Starting Out

So, this week I have been assigned a group to work with for the group project. Sadly, only I and one other person were present for the discussion of our topic. Luckily, we were able to contact one person from our group. The topic that was give to our group is Identity, Representation, and the Media.

Me and, the other group member present, Nelly have discussed quite a few things about our project. First of all, what is Identity, Representation, and the Media topic about. It is about how people are shown on different forms of media, including digital media like social platforms. The reason why I chose this topic is pretty simple, I know many people with different identities that were affect by media and how they were represented by it.

Once we had that figured out, we tried to decide what each one of us was going to do. I decided to talk about the LGBTQIA+ community since I can relate to the topic because I am part of this community and I have many friends who were part of it much longer than I am.

Nelly decided to do about music and how it represents different people and communities and after being able to contact Thomas, he decided to about film and how we perceive actors as objects and not real people. Since there has been no contact with Tara, another member of our group, we have yet to figure out what she wants to talk about.

As a group we also are thinking about making the project video into an animation of sorts so that we don’t have to show are faces if we don’t want to. It probably won’t be easy, but we will certainly try our best to make this video watch worthy.

In class Nelly and I tried doing a little bit of research based on the LGBTQIA+ representation in media. We only got to see one article but when I went home and continued doing some further research. During this research I found one more article related to my part of the topic.

The first article that I read was “Talking to Gaymers.” It was talking about gay people or such trying to find other gay people or one who identify as such that play game to find support and to not need to hide themselves from others. For those people this was seen as a safe place from the “gay-bashing” in many online gaming spaces.

The second article that I read was “Safe Spaces in Online Places: Social Media and LGBTQ+ Youth.” This article talked about research done on whether or not digital spaces provide safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ youth saying that the “LGBTQ youth use social media as part of their everyday experiences in an attempt to safely navigate their lives through learning, participating, engaging, communicating and constructing identities in digital spaces.”

After reading both of these articles I realised that for LGBTQIA+ people it’s not always easy finding a place to fit in on digital media.

Talking to Gaymers:

Adrienne Shaw (2012), TALKING TO GAYMERS: QUESTIONING IDENTITY, COMMUNITY AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION, Temple University

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.692.6712&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Safe Spaces in Online Places: Social Media and LGBTQ+ Youth:

Leanna Lucero (2017) Safe spaces in online places: social media and LGBTQ youth, Multicultural Education Review, 9:2, 117-128

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2017.1313482