Making Queer Content Visible

Media Framing of Queerness in Serbia

1_Introduction I love Serbia. It is a beautiful and hospitable country in the heart of Europe, the home of my ancestors and family, and I have many fond childhood memories of it. The country, which has been a candidate for EU membership since 2012, is developing steadily, but there are often obstacles that slow it down. One such example is the questioning of traditional norms and values. Queerness is a difficult topic in Serbia. Even in my family it is considered a taboo subject. My family avoids talking about it and prefers keeping quiet, which includes me—I keep quiet. I don’t dare talk to them about it. What if they reject my attitude and opinion? What if they reject me? Looking at the representation of queerness in the media does not improve the difficult situation. As this _Perspective will show, the LGBT+ [1] community in Serbia faces rejection from various actors. To find out how Serbian society perceives, understands, and reacts to queerness, I use the concept of media framing from media, communication, and sociological research. As media scholar Robert Entman puts it: Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. [2] Therefore, people employ frames of reference or interpretation in order to categorize, interpret, and evaluate facts, events, or actors. [3] The utilization of such frames by parties, different groups, social movements, or even journalists is referred to as framing. [4] The resulting effects on recipients are in turn categorized as framing effects. [5] This means that the way information is presented can significantly influence people and the way they think about and interpret the world around them. Frames themselves are a kind of interpretive lens through which information is processed. These lenses can be understood as cognitive structures that guide an individual’s understanding and response to new information. The concept was popularized by the book Frame Analysis, by sociologist Erving Goffman, who argued that people use frames to organize their experiences and make sense of the world. [6] Framing, in this sense, is the (subjective) selection and emphasis of certain aspects of reality while omitting or downplaying others. Media framing is therefore a powerful tool for influencing public…