Sexuality And Teen TV: Article Analysis

Sexuality and Teen Television: Emerging Adults Respond to Representations of Queer Identity on Glee is a scholarly article from the Sexuality & Culture journal, and was written by Michaela D. E. Meyer and Megan M. Wood. By using qualitative interviews, Meyer and Wood are able to explain the impact teen shows have on emerging adults in society and their own life. Teen television is a specific genre of television series that focuses on the lives of teenagers as they transition into adulthood. It has the ability to address issues of identity formation by the narratives and allows the viewers to have a common theme with the characters. The authors examined Fox's television show Glee, created by Ryan Murphy, for research because it had a “rather

436). By conducting qualitative interviews with people who watched Glee and considered themselves to be gleeks (geeks for Glee). The main research question is a two part question; “how do audience make sense of Glee's representations of queer sexuality and how do these representations impact their own sexual identity?” (p. 436). During the study when Meyer and Wood noticed that non-heterosexual identities were rising in teen television narratives another research question emerged: “who are these narratives intend for and who is actually consuming them?” (p. 438). These narratives are “for” teens “by” adults which lead to defining the audience as “teen” problematic. A common theme in teen television is that characters will behave immaturely, but their dialog is mature as they battle their way into adulthood. This allows adult viewers to relate to the teen characters and remember their own past identity

The sample was predominately female 86.4% and male at 13.6%, with a mean age of 20.6, and white ethnicity at 90%. (p. 440). All of the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by the use of the thematic analysis. The article explains that the thematic analysis is a helpful way to find common themes from the results of the subjects. Thematic analysis discovered not only themes that emerge within each participant's response, but also themes that were common across participants. After following the analysis and collecting the data it was clear that there were recurring themes related to sexuality and gender identity. Each subject was given a random number in the transcript in order to protect their