Through the analysis of over seventy films and thirty television series, ranging from Shortbus, Sweet Home Alabama, and Poseidon to Noaha (TM)s Arc, Brothers & Sisters, and Dawsona (TM)s Creek, Goltz examines reoccurring narrative structures in popular media that perpetuate the extreme value placed upon "young" gay male bodies, while devaluing health, aging, and longevity. Alienated from the future -- outside of limited and exclusionary systems of marriage and procreation -- the gay male is narrated within a circular tragedy that draws upon cultural mythologies of "older" gay male predation, the absence of gay intergenerational mentorship, and the gay male as sacrificial victim. Using a Burkean framework, Goltz makes a theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural investigation of how the increased visibility of "positive" gay representation in dominant media shapes contemporary meanings of gay aging, heteronormative future, homonormative future, and queer potential.

Through the analysis of over seventy films and thirty television series, ranging from Shortbus, Sweet Home Alabama, and Poseidon to Noaha (TM)s Arc, Brothers & Sisters, and Dawsona (TM)s Creek, Goltz examines reoccurring narrative structures in popular media that perpetuate the extreme value placed upon "young" gay male bodies, while devaluing health, aging, and longevity. Alienated from the future -- outside of limited and exclusionary systems of marriage and procreation -- the gay male is narrated within a circular tragedy that draws upon cultural mythologies of "older" gay male predation, the absence of gay intergenerational mentorship, and the gay male as sacrificial victim. Using a Burkean framework, Goltz makes a theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural investigation of how the increased visibility of "positive" gay representation in dominant media shapes contemporary meanings of gay aging, heteronormative future, homonormative future, and queer potential.

Amidst rapid advances of mainstream gay and lesbian platforms, questions of essential sexual identities, queered rituals of family, queered notions of intimacy, queer considerations of time, and the possibility and value of queered systems of relation are largely absent. Resisting the public face of a normative and homogenous gay and lesbian community, and embracing a broadened conception of queerness, this book brings together 29 writers - a diverse community of scholars, lovers, and activists - to explore queer theory and embodied experiences within interpersonal relations and society at large. Enacting a critical intervention into the queer theoretical landscape, the book offers an alternative engagement where contributors centralize lived experience. Theoretical engagements are generated in relation and in dialogue with one another exploring collectivity, multiple points of entrance, and the living nature of critical theory. Readers gain familiarity with key concepts in queer thought, but also observe how these ideas can be navigated and negotiated in the social world. Queer Praxis serves as a model for queer relationality, enlisting transnational feminist, critical communication, and performance studies approaches to build dialogue across and through differing subjectivities.

"Communicating Identity: Critical Approaches" provides a poststructuralist engagement with contemporary theories of identity, which view identity as a construction, negotiation, and a process of communicative messages. Embracing an intersectional investigation of identity and examining the critical interworkings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, this edited anthology contemplates the shifting and fluid dimensions of identities within spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts.
Bringing together works from scholars in the disciplines of organizational communication, critical/cultural studies, rhetorical and media studies, performance studies, and intercultural communication, the text is divided into four sections:
"Theorizing Identity" provides a poststructuralist introduction to identity through differing conceptual frameworks that highlight the performative, relational, and intersectional dimensions of identity formations."Organizing Identity" looks to institutional and national contexts to examine how systems of power and hierarchal structures within organizing discourses work to shape, mold, constrain, and produce disciplined identities."Representing Identity" looks to popular culture, online environments, and personal accounts of experience as sites of identity production and negotiation."Performing Identity" shifts attention to the spatial, temporal, and embodied dimensions of identity work, theorizing performative dimensions that resist and rearticulate identity discourses.Jason Zingsheim (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Governors State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in intercultural communication, critical/cultural studies, identity and communication, and communication theory and philosophy. His work has been published in "Cultural Studies" "Critical Methodologies," "Text & Performance Quarterly," "Liminalities," and "Battleground: Women, Gender, & Sexuality."
Dustin Bradley Goltz (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at DePaul University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in performance studies, rhetoric of identity, performance of gender and sexuality, and rhetoric of popular culture. He is the author of "Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity." His research has been published in "Text & Performance Quarterly," "Qualitative Inquiry," "Western Journal of Communication," "Genders," and "Liminalities."