Producing Queer Youth The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media Series

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 for?rather than, in itself, evidence of?power.

Introduction 1. The Problem with Youth Voices 2. "Look at Me, I’m 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 Can’t Talk When I’m 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.