This book introduces a fresh, critical perspective that expands the conceptual frameworks traditionally employed in PR research. It interrogates the field’s embeddedness within capitalist, market-oriented systems, which often prioritize profit, brand management, and market expansion. A queer lens examines how PR practices serve market logics that commodify identities, turning diverse experiences into marketable categories.
This book critiques the normative biases undergirding contemporary PR scholarship and practices. By queering PR, the book highlights fractures in how certain groups, identities and lives are represented (or invisible) in media and communication. It challenges the field to rethink logics of inclusivity, representation, and advocacy, particularly in how non-dominant identities are constructed and communicated in public spheres, serving as a counterpoint to the corporate-driven, homogenized narratives that dominate PR.
Drawing on queer theory, this book will particularly resonate with scholars involved in critical public relations and communication studies, gender studies, queer theory, cultural and media studies, and ethical business practices.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Public Relations Theory and Its Discontents: Normativity, Power, and Critical Turns 2. From Inclusion to Intelligibility: A Queer Theoretical Framework for Public Relations 3. Queering Corporate Social Responsibility: Public Relations, Safe Inclusion, and the Governance of Recognition 4. Queering Crisis Communication: Public Relations and the Regulation of Intelligibility 5. Performing Activism: Public Relations and the Queer Politics of Intelligibility 6. Queering Public Relations Beyond Visibility: Disclosure, Intelligibility, and the Politics of Recognition Conclusion
About the Author :
Erica Ciszek is Associate Professor at Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her scholarship explores how people and organizations navigate power, identity, and structural conditions that shape voice, visibility, and erasure. Ciszek’s research examines what communication does, for whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Using theoretically and empirically rigorous methods, she studies marginalized and hard-to-reach populations and considers how communication can promote equity, inclusion, and social change.
