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Learning About Mobile Sexual Identities from Queer as Folk

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Abstract

This chapter explores how the British television program Queer as Folk functions as popular sex education about mobile sexual identities. In a digital/media-saturated contemporary culture, identities—including marginal and youth subjectivities—are constituted in the context of new digital technologies, and the processes of relationality that these produce. These include mobile phones. Such pervasive devices encourage interactivity with texts, narrative, discourses, and new relationalities with other users that re-configure the constitutive power of space and place in identity. Russell T. Davies’ Queer as Folk (UK 1999–2000) presented an early representation of the centrality of mobile technologies to community support, networking, sexual identity, and resilience. The program teaches viewers about the ways in which digital communications are pivotal in the everyday performativity of selfhood.

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Cover, R. (2017). Learning About Mobile Sexual Identities from Queer as Folk. In: Allen, L., Rasmussen, M.L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_22

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