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The incident at the University of Florida last week brought many issues to the forefront.  The censorship and torture of a student is only one of those issues.  Horrified as I am by the events, I am interested in the responses in mainstream media that whitewashed the event, not unlike the response to protests in the 1960s and 70s, and the refusal of University administration to take responsibility (also like the earlier protest movements).  Now, however, the event and the questions it raises have been brought inescapably to the forefront by responses in networked media, with images and sounds that refuse the simplistic and reactionary responses by established voices.  More than anything else, this event tells us that (1) protest will never be only in “new” media, and (2) that emergent media forms work through a sophisticated approach to conflict, not consensus, in which community is a process of change and contestation.

Although much work on media and politics is polarized into a utopian/dystopian binary, cultural studies has sought various ways in which to connect or problematize such simplistic approaches.  Unfortunately, even cultural studies has increasingly become disconnected from both close textual analyses of culture (specifically popular culture) and theory that is engaged with specific socio-political trends.  This paper will attempt to continue the project through which “production” and “audience” are destabilized within both political and popular culture.  Through an analysis of the changing sexuality of Mr. Garrison in the television show South Park, it will demonstrate how cultural texts can act discursively within the wider framework of contemporary politics.  Over the course of ten seasons, South Park has incorporated this character specifically to address and attack rhetoric surrounding queer identity, (hyper)masculinity, femininity, and heteronormative sexual politics.  Although the paper uses primarily a postmodern approach to narrative and character analysis, through an exploration of fragmentations and disconnections rather than continuity or its “utopic potential,” it will not seek to remove the show from its context.  Rather, it will be primarily concerned with tracing the genealogy of the character across ten years of political discourse.  Engaging with Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, Wendy Brown, and other theorists of queer cultural politics, the paper attempts to formulate an understanding of queer identity based not in “difference,” “tolerance,” or “resistance,” but as an assemblage of discourses and representations that are both reactions to and attempted critiques of dominant (binary) positions on sexuality.  The movement from an anti-gay, highly performed masculinity to conflicted gay identity to highly exaggerated homosexuality is interesting enough, but as the character has recently been used to specifically address the politics of “metro” sexuality and gay marriage, often outside the range of either mainstream queer theory or politics, it has attained a level of discursiveness that has wide-ranging implications for cultural studies and theories of popular culture.

Author: Ted Gournelos, Institute of Communications Research
[note:  two more abstracts to follow for the other papers on the panel]