Since the late twentieth century, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have become a familiar presence on the media landscape. Drawing from sociology, LGBTQ media studies, feminist media studies, and cultural studies, this dissertation interrogates broader narratives about LGBTQ media representation, using YouTube as an entry point. Through digital ethnography and content analysis, I provide three key findings. First, I illustrate that YouTube brands itself as a progressive company by strategically representing advertiser-friendly LGBTQ video creators (also known as YouTubers) who vary in their identities, yet the platform algorithmically discriminates against YouTubers producing controversial content that threatens its digital presence and advertising relationships. Second, I show that video creators modify their production and algorithmic strategies to navigate the platform’s restrictions, and some creators then use YouTube to develop personal brands that grow beyond the platform. Third, I underline the communities and social bonds that form because of LGBTQ creators. By sharing stories of identity development, pride, and belonging, these YouTubers inspire viewers to accept their own identities and, in some cases, become video creators themselves. Creators persist in their community engagement and media production despite working within platforms structured by algorithmic bias, capitalism, and heteronormativity. This dissertation ultimately suggests that media is polysemic and the site of ambivalent, contradictory politics.

La Douleur Exquise: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Un/Making of Blackness in the 21st Century, examines how neoliberalism operates as a cultural discourse and the distinctive ways that race is deployed through the constitution of bodies and spaces. My data for the project draws on the cultural politics of aesthetics and political economies of redevelopment.

Using a mixed methodology of visual, textual, and ethnographic analysis, I examine two different sites of the discursive production of blackness and contemporary politics: high fashion and urban development. I develop an argument about the interrelatedness of neoliberalism, race, and aesthetics and maintain that neoliberalism embeds a particular logic about blackness that ought to be understood as an aesthetic politics or racial aesthetics. While scholarship on race and neoliberalism observe that neoliberalism dissociates race and racism from social actors and social formations, my project highlights aesthetics as a social formation, which is in turn an articulation of blackness specifically, and race, generally. By considering aesthetics, this project expands claims about neoliberalism and race that tend to highlight the political economic logics of how neoliberalism ideologically deploys race in service of capitalism.

The study has two components: first, I explore how blackness is deployed on bodies by explicitly focusing on editorial images in the high fashion industry, and by developing an archive of industry publications, fashion blogs, interviews with designers, stylists, magazine editors, photographers, models, and fashion writers that feature descriptions, responses, and conversations in the fashion world about the role of race in high fashion. Secondly, I use ethnography to explore the discursive meanings and expressions of blackness produced within physical spaces of everyday life as they develop alongside urban renewal efforts along the H Street, NE corridor in Washington, D.C.

I draw on African American Studies, Urban Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Visual Studies to guide my interdisciplinary exploration of fashion and urban renewal and their engagement with identity, visuality, and oppositional politics within the context of neoliberalism. Within each site, I empirically describe how blackness operates and identify the mechanics of how neoliberalism works as a system. To capture the importance of the everyday, I look to these innocuous spaces to concretely illustrate how neoliberalism appears visually and through discourses of racial authenticity, identity, and excess.

On Quietly Being Out of Time asks media scholars and creatives to develop a politics of opacity, errantry, and care for the Black life and living embedded in our work. To do so, my dissertation reorients the epistemological and methodological concerns of scholars and creatives working with media collections featuring Black life and living. The weight of my work attempts to shift scholars and creatives from knowing Black media as objects we hold, towards what it might mean to embrace the Black moving images and life that appear (or refuse) our media streams. I explore how we might see and enact this embrace by acknowledging that media collections and archives allow scholars and creatives to work within what critical Black studies scholar and philosopher Christina Sharpe (2016) notes as the ‘wake of Blackness.’ I use ‘wake’, ‘holding’, and ‘anagrammatical blackness’ from Sharpe’s (2016) work to argue that when we work with Black moving images we are participating in the re/arrangement of how Black lives come to socially and culturally matter. I write across sociology, Black studies, archival theory, and media studies to show how working in and through Sharpe’s (2016) ‘wake’ exposes the urgency of using our work to demonstrate how Black life can be unknowable, refuse hypervisibility, and still be a nexus of care.

Artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death and television and film producer Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness serve as my case studies for producing work that collects / gathers / and arranges Black life and living towards opacity, errantry, and unknowability. I use their work to theorize how scholars and creative have to augment our sense of life, refusal, and care to imagine our work as a part of how Black life and living are socially and culturally re/arranged. I contend that in doing so we extend the concerns of our scholarship and creativity beyond using Black life as data or a rhetorical/metaphorical tool and wander towards developing practices of care for Black moving images that are systematically denied to Black people. My dissertation ends with a section on rest. In this section, I make a clear connection between how Black lives continue to labor outside of their corporeal forms and within the televisual images we use in our work. This ending allows me to suggest that a politics of care for the Black life and living in our scholarly and creative work must also imagine methodologies that honors all iterations of Black life to experience rest.

Building on women of color feminists' frameworks that engage the complexities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, "Tracing Queer Latina Diasporas: Escarvando Historical Narratives of Ancestries and Silences" analyzes historical, literary, sociological, as well as other ethnic studies and feminist studies scholarship, and uses methods such as oral history and archival research next to analysis of visual representations, art, and museum visits that together map out an emerging analytic interpretive frame to trace queer Latina discourses of creativity and knowledge. Tracing the diasporas of "queer borderlands" highlights the forced migrations and colonizing of Latinas/os and Latin American communities. By racing the "queer" and queering the "Latina/o," the tensions and dialogues manifested in these historically diasporic and transnational identities and communities can be traced.

This project examines the often over looked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer theory through the work of lesbian of color and queer women of color feminist formations. Tracing silences of non-heteronormative populations of color is a move to address colonial forms of epistemic violence. The chapters in this dissertation form archives to address the overarching question: How do women of color feminists knowledge production, decolonized methodologies, and representations of cultural memory assist in tracing and remembering hidden histories and silences of queer Latina/o ancestries?

Chapter one, "Decolonizing Aztlán: Unraveling Conflicting Colonial Histories of Land and Race to Trace Queer Ancestry" is a historical account that disrupts the usual story of colonization that is central to Chicano studies and instead searches for connections of race and land and complexities of gender and sexuality to open space for the exploration of queer ancestral histories. This chapter complicates the historical racial formation of the Mexican American through an analysis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Chapter two, "Gloria Anzaldúa: Altars, Archives, and Opening up the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" argues that Anzaldúa's classic text is an altar that functions as a guide for creativity and ceremony. Through a grounded analysis of racism and colonization, Anzaldúa opens an analysis of decolonization that includes gender, sexuality, and spirituality.

Chapter three, "Queer Latina Cultural Production: Remembering through Oral and Visual Storytelling" focuses on queer Latina and Indígena artists who use enact forms of remembering through their art (i.e. sculpture, film, theater, and painting) to regain cultural ancestral memory and story. The fusion and collaborative methodology of this work is reflective of feminist of color knowledges. While chapter four, "Tracing Latina Lesbiana Historias of Resistance, Solidarity, and Visibility" purports the importance of an early generation and network of women of color who did the work to construct visual archives in various forms, such as the production of anthologies, building archives, and documenting through photography, as a mode of establishing visibility for Latina Lesbiana in community and academic spaces.