Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2025

This article offers queer methods for reading aromanticism – the absence of romantic attraction – in cultural production. Focusing on Ghanaian American musician Moses Sumney, the article analyses how his concert film Blackalachia centres isolation and the lack of romantic love as part of utopian possibilities. Sumney deploys what I call ‘queer aromanticisms’, articulations of aromantic affects without a claim to aromantic identity. Sumney titled his 2017 album Aromanticism as a gesture towards aromantic sensibilities, but he expresses ambivalence around identifying as aromantic; ‘I am, and I am not’, he says. Building on queer theoretical accounts of subjectless critique and José Muñoz’s idea of disidentification, I argue that Sumney’s non-identification is itself a queer tactic for resisting amatonormativity – the insistence on romantic love as a metric of human worth. To conclude, I argue that aromanticism in cultural production actively queers cultures beyond those minorities who identify outright as aromantic or asexual.

This article initially analyses the provocative, unanticipated sequence at a Parisian gay sex club that opens the romantic gay drama Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). In this sequence, Théo, a beginner looking to experiment sexually with other men, is attracted to Hugo. During their sexual interactions, they are instantly infatuated and leave the club together. This unique sequence blurs the boundaries between public and private spheres, pornographic and romantic spectacles, and irresponsible promiscuity and guilty pleasures. The analysis of this stimulating sequence involves a reconsideration of the relationships between public sex culture and queerness, pornography, bacchanalia and barebacking. From a broader perspective, this opening sequence might communicate a critical discussion of the modern, urban sex lives of young gay adults, particularly in the age of PrEP and condomless, alienate, anonymous, multi-partnered and risky sexual encounters.

Bros (2022), starring Billy Eichner, was heavily marketed as the first gay romantic comedy given a wide release by a major Hollywood studio. After the film flopped at the box office on opening weekend, users on TikTok weighed in with divisive responses blaming a host of reasons for this failure, including fellow audiences for not showing up. This is a classic example of the burden of representation, a phenomenon wherein a media text showcasing an underrepresented group invites more scrutiny by both industry and audiences due to a lack of others like it. This article analyses both the film’s pre-release promotional discourse through press coverage and its social media reception via TikTok videos to argue that Bros illustrates the constructed pressure for a queer film to perform at the box office and queer intra-community discord after its release, both hallmarks of the burden of representation.

Review of: The Golden Girls (1985–92), USA: Witt/Thomas Productions and Touchstone Television