ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the globalisation of the Irish television industry and the growth of Ireland’s media landscape resulted in a more competitive domestic market, altering the ways in which Irish television engaged with queer visibility. The chapter argues that the global television market and the evolving domestic competition within Ireland’s media landscape engendered localised development of entertainment programming, which incorporated and largely mainstreamed queer visibility. Part of this localised development saw Irish television engage with global trends of quality television, producing high-end television drama with big-budget aesthetics that configured queer visibility in terms of neoliberal consumerism and cosmopolitanism, offering competing arrangements of it. Further, the chapter explores the ways in which queer visibility became allegorical, reflecting a broader cultural trend of remaking Irish identity as international, progressive and attractive.
