This book examines the rise and impact of digital media projects, such as the widely-celebrated It Gets Better Project viral video campaign, designed to support LGBTQ youth at risk. Such media has been commended for enabling everyday makers the opportunity to circumnavigate the formal barriers of institutional spaces and the constraints of mass communication, giving way to a mode of expression, empowerment and voice not available through other means. Based on over three years of participant action research with LGBTQ teen media makers and textual analysis of hundreds of...

Queercore is a queer and punk transmedia movement that was instigated in 1980s Toronto via the pages of the underground fanzine (-zine-) J.D.s. Authored by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, J.D.s. declared -civil war- on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams, consolidating a subculture of likeminded filmmakers, zinesters, musicans and performers situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and exclusionary tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. More than thirty years later, queercore and its troublemaking...

This book explores the emergence of "lifestyle" in the US, first as a term that has become an organizing principle for the self and for the structure of everyday life, and later as a pervasive form of media that encompasses a variety of domestic and self-improvement genres, from newspaper columns to design blogs. Drawing on the methodologies of cultural studies and feminist media studies, and built upon a series of case studies from newspapers, books, television programs, and blogs, it tracks the emergence of lifestyle's discursive formation and shows its relevance in contemporary media...