MDIA professor’s expertise on cancel culture and LGBTQ+ media representation is in high demand

Media Arts and Studies Associate Professor and Graduate Director Eve Ng’s expertise on cancel culture and media representation of the LGBTQ+ community is in high demand these days. She has recently been published by Sage Journals and Popular Communication, and will be published later this year in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2nd edition) and by Rutgers University Press. Ng is also asked to talk with students about the subjects on the Athens campus.

Ng is being tapped to share her expertise after authoring two books, "Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis in 2022" and "Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and commercial Television in 2023." Cancel Culture was the first book to examine the phenomenon from a critical media studies perspective.

“I noticed in 2019 that there was a surge in discourse of people talking about cancel culture, and at that time there was a positive feeling about it. The ‘Me Too’ movement in 2017 resulted in various celebrities and political figures being ‘canceled,’” said Ng. “As time progressed, the perception of cancel culture got more and more negative and was criticized as an attack on free speech. In the book I talk about what cancelling looks like in different domains. What was really interesting for me was comparing cancel culture in the U.S. to what was happening in China. In China the government is an agent of canceling and in the U.S., the government is not involved in the same way.”

"Mainstreaming Gays" provided a new account of LGBTQ+ integrations into mainstream media spanning the legacy and streaming eras.

“That book looks at an interesting time period where legacy media, like Viacom that owned CBS and things like MTV, started a cable network called LOGO,” said Ng. “Bravo, which was owned by NBC, also had a huge hit called 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' (which was created by Scripps College graduate David Collins ’89). There was this convergence of legacy media and online media as well, and fans were discussing the programs on the websites. Networks wanted that kind of engagement. Media fandom used to be stigmatized, but now the networks loved fans and engagement.”

Ng started working at Ohio University in 2013. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication and a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from UMass-Amherst, and also has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science with Honors from the University of Melbourne. Ng is frequently asked by instructors on campus to give guest lectures on cancel culture to their classes.

“Students like to talk about because all of them have either seen it or have participated in cancel culture,” said Ng. “Each fall I teach a Media Arts & Studies course called Media and Sexual Representation, and this whole trend of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ representation in comes up a lot in that course.”