Search results

To know the role of online social media (OSM) on the experience and communication of a gay film festival (ZeFestival) in a tourist destination: Nice, France

Literature review accompanied with a qualitative study and netnographic analysis.

Informs on the use of OSMs by both organizers and festival goers, with a much poorer involvement of stakeholders than was envisaged. Proposes avenues for finding the causes of this lack of communication and sharing of the online experience.

An exploratory study of a single gay film festival. The research work should be extended to other gay cultural events in Nice and France as a whole.

Recommendations for online experience sharing and communication before, during, and after the event.

This theme has been hardly broached on an international scale and never in a French context.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the sponsorship of a gay and lesbian sports event, and whether this differs from the sponsorship of more mainstream sports events. This is achieved by focusing on one particular non-mainstream sport and event, the Gay Softball World Series. It concludes that nonmainstream sports, such as gay and lesbian softball, have become a significant and legitimate, if problematic, cultural force and a desirable magnet for sponsors as corporations attempt to reach new target groups.

This paper presents a theoretical definition of protest that overcomes the bifurcation of politics and culture in mainstream social movement research. The model is grounded in a study of drag performances, which have a long history in same-sex communities as vehicles for expressing gay identity, creating and maintaining solidarity, and staging political resistance. Extending Tilly’s concept of repertoires of contention, we propose the term “tactical repertoires” to refer to protest episodes, and we identify three elements of all tactical repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. We combine social constructionist perspectives on gender and sexuality, the social movement literature, and writings in performance studies to understand how drag performances function as tactical repertoires of the gay and lesbian movement. We argue that because they are entertaining, drag shows illuminate gay life for mainstream audiences and provide a space for the construction of collective identities that confront and rework gender and sexual boundaries.

Previous research has explored a relatively narrow representation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer (LGBTQ) community. Yet modern event attendees are part of a diverse niche group within the broader LGBTQ community. This group comprises a wide range of event attendees in search of more than sex, clubs and feather boas. This paper aims to report on empirical research conducted in Queenstown, New Zealand, during the 2016 Gay Ski Week (GSW) and explores the transformative, inclusive potential of event places, social atmospheres and experiences.

Ethnographic and autoethnographic research methods were used in this study for the exploration of transformative tourism experiences. Qualitative data were collected via in-depth interviews, observations and one of the author’s immersive experiences of the event. This author was able to bridge the divide between research and participant, contributing to a contextualised understanding of various participants’ subjective realities.

The paper reports on and discusses empirical findings, which are organised under the meta-themes of place and social atmosphere, attendee experiences, acceptance and inclusivity.

From these themes emerge a broader understanding of how LGBTQ tourism events can contribute to transformative, inclusive experiences.

This paper explores the need for event managers to revisit and adapt to the demographic, motivational and behavioural characteristics of the modern gay event attendee. In particular, this paper discovers the motivations of Asian gay attendees as a marginalised community within a traditional LGBTQ event in a traditional heterosexual destination.

This chapter draws on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork collected in gay bars from three American cities to explore the strategies LGBTQ subcultures deploy to recreate meaningful places within the vestiges of local queer nightlife. As gentrification and social acceptance accelerate the closures of LGBTQ-specific bars and nightclubs worldwide, venues that once served a specific LGBTQ subculture (i.e., leather bars) expand their offerings to incorporate displaced LGBTQ subcultures. Attending to how LGBTQ subcultures might appropriate designated spaces within a gay venue to support community (nightlife complexes), how management and LGBT subcultures temporally circumscribe subcultural practices and traditions to create fleeting, but recurring places (episodic places), and how patrons might disrupt an existing production of place by imposing practices associated with a discrepant LGBTQ subculture(place ruptures), this chapter challenges the notion of “the gay bar” as a singular place catering to a specific subculture. Instead, gay bars increasingly constitute a collection of places within the same space, which may shift depending on its use by patrons occupying the space at any given moment. Beyond the investigation of gay bars, this chapter contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, unstable, and ephemeral nature of place and place-making in the postmodern city.

Among students of social movements, the prevailing view is that, in Western democracies, most social movements target the state and its institutions. Recently scholars have questioned this definition of social movements, associated with the political process and contentious politics approaches, arguing that public protest is also used to shape public opinion, identities, and cultural practices and to pressure authorities in institutional arenas not directly linked to the state. In this paper, we take up this debate by examining the targets of recent social movements. Our analysis draws from data on 4,654 protest events that occurred in the United States between 1968 and 1975. The protest events in our dataset encompass a variety of tactics used by social movements organized around a number of different issues. We find that, although virtually all movements in the United States direct some public protest at the state, there is considerable variation in the targets of modern movements. During this period, environmental, peace, international human rights, single-policy, and ethnic movements were more likely to direct their appeals to the government, while the civil rights, gay and lesbian, and the women’s movement were more likely to target public opinion and other, non-state institutions. Our analysis calls into question excessively state-centered conceptions of social movements that view social movement activity as directed primarily at the formal political domain of social life.

This paper examines the conditions under which states include sexual orientation as a protected status in hate crime policy over the course of 25 years. Previous research in this area has generally focused on the passage of either general hate crime statutes longitudinally or the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate crime legislation via cross-sectional analysis. Moreover, previous work in this area tends to concentrate on two types of factors affecting policy passage: (1) structural factors such as social disorganization and economic vitality, and (2) political characteristics including governor’s political party and the makeup of the state legislature. We argue that a strong LGBT social movement organizational presence may also influence LGBT hate crime policy passage. Using an event history analysis, we test how state-level social movement organizational mobilization, as well as the state-level political context, affect policy passage from 1983 to 2008. Our findings indicate that political opportunities, including political instability and government ideology, matter for the passage of anti-gay hate crime policy. We also find evidence to support political mediation, as the interaction between social movement organizational presence and Democrats in the state legislature affect policy passage.

Purpose – In this paper, we contribute to the study of conservative, reactive mobilization through a study of the ex-gay movement in the United States.

Design/methodology/approach – Using state-level event history analyses over 25 years, we examine the role of threat, resources, and political opportunity in the formation of the first ex-gay organization in each state.

Findings – Our results demonstrate the importance of threat, particularly perceived challenges to traditional definitions of morality, in the formation of ex-gay groups. We find little support for either resource mobilization or political opportunity.

Research limitations/implications – This study indicates a need for further research on sociocultural threat and the ex-gay movement.

Originality/value – It expands scholarship on countermovement emergence, conservative and reactive countermovements, and the role of threat (especially sociocultural threat) in movements.