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Gay
Visiblity and Visual Justice
Giovanni
Porfido
School
of Applied Social Sciences Sociology
Durham
University
(Inglaterra/UK)
This paper explores the
notion of visual justice in relation to questions of gay
identity and gay visibility. It looks at the relationship
between gay identity and visual justice because the
homosexual experience of social exclusion and
discrimination is often described as a form of social
invisibility and gay identity politics can be seen as a
struggle to obtain public visibility.
It argues that in
late-capitalist or spectacular societies, social dynamics
connected to visual matters and regimes of visuality have
increasing salience, and the lack of visual
representations and/or misrepresentation of gays in
mainstream culture and society is a form of injustice that
needs to be seriously addressed. This thesis analyses and
critically questions the relationship between gay identity
and forms of visibility. To articulate these questions the
paper considers the public media event produced by the
broadcast of the first entirely gay TV drama Queer as
Folk.
The programme’s explicit
visions of gayness triggered a heated public debate on
questions of gay visibility. Some viewers saw it as an
obscene programme which was rendering public matters that
were better kept ‘private’, whilst some others
welcomed it as an example of a more democratic widening of
the representational arena, and as a symptom of greater
social inclusion and acceptance of gays in mainstream
culture and society.
By examining and evaluating
the public discourses around Queer as Folk this paper
articulates a wider sociological investigation into the
relationship between gay identity and the representational
field. It aims to gain an understanding of social
inclusion and social justice in visually mass mediated
societies and emphasises the importance of cultural
visibility to encourage the social inclusion of gays in
multicultural/visual Britain and to promote more equal and
democratic opportunities of visual and social citizenship.
The paper considers how gay
visibility challenges views of social justice based on the
distinction between symbolic processes of culture and the
material processes of political economy (Fraser and
Honneth, 2003). It demonstrates that visual
representations of homosexuality impinge on both symbolic
and material social processes and that homosexual cultural
visibility is simultaneously a recognitive and
redistributive claim for justice (Butler, 1998). It
highlights important questions about the social
invisibility of identity-based minorities and their
struggle for public visibility and recognition.
This paper demonstrates
that the public representational arena is still regulated
by heteronormative dynamics. Gay people remain
under-represented and misrepresented in contemporary
visual life. It suggests that public TV broadcasting must
address the question of homosexual visual citizenship. It
must fulfil the representational needs and rights of
homosexual audiences. Crucially, the paper also discusses
the possible shortcomings of gay politics of visibility in
the pursuit of visual justice: the danger of visual
commodification of gay identity, the disciplinary risk of
identitarian surveillance, and the risk of social,
cultural, and visual assimilation within heteronormative
social structures and values.
About Giovanni Porfido
Dr Porfido read
Contemporary Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and
Literature (Bari-Italy), took an MA in Communication,
Culture and Society at Goldsmiths College-University of
London, and obtained his PhD in Sociology at the London
School of Economics. Before joining the School of Applied
Social Sciences at Durham in August 2006 he lectured at
LSE, LSBU, Goldsmiths College, Reading University, and
Essex University. Dr Porfido’s main interests are in the
area of sexualities, identity politics, social, cultural
and queer theory, visual/popular culture, and discourse
analysis. He has researched on the visual construction of
homosexual identity in Western societies and on its
representations in British mainstream television. He is
currently working on the in/visibility of queer teens in
popular and visual culture.
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