Producing Queer Youth

<p><em>Producing Queer Youth</em> challenges popular ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment cultural transformation and social progress. Based on over three years of participant action research with queer teen media-makers and textual analysis of hundreds of youth-produced videos and popular media campaigns the book unsettles assumptions that having a voice and gaining visibility and recognition necessarily equate to securing rights and resources. Instead Berliner offers a nuanced picture of openings that emerge for youth media producers as they negotiate the structures of funding and publicity and manage their identities with digital self-representations. Examining youth media practices within broader communication history and critical media pedagogy she forwards an approach to media production that re-centers the process of making as the site of potential learning and social connection. Ultimately she reframes digital media participation as a struggle for—rather than in itself evidence of—power.</p>