Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story

Abstract

Drawing on a 19-month ethnographic study, this essay explores how rural young people weave digital-media-generated source materials into their identity work, particularly as they navigate the politics of visibility's master narrative event: “coming out.” More so than in urban scenes where a critical mass of LGBTQ visibility is taken for granted, these stories resonate with the complex negotiation of visibility and family ties that consume rural young people's everyday lives. At the same time the amount rural youth absorb or rework these categories has everything to do with each person's capacity to enact and publicly assert them. This approach to studies of media effects calls for a deeply situated understanding of media engagements beyond reception of particular media texts.