China puts Dumbledore back in closet with Warner's helo

Guardian April 2022.

Rowling row sinks Fantastic Beasts 5 film plan?

 See Guardian April 2022

AI tackles homophobic trolling in football

 Lots of relevant stories linked to football - the Premier League 4 day blackout of social media, the abuse of the single out player in Australia, the rainbow laces campaign, the preparedness of the Norway and England teams to speak out against Qatar’s homophobic laws, Liverpool hiring a mental health coach to help young players cope with trolling.

This case is a trial of AI software to mute homophobic trolling in Australia. Guardian April 2022

Disney reinstate Toy Story prequel same sex kiss after backlash

 Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/18/toy-story-disney-film-lightyear-same-sex-kiss?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Disney pressured into Florida gay rights declarations

Feature analysis by Guardian as Disney CEO apologises, promises to champion LGBTQ+ rights and pauses all donations to Florida politicians. Article notes the history of Disney censorship, often at the story stage.

Earlier Guardian report on the "don't say gay" bill - which has uncanny parallels with Thatcher's notorious clause 28 bar on teachers or schools even mentioning homosexually ... in the EIGHTIES. That's now looked back on as a preposterous relic of past times and attitudes, but this is a good example that liberalisation is not a simple linear path of improving acceptance and tolerance.

Apple ban Malaysia gay conversion app

 Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/17/malaysian-governments-gay-conversion-app-pulled-by-google-play?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Gulf states ban Disney MCU Eternals over gay kiss

See Guardian.

Superman goes bi and waves goodbye to the American Way

This is in the comics, not yet any movie plans.

A burned out Superman will take solace with a make reporter boyfriend, while the 'truth, justice and the American way' gives way to '...and a better tomorrow'. Guardian, 2021.

OFCOM complaint against Clarkson Grand Tour

Will Young accuses The Grand Tour of homophobic stereotyping https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jan/30/will-young-accuses-the-grand-tour-of-homophobic-stereotyping?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

China bans same-sex depictions

As part of a wider censorship drive under the new president (from 2012), China has now banned any depiction of same-sex relationships as 'abnormal' (on a list with incest and assault).

This marks a reversal of the liberalising direction of Chinese media and society over the previous decade, with homosexuality finally de-listed as an illness in China in 2001.

Read more.

From Dot Cotton to Torchwood...

Torchwood is a useful show for examples of representation of sexuality. I'll post some clips below which we'll look at in class and you can use to practice your semiotic deconstruction skills.

Anytime you are doing this, always try to use terminology as much as possible - remember, there are 10/50 marks for Use of Terminology. I've also provided formally written examples of how you might combine this with EX (use of evidence [denotation]) and EAA (explanation, analysis and argument [connotation] get 20 marks each).

These clips would have been broadcast post-watershed, and do cover some quite adult ground.

When considering representation of sexuality the topic of gender is important: the basic stereotype of a gay man or woman is centred on showing characteristics of the opposite gender [so... binary opposites], especially as regards hair and clothing but also body language and aggression or passivity (and taste in music etc).

This picture is complicated somewhat by having two conflicting stereotypes of lesbians: the 'butch' lesbian (diplaying masculine characteristics) and the 'lipstick' lesbian, an ultra-glamorous, hyper-feminine figure. When we see a lipstick lesbian we should consider if the character is perhaps being included to pander to a male audience (the feminist 'male gaze' theory), using codes of pornography rather than seriously exploring social issues.

The first clip shows how far UK TV has come in its treatment of gay characters. Eastenders broke many taboos in its depiction of a gay male couple back in the 1980s, but was also heavily criticised for centring their storyline on the issue of AIDS.

We can see clearer examples of butch lesbian stereotypes in dramas such as Prisoner Cell Block: H [wiki].

EASTENDERS CLIP FROM 1986
(can play at higher, 360p, qual direct from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVyD8MAe2s8)

Eastenders has gone on to include gay characters with somewhat less controversial storylines, though appeared reluctant to permit some of these to have sexual relationships, notably Pauline Fowler's long-term companion. There was considerable controversy in 2008 when the BBC included two young men kissing in the Eastenders omnibus, so the inclusion of gay characters clearly remains a sensitive and controversial issue.

The Mail tried to fuel a moral panic. It'll be a while before they catch up to the 21st century

Playlist of past/practice clips

You can use these to set yourself practice exercises - feel free to hand in any subsequent essays for marking and feedback:

Jan 2012 clip + report

The representation theme was SEXUALITY:


THE EXAM BOARD REPORT

Does Tom Daley show progressive modern attitude?

This isn't fictional media, but a really interesting case study nonetheless in the mediation of sexual image, and how social media equip celebrities (and everyone else!) to at least attempt to mediate and control their public identity and responses to their 'outing'. There has been much media commentary on this - its made the front page of most papers today - with the sentiment that things will only be truly improved when this isn't a story worthy of note or comment expressed in much of the coverage.
Even the Daily Mail managed to avoid overt homophobia; the paper that gave a home to the hateful column attacking Stephen Gately on the day of his funeral lauded Daley as 'frank and fearless'.

Diva: profile of lesbian magazine

One clear way of looking into representations of any particular group is to investigate media which specifically targets them. Diva is Europe's best-selling lesbian magazine, and there's a lengthy profile in today's Guardian of its editor, who relates some of the difficulties of editing such a title as well as some of the social changes she's seen in her time. Here's a few sample quotes; you can read the full article here.

 Jane Czyzselska, the editor of Diva, was in her 20s, working as a freelance journalist in Leeds, when she heard about a new mainstream magazine for lesbians and bisexual women. She soon began writing for it. Frances Williams, Diva's launch editor, wanted to make it a "publication for us", says Czyzselska. "Previously we had been the object that had been written about, and now we were the subjects. We were reporting on our own lives."
...

Gay rep'ns in comics and games in XMen comic

Since blogging the article below, another article caught my eye: is Judge Dredd to be outed?!

Here's another I've just read, which explicitly references (and discusses) the male gaze theory. It included a link to the Wiki on this, which I also re-read: pretty good, and will certainly boost your understanding of the concept. This one centres on a Star Wars game which added a romantic element, but caused controversy by programming 10 hetero Ms + Fs; their response was to create a standalone world, available only for premium subscribers, in which gay couplings functioned, attracting further criticism. Its fair to say that the very fact this has attracted criticism points to the success of the campaign groups who've sought to attack the hegemonic status of hetero-normativity. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/jan/25/star-wars-old-republic-gay-planet.

Row over school curriculum

Bit of wider context here, showing just how contested this whole area is: in this Guardian article we read about literature passed out to faith schools in Lancashire by a visiting Catholic speaker who advises that homosexuality is linked to abuse and that there is no such thing as safe sex. Asked by the TUC to intervene, Education Secretary Michael Gove insisted that the school curriculum was not subject to the 2010 Equality Act ... but a civil service spokesperson for the DfEE (Dept for Education) said it was.
Perhaps the most useful question here is how well fiction TV represents this range of views - is it dominated by 'PC' representations, do old negative stereotypes still dominate, or is the answer a wide range of conflicting, competing representations?

Laws on homsexuality across the world

A bit of context to the issue of representation here; think about Stuart Hall's that how we read a text depends on our values/knowledge; how would the Eastenders or Torchwood clips be viewed in the different countries discussed in the article below?

Gay rights: a world of inequality

Gay people still live in fear in many countries around the world – prejudice, torture and execution are common. Can two new legal and diplomatic campaigns change attitudes?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011 19.59 BST
  • Article history



Two teenagers are publicly hanged under anti-gay laws in Mashhad, Iran, in 2005.

Last Thursday, three men were hanged in Iran for the crime of lavat, sexual intercourse between two men. The case is considered extreme even by Iranian standards, because while the death penalty is in place for homosexuality, it is usually enforced only when there is a charge of assault or rape alongside it; the accusations in these three cases were of consensual sex.
In Uganda, politicians have been seeking since 2009 to institute a strikingly nasty piece of legislation: the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" (being homosexual more than once) and, in a totalitarian touch, penalties for teachers, doctors and even parents who suspected that someone in their care was gay but didn't report them. In Belize, there is a law on the statute books that criminalises homosexuality; a gay rights group in the country, Unibam, has brought a motion challenging the law, and had this reply from the minister of works, Anthony "Boots" Martinez: "My position is that God never placed anything on me for me to look at a man and jump on a man. I'll be clear on it … How would you decriminalise that, I am sorry, but that is law. Not only is the law made by man, that is a law made from the Bible. Why you think God made a man and a woman, man has what woman wants, and woman has what man wants, it's as simple as that. I'll fight tooth and nail to keep that law."
For lesbian and gay people who live in one of the 82 countries where homosexuality is criminalised, the world is not getting better: it is getting significantly, demonstrably worse. The irony – it's actually not an irony, it's a source of great shame, but it is also an unhappy coincidence – is that 40 of these countries are members of the Commonwealth, and this is a British export. Homosexuality was criminalised here in the 1880s, and was therefore part of our legislative package in the age of empire. By the time it was decriminalised in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 (Scotland followed in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982), we no longer had any control over Commonwealth jurisdictions. The repeal came after a report by Lord Wolfenden in 1957; if its findings had only been enacted more swiftly, today unnumbered people across the Commonwealth – at an estimate, more than a million – would be living entirely different lives. Jonathan Cooper, CEO of the Human Dignity Trust, says: "The human misery that criminalisation causes can never be overestimated. The impact on lesbian and gay people growing up, you cannot overestimate what it does to people living under those laws, even if they're not being prosecuted. Just the fact that the rest of society is denied to them, they have no access to it."
That's the bad news. Incredibly, for a story like this, there is also good news. Apart from specific campaigning bodies such as Stonewall and more general human rights agencies such as Amnesty, there is a new crop of organisations trying to tackle this in a different way. This isn't another story about new media taking on old battles, though an awe-inspiring Facebook campaign, We Are Everywhere, has gained ground since the hangings last week. But two groups in particular are taking the old-fashioned routes of top-level pressure and the rule of law. Kaleidoscope is described by its director, Lance Price, thus: "First, we're being driven by the experience of the people in the countries we're talking about. If you look at any country in the world where there has been progress, it started with a small group of people who had the courage to stand up. It's their struggle, these are their countries. Second, the people involved have been active in politics at a very high level [Price is a former adviser to Tony Blair], or active in the civil service at a very high level. I'm not bragging. But we're working all the time on behalf of people who struggle to have a voice, and we can bring them to the attention of powerful people who do make decisions, in their own countries and here."
It's not lobbying, exactly; it's not diplomacy, but it is characterised by "quiet conversations with people who can make a difference. We're going to have to engage with people, quietly, rather than shouting at them."
The other group, the Human Dignity Trust, is not a campaigning organisation either. It is not there to raise awareness and is not even there to put pressure on governments. It is setting out to change the law, in the Commonwealth and beyond, on the basis that it is a breach of international human rights to criminalise someone's sexual identity.
With a few exceptions – Saudi Arabia being one – all the countries that criminalise homosexuality are signed up to either the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or they are bound by test case rulings in their respective courts. "This is a matter of law," Cooper says. "Once you're not following the law, you're undermining the rule of law." This is reflected in the list of the trust's patrons – the former attorney general of India; the former secretary general of the Commonwealth; Lord Woolf, former lord chief justice of England and Wales; and a former judge at the Intra-American court of human rights. "They are not pursuing this as part of a lesbian and gay agenda. It's an international rights law agenda," says Cooper.
The story of the trust is this: when Uganda's homophobic upsurge began two years ago, Tim Otty, a QC with a "strong sense of fairness" (according to his entry in Chambers UK), was asked by the Commonwealth Association to give his advice on the law, and found it, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be in breach of their human rights treaty obligations. Cooper, also a barrister and a friend of Otty, explains how the situation evolved: "Tim is pretty establishment – he's at Blackstone chambers, he's not somebody you would associate with lesbian and gay issues. Unlike me, because I've been around these issues for 20, 30 years; I've done transgender cases, I've done sexuality in the armed forces cases, I've done loads of this type of stuff. So I was not at all surprised when, as we found out in our research, 80-plus jurisdictions continue to criminalise homosexuality around the world. That's almost half the countries in the world." He was amazed that countries still criminalised in flagrant violation of international human rights law, even having signed the treaty.
The test case for European law was Jeff Dudgeon v the United Kingdom in 1981, when the activist brought a case against the British government for the fact that criminalisation was still in force in Northern Ireland. "In a way that was the revolution," says Cooper. "Human rights now protected the lesbian and gay identity. But the Brits didn't over-defend Dudgeon." If you are looking for excessive defence, that happened in the Repulic of Ireland in the late-80s. "They threw everything at this case, to say: you are not going to change our law, human rights law cannot change Ireland's Christian-based law. The Strasbourg court said: 'Actually, we can.'" After one more case, in Cyprus, this became a settled matter for the Council of Europe. Then, following a case brought by Nicholas Toonan in Australia in 1991, the same decision was reached by the UN. "By the mid-90s, it had been settled: international human rights law doesn't protect lesbian and gay rights; it protects identity. And as a consequence of protecting identity it protects you as a gay man or a lesbian woman from having your identity criminalised. That's how it works," Cooper explains.
So all the trust has to do now is change the world, through test case litigation. It does so by finding an individual who is mounting a challenge against, say, the government of Belize, and then, to put it a layman's way, piling in. "I email our legal panel, asking: anyone have any experience of litigating in Belize? Someone comes back and says yeah, we'll represent you in this legal challenge. They bring in as their counsel Lord Goldsmith, and the former attorney general of Belize, Godfrey Smith. We turn up as the international community, with a legitimate interest in the outcome of this case, but we do change the nature of the struggle because we have approached it on the basis that it's a major legal challenge. That is our intention." They're not going to know what's hit them, I observe. "You almost feel sorry for the judge!" Cooper replies, delighted.
Naturally, an appeal will be mounted, whoever loses, and the case will then go to a higher court. "What that means is that when we turn up in the difficult places of Africa and Asia, it's watertight. You can imagine them saying: 'Well, that's South Africa, that's the US supreme court' and trying to distinguish them. But it would be very difficult to distinguish two privy council decisions, one from the South Pacific, one from the Caribbean. If you are that independent judge in Kenya, faced with those authorities, how do you say: 'We're going to retain criminalisation'? You can't."
Price is quite cautious about the work he's taken on: he thinks the process will be slow, and its impact subtle. "If we can just begin to level the playing field a bit so that the other side is put, that will be progress. Because, at the moment, those who want to preach hate have pretty well got a free run."
Cooper, also measured but with the fire of optimism in his eyes, thinks they could have all the decisions they need in five years. "We will have to pay for cases in jurisdictions; I don't see why local lawyers should do it pro bono. We will fundraise, and there is something rather charming that you can say to somebody: 'If you give us £50,000, I can more or less guarantee that you will have decriminalised homosexuality in Tonga.' And actually, you know, that's great."

Cheers!

Excellent example of how TV operates as a key cultural battleground over social values and beliefs: this episode of smash hit US sitcom Cheers from way back in 1983. Just as the Eastenders clip from slightly later in the same decade seems quite shocking some decades later, so will this. In both cases though, the homophobes are positioned as the antagonists; the serie' central protagonist undergoes a journey: initially antagonistic and homophobic, his hidden liberal instincts finally triumph. As Todorov's narrative model suggests, the new equilibrium leaves us with a changed Sam Malone.

Conservative, right-wing critics of the mass media contend that there is a liberal bias to the mainstream media, an argument long associated with the Tory Party in the UK (and Republicans in the US); Lord Tebbit once famously dubbed the BBC the British Bolshevik Corporation.


There are two more parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-BZqapaEY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4pPV_BClwA.

AKT Now ad stars act consequences of homophobia

Gdn report on a new ad to raise awareness about the consequneces of homophobia:

Ian McKellen, Paul O'Grady and Samantha Fox star in gay awareness ad

Albert Kennedy Trust campaign aims to highlight difficulties gay people can face if they are victimised

Mark Sweney 9.6.01 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/09/samantha-fox-ian-mckellen-paul-ogrady-ad

Samantha Fox turning tricks as a prostitute. Sir Ian McKellen being doused with a bottle of cider by teenagers while sleeping rough. Paul O'Grady huddling for warmth in an all-but-derelict house. These unsettling images of the three stars appear in a new TV campaign for charity the Albert Kennedy Trust aims to raise awareness of the often difficult life that lesbian, bisexual, gay and transexual people can face when they are victimised. The campaign – made by ad agency TBWA – also features comedian and TV presenter Sue Perkins, Hollyoaks actor Kieron Richardson and Andrew Hayden-Smith, whose credits include Byker Grove and Doctor Who. Set to Radiohead's Creep as sung by Scala choir, the ad aims to show that with a few unfortunate turns anyone's life could end in life-threatening situations such as homelessness and prostitution. Perkins said: "We live in a really fortunate corner of the world – we're affluent and we're lucky, and for people to still suffer because of the prejudice of some is unforgiveable." The agency and the actors donated their time for free – McKellen is a patron of AKT – and the campaign is the first that the charity has been able to run. "We've used some well-known personalities in these tough situations to help let young LGBT people know where they can turn for support," said Robert Harwood-Matthews, president of TBWA UK. "TBWA London is hugely proud to be a part of a such a groundbreaking campaign that hopes to increase awareness and shift behaviour towards a cause that too often goes unrecognised." AKT was founded following the death of Albert Kennedy, a 17-year-old who was the victim of a homophobic attack, ending in his death after falling from a multi-storey car park in 1989.

Further Eastenders egs

Although it was C4 and Brookside that broke the taboo of the lesbian kiss, Eastenders was the groundbreaker with the first male gay couple featured kissing, as touched on in an earlier post. Another example here from a long-running storyline about a decade later:

If you watch this on the YouTube page, you'll see a real mix of views, including some strong homophobic opinions.
More recently they've gone for a storyline which throws religion into an already combustible mix (though will we still see a gay kiss on TV as noteworthy in a decade's time?); this is apparently an unbroadcast clip, trailed on the BBC's website:

This is the broadcast scene that caused a rumpus:

At A2 we get more into wider aspects of the media, including the ideology or values of media such as the press. This is a perfect example; here's 3 publications covering this 'story'; one is a notoriously homophobic, right-wing source which caused outrage itself with its vicious attack on Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in the week of his death and funeral - can you guess which one that is?
Complaints pour into BBC after EastEnders screens gay kiss before the watershed
TV ratings: Gay kiss lifts EastEnders to nearly 8m
EastEnders gay kiss watched by nearly 8 million

Hollywood: playing gay straight?

A controversy has been sparked by claims that Hollywood refuses to cast gay actors to play characters - see http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/04/hollywood-gay-actors-ramin-setoodeh for more

Useful Resources

See various articles at http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-role.htm