Sexual diversity and streaming television: Toward a platform studies approach to analyzing LGBTQ+ TV

Abstract

This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when studying the politics of sexual representation in contemporary television programming. Using a corpus of four LGBTQ+-themed programs that represent queer and trans sexualities and HIV/AIDS, the paper argues that funding mechanisms play a constitutive role in determining the kinds of sexual diversity that can circulate via streaming technologies. Comparing and contrasting content created for SVODs, BVODs, and video-sharing platforms, the essay considers the impact that the economic diversity of television’s multiplatform ecology has on the sexual diversity of content that circulates there. Purposefully combining an analysis of online TV with social media entertainment, the essay casts ‘streaming television’ as a wide, varied category whose relationship to questions of representational diversity is more complex than existing scholarship on these issues sometimes suggests. Situating its analysis in the literatures of platform studies, media industry studies, and television’s politics of LGBTQ + representation, the essay shifts the purview of ‘diversity’ away from representations of identity and toward diversities of funding mechanisms and diversities of sexual acts and practices. The essay argues for the necessity of textual analysis to properly articulate the relationship between platforms and the politics of sexual representation in the content that they circulate.