| dc.description.abstract | Western society has slowly evolved to accept the identities of LGBTQ+ people. With strides forward in laws and public opinion, queer people are overall more accepted now than they have been in previous decades. However, there remains a social resistance to accepting transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people. While queer sexualities are more widely embraced, queer genders are not. Public debate surrounding the rights of TGNC people provide evidence to the prejudice, as cisgender people discuss whether transgender people should be allowed to participate in sports or hold any position of recognition in the social sphere. This discrimination can be seen reflected and perpetuated by popular culture. Television in particular serves as both a mirror and teacher of social norms (Herek, 1990; Luther & Legg Jr., 2010), including the consensus around queer identities. As such, this study approaches popular television from a critical discourse analysis framework in order to understand the power dynamics that exist within television communication. Specifically, I focus on the affordances and audience considerations of children’s cartoons, which are often the first media socialization that children encounter. Because of this, children are apt to learn social norms from whichever cartoons they consume. When children watch television programs containing positive depictions of queer people, they can learn to understand and respect the existence of queer people, and possibly even understand their own gender and romantic identities more thoroughly. Likewise, children who watch television featuring TGNC people can learn more specifically what it means to exist outside of arbitrarily mandated binaries of sex and gender. My analysis considered a sample of episodes from 20 children’s cartoons which featured TGNC characters. In the subsequent discussion, I concluded that the series analyzed often represented five major themes: TGNC people as exceptional at all costs, the backgrounded roles of TGNC people, TGNC characters favoring masculinity as a default, the rebellions of TGNC characters, and utopian series contexts which included TGNC characters. I end by presenting implications and recommendations of the study. | en_US |
