Biography

Jackson McLaren is a PhD candidate in the Media & Communication program at Temple University. Hailing from Canada, he received his BA in Psychology and Media, Communication and Film and MA in Communication and Social Justice from the University of Windsor.

Jackson’s current research interests sit at the intersection of game studies, cultural studies, and transgender studies. He utilizes qualitative research methods like ethnography, discourse analysis, textual analysis, and interviews to pursue questions focused on LGBTQ and specifically transgender representation. Jackson’s dissertation is focused on analyzing how transgender characters are meaningfully represented in video games. Other research interests include LGBTQ representation in video games and popular culture, gender and live streaming, virtual ethnography and other qualitative methods, and trans masculinity in the gaming space.

He has previously interrogated the way transgender people are represented in popular television shows like Orange is the New Black and The Fosters, finding that the transgender characters in these shows hopefully challenged common negative stereotypes and tropes that trans characters in other media examples are victims of (McLaren, Bryant & Brown, 2021). In a second journal article, he explored how two transgender athletes were represented in news articles (McLaren, 2022). In this article, Jackson argued that the news coverage he examined gave hockey players Platt and Browne more autonomy to tell their own stories, thus offering a more complex way of representing transgender athletes. The common thread between these two articles is his interrogation of how transgender bodies are represented for public consumption in certain media venues, such as fictional television or news articles. As his second article was written amidst a continuing backlash against transgender women participating in women’s sports, his interrogation of how transgender people can be given space to tell their stories in news media is still timely and important.