Since Zaya Wade came out as transgender, she has continued to take up prominence in popular culture and press coverage of Zaya has centered on her fashion. In this article, we analyze press coverage of Zaya to examine the intersections of Blackness, femininity, trans identity, and child celebrity. Building on scholarship about trans representation and performing Black femininity in popular media, we focus our attention on how Zaya is presented as authentic—a core theme in this scholarship. In our analysis, we illustrate how these representations appear seemingly positive by shedding light on Zaya's unique perspectives about family, beauty, and activism. Yet, we find the press coverage only promotes Zaya's unique identity to the extent her performance of authentic Black femininity upholds transnormativity. This article unpacks how authenticity is used as a strategy of transnormativity that is animated by Zaya's Blackness, femininity, and status as a child celebrity and activist.

This research analyzes mass media coverage of The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Online Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), two landmark 2018 bills that changed how sexual content is moderated by internet service providers in the United States. Using critical discourse analysis, I compare the framing of 101 news stories about FOSTA-SESTA published in mainstream U.S. newspapers, feminist media, and LGBTQ magazines over the course of 7 years. Findings describe coverage of online sex work, online child sexual exploitation, and free speech concerns that preceded and followed the landmark ruling from 2017 to 2023. I show FOSTA-SESTA's progression as a topic of discourse during the 2020 presidential election and compare differences between coverage in ideologically diverse U.S. media. While mainstream news originally supported FOSTA-SESTA's efforts to restrict the tech industry and prevent online child sexual exploitation, alternative media tended to present skeptical arguments that supported sex workers and other marginalized communities. Journalism industry interventions are discussed.

This essay suggests that there is a variant of what Stephanie Kelley-Romano calls the “conspiracy genre on American television,” a subgenre targeting children that we call kinder-conspiracy theories. Treating Disney's Gravity Falls as an exemplar of the subgenre, we argue that kinder-conspiracy theories differ from the larger genre in three ways. First, while inspiring social mistrust like most conspiracy entertainment, the programs portray some conspiracy theorists as hucksters, encouraging viewers to build their defenses against possible deception. Second, by serving as an introduction to reading conspiracy culture, the genre also serves as a kind of conspiracy literacy training and an inoculation against a milieu of rampant suspicion and polarization. Finally, due to their prosocial messaging for younger audiences, the genre also emphasizes a kind of collectivistic agency that privileges community over the traditional individualism and fantasies of the lone wolf conspiracy theorist.

This essay is a close reading of YouTube's Michael & Anthony's video content in which mixed-race Black male pro wrestler Anthony Bowens and his white boyfriend Michael Pavano's romance is represented. The goal is to deploy queer of color critique to unpack how the interracial aspects of Bowens and Pavano's romance offer moments to question, critique, and reimagine the queer politics of interracial dating. Three themes emerge from this reading: reconstructing masc/femme coupling trope, counteracting interraciality, and optimism (and pessimism). This essay considers how Bowens and Pavano's romance reifies or resists postracialism working with the LGBTQ+ liberation movement.

Between 1953 and 2023, mass media changed how they cover Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. My thesis is that the defining narratives of Hugh Hefner and his famous creation involved five distinct media personas, which were entrepreneur, activist, paradox, tragic figure, and predator. Using key magazine articles as central points of information, I consider how changes in Playboy's success combined with cultural shifts in the structure of feeling, such as fourth-wave feminism and the Me Too movement, to transform the dominant representation of Hugh Hefner from an entrepreneurial Horatio Alger to a salacious predator. Media attention after his death recognizes that Hugh Hefner had a definite but undeniably controversial influence on American life.