[ecrea] New Book: Producing Queer Youth: The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment

New book, Producing Queer Youth: The Paradox of Digital Media 
Empowerment<https://www.routledge.com/Producing-Queer-Youth-The-Paradox-of-Digital-Media-Empowerment/Berliner/p/book/9780415790840>(Routledge). 



Description

/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.


      Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Problem with /Youth Voices/

2. "Look at Me, I’m Doing Fine!": The Conundrum of Legibility, 
Visibility, and Identity Management in Queer Viral Videos

3. Vernacular Voices: Business Gets Personal in Public Service Announcements

4. "I Can’t Talk When I’m Supposed to Say Something": Negotiating 
Expression in a Queer-Youth-Produced Anti-Bullying Video

Conclusion: Out of the Closet and into the Tweets


      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/

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