Responding to Offending Images in the Digital Age: Censorious and Satirical Discourses in LGBT Media Activism

This article critically examines the censorious campaigns of media watchdog organizations such as Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), challenging the assumptions about media effects and media power underlying this discourse. In addition, I explore alternative modes of response to offending images within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community that take advantage of emergent participatory media platforms and satirical modes of critique to challenge representational power in the public sphere. Adapting Finnegan and Kang's Latourian theoretical framework of iconophilia, I argue that contemporary popular practices of digital remix and parody suggest a promising, if imperfect, strategy for media activists to embrace and actively transform the meaning of offending images while resisting an iconoclasm that assumes their static power over weak and vulnerable audiences.