Placing the Queer Audience: Literature on Gender and Sexual Diversity in Film and Television Reception

This article provides an overview of existing scholarship on gender- and sexually-diverse Anglophone film and television media. It presents an up-to-date state of the field, drawing genealogical traces across different frameworks for conducting research on this topic and theorizes reasons why certain methods, approaches and emphases have dominated while others have been excluded or marginalized within this growing field. The article focuses on four key trends that can be discerned in the meta-analysis of contemporary scholarship on queer screen media: the dominance of textual analysis of films and series following traditional literary and film studies methods; an emphasis on questions of visibility and the shift from general visibility of minority characters to analyses of positive and negative representations; how assumptions about audiences has produced limited perspectives on the value of texts or which assumes audience members make meanings primarily in relation to identity standpoints; and finally, an analysis of a small number of recent studies that have undertaken empirical audience research. A cultural studies approach that is attentive to the full range of media processes from creative contexts to audience reception is, we argue, necessary to understand the significance of gender and sexual diversity in media.