of the aspects that typify alternative R&B is the emergence of an alternative masculinity. The aim of this study is to research whether the alternative masculinities represented in alternative R&B resist the hegemonic masculine ideal established within R&B and hip hop culture. To this end, this study conducts a textual analysis of the representations of gender in the work of Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, artists considered representative for alternative R&B. The analysis reveals that Ocean’s work features successful nonnormative masculine identities, whereas The Weeknd refrains to representing postmodern exaggerations of the hegemonic male. Despite divergent representational strategies, both artists do engage in questioning what it means to be a man in R&B and hip hop culture and thereby at least attempt to challenge the supremacy of hegemonic masculinity.