Fig. 1 Here we see Gay Cat as he appears in his original form.

Introduction
ATRL is a forum-based website for pop-music and pop-culture obsessives that began as a fan site for MTV’s now-defunct music-video-countdown show, TRL (hence its name, which is an abbreviation for “Absolute Total Request Live”). Members of the ATRL community make extensive use of small visual compositions called smileys in their forum posts. These figures, similar to emojis in form, represent a variety of characteristics and moods that might not be easily conveyed in textual form – or could be but are less entertaining and poignant when expressed through linguistic means. (You can find the original forms of ATRL’s smileys and their codes here.)

The use of visual compositions like emoticons, emojis, and smileys in textual communication has led to a persistent uproar among scholars and the popular press about degrading language standards (Baron and Ling, 2011, p. 48; Garrison, et al., 2011, p. 113). However, emojis stretch linguistic traditions and “[open] a gateway to a non-discursive language of new possibility” (Lebduska, 2014). A specific smiley on ATRL called Gay Cat proves this point, and with this project, I ask, how do members of the ATRL community use Gay Cat? Though the smiley makes use of stereotypical visual cues of gayness and queerness, I argue that Gay Cat allows for those in the ATRL community to subvert negative connotations with queer identification as an asset and not as a deficit or as a neutral identification, and to claim, manipulate, and subvert queer identities.

Continue reading Queer Performances in Online Places: The Use of Gay Cat on ATRL →