Overview

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.

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9780367589523

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Reviews

Berliner challenges existing truisms about digital media and youth empowerment with a thoughtful examination of anti-bullying rhetoric, the logic of public service announcements and public health messaging more generally, and the discourses of neoliberal resilience that undercut possibilities for solidarity and subversion in social movements. Rather than approach youth media without examining the biases of ageism and classicism, Berliner encourages readers - from her position as an experienced educator - to consider the media practices of queer youth on their own terms. -Elizabeth Losh, William and Mary Producing Queer Youth is an original and useful intervention into scholarship about contemporary media with a particular, close attention to youth engagement and empowerment as well as histories of and possibilities for online social justice campaigns. The book's most critical contribution is its contentious, perhaps counter-intuitive concluding claim Against Digital Media Empowerment. In making this negative assertion, Lauren Berliner makes positive contributions within media studies, queer studies, youth studies, media ethnography, and media literacy. Building careful case studies of queer youth media empowerment projects and some necessary history of advertising, media literacy, and PSAs, Berliner shatters this myth or rather a set of mutually producing myths by revealing the paradoxes of digital media empowerment and the often hidden power and need of governments and corporations behind so-called youth produced media campaigns. -Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College

Author Information

Lauren S. Berliner is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, USA.

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