About the Book
Media matter, particularly to social minorities like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Rather than one homogenised idea of the ‘global gay’, what we find today is a range of historically and culturally specific expressions of gender and sexuality, which are reflected and explored across an ever increasing range of media outlets. This collection zooms in on a number of facets of this kaleidoscope, each chapter discussing the intersection of a particular European context and a particular medium with its affordances and limitations. While traditional mass media form the starting point of this book, the primary focus is on digital media such as blogs, social media and online dating sites. All contributions are based on recent, original empirical research, using a plethora of qualitative methods to offer a holistic view on the ways media matter to particular LGBTQ individuals and communities. Together the chapters cover the diversity of European countries and regions, of LGBTQ communities, and of the contemporary media ecology. Resisting the urge to extrapolate, they argue for specificity, contextualisation and a provincialized understanding of the connections between media, culture, gender and sexuality.
About Bart Eeckhout
Bart Eeckhout is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp. He is Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002), and co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008), Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism (2012), and five special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is currently at NIAS to investigate the ways in which the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens’ writings relate to the world and may be considered relevant to world literature.
