"Queer Visibility and Social Class"
Media Queered Symposium, University of Illinois Chicago
April 2, 2004
Description:
How do popular discourses of social class in the United States frame current queer visibility? A familiar critical idea - that U.S. media culture contains no popular discourse about social class - is worth resisting. Class difference may be richly present but indirectly expressed. Queerness, by contrast, is announced. How does the high profile of queerness encounter the low profile of class difference in the popular media? With key examples from commercial television and independent cinema, this essay tracks the reciprocal mediation of queerness and class, to reveal a symbolic economy of body, family, and acquisition as class measures of queer worth.
