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Book Cover for: Australian Queer Screens: Diversity and Social Change in Film and TV, Rob Cover

Australian Queer Screens: Diversity and Social Change in Film and TV

Rob Cover

This is the first book-length study of Australia's rich history of LGBTQ+ film and television, covering histories, production, screen representation and audience identities.

Despite a long-standing international field of queer media studies, Australian scholarship has only recently emerged. Screen diversity in Australia is important to cultural policy, education and social harmony. This book presents new scholarship on the role and significance of gender- and sexually-diverse characters, themes and narratives on Australian screens, as Australian film and television has a very rich history of representing LGBTQ+, gender- and sexually-diverse characters, stories and themes.

The chapters in this book cover a broad range of areas to provide a comprehensive overview of LGBTQ+ film and television in Australia, including: the history and formation of LGBTQ+ screen representation in such film and TV series as Dad and Dave Come To Town, Lovers and Luggers, Cop Shop, Division 4, and Homicide; production perspectives and challenges, including insights from screen writers and actors; the significance of LGBTQ+ film festivals as part of Australian cultural heritage; analyses of key Australian queer film and TV series to draw out themes that foreground their 'Australianness', including The Set, Victims, and Boys in the Band, among others; and perspectives on audience and culture, including the utility and value of LGBTQ+ screen representation to identity, belonging and social change.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: Feb 19th, 2026
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 1.00in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9798765128435
  • Categories: Film - History & CriticismAustralia & New Zealand - GeneralTelevision - History & Criticism

About the Author

Cover, Rob: - Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He leads a number of major funded research projects on young people, health and wellbeing and digital and broadcast media. The author of around one hundred journal articles and chapters, he publishes widely on topics related to digital cultures in the context of social identities, young people, suicide prevention and resilience. Rob is the author of ten books, including: Identity in the COVID-19 Years (Bloomsbury, 2024), Identity and Digital Communication: Concepts, Theories, Practices (2023), Fake News in Digital Culture (2022), Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (2019), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (2016), and Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (2016). He is a co-editor of several anthologies including: Queer Studies in Education (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights (2024) and is co-editor of The Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies (2025).
Monaghan, Whitney: -

Whitney Monaghan is Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her current research examines LGBTIQ representation on screen. She is the author of Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not 'Just a Phase' (2016), and co-author of Queer Theory Now: From
Foundations to Futures (2020). She is also a co-ordinator of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival.

Richards, Stuart: -

Stuart Richards lectures in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia. He is author of The
Queer Film Festival: Popcorn & Politics (2016). He has previously worked with both the Melbourne Queer Film Festival and the San Francisco Frameline International LGBTQ Film Festival.

McKinnon, Scott: - Scott McKinnon is a PERL Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has a research background in histories and geographies of sexuality, and the place of movies in Australian cultures, with a focus on film reception and memories of cinema among gay audiences. He is the author of Gay Men at the Movies: Cinema, Memory and the History of a Gay Male Community (2016).
Pym, Tinonee: -

Tinonee Pym is a Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project AusQueerScreen: Representation of Gender and Sexual Diversity in Australian Film and Television, 1990-2010
at RMIT University, Australia. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Media and Communication at Swinburne University, Australia, where her research focuses on queer community, sexuality and digital cultures.

Praise for this book

"Australian Queer Screens challenges the notion that many hold that LGBTIQ+ representations were not visible throughout Australia's rich screen history. This book is the long overdue compendium of the queer history of Australian screens. It charts these developments through their history and formations, production contexts, reading practices and audience and culture. It is a book where the authors declare 'Queerness has always existed on Australian screens' and then show the diverse ways this statement is true. Australian Queer Screens is essential reading for those who want to understand just how queer Australian screen media was, is and could be in the future." --Damien O'Meara, Lecturer, RMIT University, Australia

"Queer representation is global - not just in Hollywood - and Australian Queer Screens: Diversity and Social Change in Film and TV displays in full force the splendid diversity and intelligence of Australian queer cinema and television. Deeply researched and meticulously comprehensive this is not just a survey of a national cinema, but a necessary resource for anyone interested in world cinema. The range of discussion here is breathtaking - profiles of individual films, production details, the economics of television, reception analysis, educational impact - and while the details here are specific to Australia, the lessons to be learned are universal. Mandatory reading for anyone interested in queer representation." --Michael Bronski, Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University, USA