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Pink Dollars, White Collars: Queer as Folk , Valuable Viewers, and the Price of Gay TV

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/15295036.2011.559478

1529-5036

Wendy Peters,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Using the American series Queer as Folk (QAF) as a lens into queer televisual representation, this article undertakes a political economic analysis of the show's production and combines it with existing textual analyses of the series, in order to argue that the quest for "valuable" demographics privileges viewers—gay and straight—with access to race, class, and male privilege, and leads to whitewashed representations of affluent, gender normative, gays and lesbians. Seeking to explore the implications of such claims, I take up Fejes's (2000) notation that "the media [are] part of the larger social process of creating identities for lesbians and gays" and offer a qualitative analysis of audience research involving a small sample of avid Canadian viewers of QAF. Among these viewers, white, middle-class, gay, and questioning men were most likely to validate, experience, and forge personal and collective gay identities in relation to the series. That is to say, those non-heterosexual viewers most likely to be deemed valuable by Viacom were best able to validate existing gay identities and "come out" in relation to QAF. This research points to the ways in which gays, lesbians, and queers who fall outside of demographics assessed as "valuable" may continue to be excluded from popular representation and the apparently validating experience of consuming commodified versions of "oneself" on television.