| Description |
Media shape and fuel migratory imaginations and are a powerful resource in selfmaking for all sorts of persons. The It Gets Better Project, a product of contemporary media, provides numerous rich texts produced by both queer and heterosexual subjects that make place-based arguments about how life gets better for queer youth. In this thesis, I explore how notions of marginality and migration are mobilized within and through rhetorics of place within the project. Using an amalgamation of critical rhetoric and queer theory, and particularly through the application of Scott Herring's concept of metronormativity, I examine the ways in which mythologies of geography-specifically, around rurality and urbanity-are configured in interesting and revealing ways for queer identity. Through a close reading of 100 video samples, my analysis yields a problematic of queerness articulated around place through the rhetorical anchors of safety, innocence, and authenticity. While urbanity is asserted as a place of safety, love, and creativity, rurality is structured as the direct opposite; the small town becomes a symbol for hostility, homophobia, and conformity. The queer individual emerges from these associations with the city as a creative agent, yet one whose self-worth is conflated with work, and more specifically, power and profit. Furthermore, culturally received notions of childhood innocence are troubled and inverted within the narratives, revealing childhood as not innocent, pure, or chaste. In this inversion, queer adulthood retains the mythical wonder of childhood; queer adulthood in the city maintains the wonder, magic, and social validation that was absent for the narrators in their youth. However, the love, magic, and discovery rearticulated with queer identity are contingent on the suppression and erasure of queer sexuality in both youth and adulthood. The narrow construction of queer identity rearticulated within the project produces an "authentic" queer identity, one that is almost exclusively based within the city and, interestingly, crafts queerness as ahistorical. Notably, the agency, creativity, asexuality, and ahistoricity of queerness that are articulated in the It Gets Better Project valorize and deify queerness, but specifically in ways that tame and contain it. |
