Chilean gays and lesbians watching television: TV representations and the construction of sexual identifications

Looking at the ways in which different programmes produced in Chile since 1990 have depicted homosexuality, this thesis explores the relationships between televisual representations and the lived experiences of participants who identify as gays or lesbians, trying to comprehend how they interpret these images, interact with them, and create meanings that inform the ways in which they articulate their sexual identification.

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of over 100 TV figures and a thematic analysis of interviews and focus group with 28 individuals, I argue that all through participants’ lives, the ways in which national television has made homosexuality visible have played a mostly detrimental role in their processes of sexual identification. Participants state that the stereotyped and simplified representations that Chilean TV has shown have contributed to further marginalise gay and lesbian lives. These images strengthened damaging feelings that fed into a ubiquitous sense of shame, thus having a negative impact over respondents’ processes of self-recognition and self-acceptance. Participants have then articulated their sexual identification by disassociating themselves from these images and establishing a clear difference in regard to them, which has implied the foregrounding of their identification as “normal” gays or lesbians. This is also what they want to see represented on TV.

I provide a contextual reading of this situation, understanding television as one of many other discursive institutions and texts through which homosexuality has been placed in an unfavourable position within Chilean society, thus shaping how participants understand their positioning within it. I, therefore, do not reveal “media effects”, but elucidate the role that TV has had in the lives of a group of self-identifying gay/lesbian individuals who understand television as an institution that, although is not the place where fixed ideas about homosexuality are originally produced, has the power to spread these meanings into broad sectors of the population and stabilise them into common sense.