17 April 2024
For centuries, the knowledge of the lives of LGBTQIA+ individuals has been suppressed on social and religious grounds. Even present in literature and exceptional cases, the sheer familiarity with same-sex acts or queer behaviour has been subject to medicalisation, persecution, and criminalisation.
In 2023, LGBTQ media was estimated to generate profits of over 1 trillion dollars in the United States as products such as films and TV series have worldwide distribution.
In this talk, Dr Helton Levy chronicled how the historical struggle for knowledge on homosexuality, transsexuality, and queer behaviour has, over time, culminated in the mass production and the commodification of queerness with noticeable gains but also losses for the community.
Dr Helton Levy is a Lecturer in Digital and Visual Media at the School of Computing and Digital Media. He is the author of Globalized Queerness: Identities and Commodities in Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury).
His research focuses on the transformative power of popular culture and digital media for marginalised communities.
He is also the author of The Internet, Politics, and Inequality in Contemporary Brazil: Peripheral Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and several peer-reviewed articles regarding digital media, journalism, and LGBTQ politics.
Photo credit: Alexander Grey.