Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2016

Why should we still care about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB/UPN)? With more than two hundred scholarly articles, a yearly conference and an academic journal devoted to its study, Buffy has been well explored. Yet compared to current broadcast programming, the show continues to stand out as an uncommonly radical mainstream text. Since Buffy’s last airing, realist images of the ‘good gay citizen’ have proliferated across US broadcast television, depicting lesbian and gay characters as assimilated extensions of the bourgeois heteronormative family and its consumer practices. In contrast, Buffy offers viewers a melodramatic and queerly negative popular aesthetic of the sort that barely exists today. In this article, therefore, the author returns to Buffy and its darkly queer hero, Willow Rosenberg (played by Alyson Hannigan), as indicators of utopian possibilities forgotten – but hopefully not yet lost.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) belongs to the body of American cinematic production that has spawned numerous debates regarding portrayals of homosexuality. Specifically, the focus of much of this particular film’s analysis to date has been on its queering of the western genre and its queer(ed) representation of America’s iconic cowboy figure. However, this article proposes that another queering process, concerning the myth of the Fall, runs parallel to the queering of the genre. Applying this particular biblical myth to Brokeback Mountain’s narrative allows for a more complete understanding of how the film deals with the subject matter of homosexuality as well as the purposes of its queering processes in terms of reception. What is ultimately argued here is that the film’s queering of genre/myth is a process of re-historicization that restores queer subjectivity within a rather rigid heteronormative canon.

This article explores Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007, SciFi) fanfiction responses to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ (DADT) policy of the United States Department of Defense. It examines 58 examples of femslash that depict a same-sex relationship between char- acters Samantha Carter and Janet Fraiser. It suggests that this fanfiction mirrors the evolving public debates regarding lesbians and gays in the military and critiques DADT in two ways. First, the femslash demonstrates that the television show repre- sents a realistic version of conditions under DADT. The second approach uses the science fiction elements of the series to critically comment on the assumptions behind DADT, such as unit cohesion based on compulsory heterosexuality. Sam/Janet femslash insists on the possibility of a valid lesbian existence within the US military and beyond.

This article seeks to investigate the revolutionary and queer possibilities in contemporary Japanese media and the otaku subculture. By specifically re-evaluating the aesthetic practice of fanservice in otaku media, it further reimagines fanservice as an aesthetically and philosophically productive model for reanimating political and sexual politics of resistance to hetero/homonormative capitalism. Relying primarily on Deleuzian media theory, this reading utilizes Studio Trigger’s smash hit animation Kiru ra Kiru/Kill la Kill (Imaishi, 2013–14) as a case study for the transformative potential of queering sexual-political assemblages within the re-engineered circuits and networks of otaku desire. This series further enunciates an upheaval of traditional discourses pertaining to gender representation and perversion in otaku media through its rhizomatic web of desiring-images that explores queer performativity, politicized desire-production and a collectivist strategy of binding together coalitions of dynamically intense desires into a new queer-otaku assemblage.

This article analyses videos created for the It Gets Better Project as well as comments by their viewers. The authors examined the top 21 videos based on number of views and rising popularity. Upon analysis of the comments, it was noted that the majority of them place the onus on the victim to ‘stick it out’ and wait until they are older for the bullying to stop, as opposed to advocating for support and action by responsible adults or bystanders, or even themselves. In addition, the messages within the videos and the comments rarely offered ideas regarding how to put an end to the bullying or that the bullies should be held responsible for their actions. This article draws attention to the unintended, and sometimes contradictory, messages received even when the goal is support.

While the gay child remains culturally unrepresentable, the last decade has seen an increasing number of representations of transgender children. In contrast to the incompatibility of sexuality and childhood presented by the gay child, I argue that normative conceptualizations of childhood are the very means by which the transgender child becomes available as a cultural representation. Situated at the intersections of queer theory, transgender studies and childhood studies, this article examines recent media representations of transgender children in the short documentary films Raising Ryland (Feeley, 2015) and I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition (Stocks, 2011) to discover which gendered ‘realities’ are representable as ‘real’ within the norms of language and culture, revealing how the idea of childhood itself governs possibilities for gendered being and becoming.

Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America, C. Winter Han (2015) New York: New York University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9781479831951, Hardback, $89.00, ISBN: 9781479855209, Paperback, $26.00

Tangerine, directed by Sean Baker (2015) New York: Magnolia Pictures

Bewitched, created by Sol Saks (1964–72) Culver City, CA: Screen Gems Television

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (2001) Los Angeles: New Line Cinema