Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Rethinking Marginality in New Queer Television, Jun 2022

Monsters have an established presence on screen as a cipher for queer identities. However, such presentations are often limiting, with queer monsters being either irredeemably evil or eliciting viewer sympathies for their helpless monstrous condition. Both forms of queer monster are highly queerphobic, but the issue this article takes with this representational binary is that it stifles the depictions of monstrous queer characters. To offer a counterpoint, I draw attention to BBC America’s Killing Eve (2018–22) and its queer monster Villanelle (Jodie Comer). I argue that Villanelle presents a new vision of the queer monster, where queerness and monstrosity are not interlocked parts of her characterization – a disconnect that allows her to be a more compelling monster and express her queerness in a plethora of ways. In this article, I focus on two ways in which Villanelle’s queerness manifests in the show: her fashion and style; and her sense of humour. I demonstrate that Villanelle’s queer humour and style provide her with a means to be a more dangerous and effective assassin, whilst also facilitating a means for expressing her queerness in complex ways. Her style, for example, enables her to dip in and out of both butch and femme aesthetics as she pleases and her humour provides a means to disarm her targets. In all, this article points towards Villanelle’s mercurial character as a positive form of queer representation, for her constant flitting creates a queer character who can be awful and provides a means for queerness to be displayed through multiple, yet legible, ambiguities.

This article uses the character Todd Chavez (voiced by Aaron Paul) from the adult animation BoJack Horseman (2014–20, Netflix) as a launch point for exploring on-screen queerness that exists outside of the confines of compulsory (hetero)sexuality. Sex and sexuality, I argue, provide a limiting framework for the expression of queerness. Using key episodes such as ‘Hooray, Todd Episode!’ (2017), ‘Planned Obsolescence’ (2018) and ‘Ancient History’ (2018) I argue that the use of hyperbolic eroticism in BoJack works to frame Todd’s asexuality as distinctly queer. Through the mobilization of asexuality as a theoretical advancement for queer studies, this article considers how non-sexual identity formations work to destabilize and queer the institutions of the relationship and attraction. It is, I argue, reductive and limiting to view queerness exclusively through the lens of sex and sexuality.

While the Star Trek franchise is synonymous with diversity, queerness has been unfortunately interpreted more as a tragic plot device rather than presenting fully realized queer characters in series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. However, the more recent programme Star Trek: Lower Decks appears to embrace Gene Roddenberry’s utopian ethos in that diversity is default in the future through multiple queer and queer-coded women. This article analyses how bisexual protagonist Ensign Beckett Mariner eventually finds support over the course of the series through her relationships with the characters Captain Amina Ramsey, Ensign D’Vana Tendi and Ensign Jennifer Sh’reyan. Unlike previous attempts at queer plots, the focal points in these moments emphasize character and community instead of violence and drama. This article proposes that Star Trek: Lower Decks signals a more positive shift in how queer characters are interpreted in the science fiction utopian franchise.

This article analyses the messy queer relationships that shape la familia in Tanya Saracho’s show, Vida. It highlights how the show reckons with mess as an affective structure in the lives of queer Latinx subjects, whose racialized sexualities and genders produce intricate subject positions from which to negotiate power. By offering ‘messy queer familias’ as an analytic paradigm, the article tracks the ways in which pleasure, desire, shame and melancholia converge and diverge in the storylines of the two Chicana protagonists, Emma and Lyn. I suggest that Vida tells a messy story about queer Latinx lives, and purposefully so, in order to shine light on messy relations of power. Analysing the manifestation of ghosts, queer kinship practices, the glimmers and wonders of a queerceañera, and melancholic mother-daughter relations, I argue that Vida’s characters make space within la familia for queerness to thrive.

In his 2020 Netflix miniseries Hollywood, producer Ryan Murphy presents us with an almost utopian version of Hollywood, an alternate history that centres queer and Black voices over the realities of the repressive queerphobic and racist nature of the 1940s US society. It tells the story of an ultimately Oscar-winning film project surrounding the story of the real-life suicide of silent movie actress Peg Entwistle, put together by marginalized creators. In many ways, the miniseries commits to the screen a classic narrative of the American dream, of the marginalized overcoming adversity and ‘making it big’. It frames Hollywood as aspirational, both as an actual physical place but also as fantastical space, using strategies borrowed from theme parks and other immersive spaces. It is unusual in centring Black, queer and Black queer voices in this story, and by extension in history – in time and space(s) where they are usually erased. It makes use of nostalgia in manifold ways to do so, showcasing it as a tool that presents both opportunities and dangers when applied to marginalized communities. As such, it emerges as a liberal fairy tale espousing the virtues of individual action over collective activism against systemic injustices, and champions a politics of visibility rooted in whiteness. This article interrogates the potentiality of popular culture, and this text of historical television specifically, for reinscribing queer people into US public memory. To do so, it discusses the Disneyfication of Hollywood in the series and how it shapes our perception of the past, ideas of marginalized nostalgia(s) for queer and BiPoC (and queer BiPoC), and the role celebrity/star figures play for constructing history on-screen.

Following the success of Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe there has been an explosion of openly queer representation in US children’s animated television through programmes such as She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and The Owl House (2020–present), among others. The majority of these programmes follow trends seen in Steven Universe. These queer-inclusive children’s programmes tend to exist within the sci-fi/fantasy genre, visually reference Japanese anime, focus on female queer identity and attract adult fan bases in addition to young audiences. These factors can be accounted for, at least in part, by the direct influence of the mahō shōjo or magical girl genre of Japanese anime and manga or its indirect influence through Steven Universe. Scholarship has already commented upon the queer tropes common in magical girl programmes, both open and subtextual, and the direct influence of this genre on Steven Universe is well established. However, while the influence of the magical girl genre is obvious in programmes like Steven Universe and She-Ra that are closely patterned on the magical girl, it can also account for the aforementioned similarities in a majority of seemingly different recent queer-inclusive programmes such as The Owl House, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts and others. The anime influenced visuals of these programmes are partially a result of borrowing from aspects of the magical girl genre, such as the iconic transformation or henshin sequence. It is the sci-fi/fantasy nature of magic and transformation, just as in magical girl programmes, that allows young women to access magical power and agency through explorations of identity. These similarities make for an accessible language of transformation and exploration through which queer narratives can be expressed. By tracing the influence of the magical girl genre and its focus on the power of self and interpersonal exploration, we can begin to see why modern, queer-inclusive children’s animation exists in the form it currently does and begin to question what this means for queer representation and messages in contemporary US children’s animation.

Comedy Central’s Broad City (2014–19) features a pair of Jewish single women navigating the pleasures and pitfalls of life in New York. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s characters find inspiration and sustenance in each other, rather than their secondary and often fleeting relationships with men. Their bond exceeds heterosexual friendship, as Ilana repeatedly declares her devotion and sexual attraction to Abbi. While Abbi casually rebuffs her advances, the libidinal Ilana pursues flings with both men and women, perceiving sexual orientation as a continuum. Co-creator Ilana Glazer has declined to label her character bisexual, claiming that Broad City was inspired by the adage that ‘everyone under 30 is gay’. By equating sexual fluidity with Millennial culture, Glazer seems to diminish the series’ political significance. However, I argue the series makes key interventions in queer representation by foregrounding the bonds between women, resisting heterosexual imperatives, and introducing queer sexual practices. My article considers the series’ importance to both LGBTQIA+ and straight viewers, combining close textual readings with attention to critical and audience responses. Additionally, I draw from recent scholarship on Broad City to examine how the series’ queer humour emphasizes white Jewish identity and relies upon cultural appropriation.