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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Diversity Casting Within Reality Tv Competitions, Maximus Moore Jul 2022

Diversity Casting Within Reality Tv Competitions, Maximus Moore

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

When it comes to casting in reality TV competition shows, many of the casts suffer from an imbalance in diversity, allowing majority white players to stick together and eliminate the few minority players every season. This paper deals with deconstructing how casting works as well as offering up solutions for change to the broken system.


Girl Crush: Liminal Identities And Lesbian Love In Children's Cartoons, Madison Bradley Jul 2017

Girl Crush: Liminal Identities And Lesbian Love In Children's Cartoons, Madison Bradley

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

A textual analysis of the cartoon Steven Universe, this project takes a semiotic approach to explore anti-essentialist messages of gender identity. I argue that within the mainstream media, the cartoon expresses prosocial messages about gender by representing nonbinary characters and gender fluid themes. Using children’s media studies, queer studies, and reception studies, I investigate how the show portrays liminal identities. In particular, I focus on how lesbian existence and gender fluidity are simultaneously normalized and othered through the text’s visuals and dialogue. Critically analyzing the ways in which the media represents queerness as ‘too adult,’ this study reveals that children’s …