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This paper proposes that LGBT+ mainstreaming on reality television programme Strictly Come Dancing creates space for audience demand for radical, authentic representations of same-sex desire and intimacy, both of which challenges normative representations of ballroom dancing. Integrating concepts of normativity and authenticity explored in existing scholarship, I argue against the encountering through a defensive stance, of reality TV's normalization of queer narratives to promote authentic, inclusive representation. Focusing on dance-themed British reality TV programme for family entertainment, I draw on a queer reading of 285 newspaper articles on Strictly Come Dancing's same-sex dance partnerships and 35 interviews with LGBT+ equality dancers in the United Kingdom, to conclude that active engagement with mechanisms of normalization can open up spaces for a reclamation of queer representation in its authenticity. The article makes a contribution to media and cultural studies and queer television scholarship through a troubling of anti-normativity, proposing a working with normativity to achieve queer inclusivity.

The essay reviews Allison Goebal's gendered analysis of women's 'right to the city' in post-apartheid South Africa and concludes that the work makes a crucial contribution to the scholarship in its injection of a 'politics of difference' and a gendered lens. The book would however benefit from expanding on its discussion of women's care burdens to explore the inclusion of care on African women's experience of justice in the city.

AbstractStrictly Come Dancing and Dancing on Ice are primetime reality television shows that promote partner dancing as a form of leisure in the UK. Both shows have consistently represented partner dancing as a partnership between a man and a woman. However, in 2019 and 2020male/male partnerships were introduced into both shows for the first time. Drawing on media reports that discuss these male/male partnerships, this paper explores how the partnerships were represented and made sense of by mainstream and LGBT + media. Employing thematic discourse analysis, we demonstrate how the male/male dance partnerships were framed by a complex and contradictory inclusive masculinity discourse. On the one hand, this discourse celebrated the male/male couples as evidence that Britain is a progressive society in which homophobia is in decline. At the same time, the representations largely centred on the male dance couples' bromances while ignoring or silencing discourses of gay love or sex. We show that although the representations can be viewed as a positive step forward, there were also some limitations to the representations which necessitate more critical examination in future research

'New' media and algorithmic rules underlying many emerging technologies present particular challenges in fieldwork, because the opacity of their design, and, sometimes, their real or perceived status as 'not quite here yet' – makes speaking about these challenging in the field. In this article, we use insights from a three-stage citizens council investigating citizens' views on developments in data-driven media personalisation to reflect on the potentials of using future-orientated vignettes and scenarios in data collection on user experiences, expectations and the ethics of algorithms. We present the possibilities and potentials of using vignettes as part of a data collection approach in user-centric algorithm studies which invites users' contextual experiences of algorithms but also enables more normative reflections on what good looks like in contemporary datafied societies.