Publications

Publication details [#59218]

McGuirk, Siobhan. 2014. “God loves you and it gets better”: Ideology, deixis and agency in an anti-homophobic bullying viral campaign. Journal of Language and Sexuality 3 (2) : 219–244.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/jls

Annotation

The ‘It Gets Better Project’ (IGBP) is an online anti-homophobic bullying initiative directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. To date, 50,000 user-generated IGBP videos have attracted over 50 million views. This critical discourse analysis of IGBP videos in the “Faith” category, notes how the projected ideologies therein overlap with and depart from conservative Christian rhetoric in surprising ways. It is asked what gets better, for whom, and how that might happen. The analysis then compares messages uploaded by laypeople and spokespeople of religious institutions. It argues that neoliberal assumptions are frequently evident in laypeople’s emphases on individualism, economic success, urban spaces and heteronormative conceptions of time. Spokespeople, conversely, tend to emphasize community-based opposition to homophobia in the here and now. This ideological struggle highlights barriers to “it getting better” in the present but also creates space for politics of redistribution and an unexpected queering of societal norms.