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Between butch/femme: On the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in a YouTube web series

ABSTRACT Drawing on a legacy of Black television and film production, Black web series remediate earlier media forms in order to usher in a twenty-first-century revival of indie Black cultural production. Specifically, video sharing and social media platforms operate as a sphere in which content creators and users are afforded unique opportunities to engage with video content and each other on a variety of levels. Focusing on the YouTube media sphere, one can also observe the myriad ways in which the performance of race, gender, and sexuality influences the types of discourse that circulate within these sites. In watching and analyzing Black queer web series on YouTube, I examine how the performance of gender and sexuality by Black queer women within and outside of web series are policed and protected by both community insiders and outsiders. Utilizing an ethnographic framework, which includes a critical discourse analysis of the YouTube comments for the series Between Women, as well as a textual analysis of series content, this project draws conclusions about the role that the politics of pleasure, performance, and the public sphere play in the recognition and/or refusal of queer sexuality within Black communities.