Cross-Atlantic Discourses in Celebrity Coming Out Stories: The Neoliberal Cases of Ricky Martin and Tiziano Ferro

[...]as previously mentioned, their letters from two different geographic regions provide an opportunity for us to examine and compare local discourses. [...]what we are interested in is not if and how Ferro and Martin felt free and liberated, but rather how they have produced their coming out as a liberation act that hides some and produces other power dynamics. [...]we considered discourse-as-discursive-practice, which is "discourse as something that is produced, circulated, distributed, consumed in society" (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000, p. 448). The Letters Appear On March 29, 2010, Ricky Martin, a well-known Puerto Rican/American pop singer- after 19 years in the spotlight and at the age of 39-through his twitter account and a letter on his blog announced his homosexuality, thus, coming out of the closet to his millions of fans.