Queer TV

Este artículo aborda la representación de las identidades LGBTIQ+ adolescentes en las dos primeras temporadas de la serie 'Sex Education' (Netflix, 2019-). Partiendo de una metodología de análisis anclada en la Teoría Queer y en el concepto de interseccionalidad se estudiará la construcción de aquellos personajes cuya expresión de género y/u orienta-ción sexual trascienden los límites establecidos por la cisheteronormatividad, además de aquellos cuyos deseos (heterocoincidentes o no) no encajan dentro de lo que las socie-dades occidentales entienden como «normal», puesto que se parte del rechazo a la norma como elemento constitutivo de lo queer. Los objetivos principales se concretan en: a.) determinar qué imágenes, conocimientos y construcciones epistemológicas se difunden en la serie en torno a la diversidad sexogenérica; y b.) definir qué discurso articula la serie sobre (no)identidades queer y la violencia que sufren las personas LGBTIQ+.

The third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things—the streaming platform’s breakaway horror hit created and produced by the Duffer Brothers—was released amidst much media fervor in July of 2019. Set (thus far) in 1983-1985, the show focuses on the presence of a monstrous force in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, and the motley crew of preteens, teens, and adults who team up to fight it. Season three was a slight departure from the tone and pacing of the previous two seasons; additionally, season three also marked the introduction of the narrative’s first canonically queer character, Scoops Ahoy employee Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke). Although it has not been made explicit yet, viewers are also left with the sense that Will Byers (Noah Schnapp)—on whom the first two seasons largely center—may also be queer, and he has certainly been coded as such throughout the narrative.

What is interesting about how the (potential) queerness of these two characters is represented is ultimately that their queerness isn't treated as the linchpin of their character—instead, their characters are fully integrated into the narrative, and their sexuality is incidental rather than constitutive to how they fit into the show. When Robin reveals to Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) that she is a lesbian, it is a sweet moment, but it is also remarkably *boring;* further, Robin does not fall victim to the Bury your Gays trope that the horror genre has in the past utilized all too often, and it appears that she will continue to be a significant member of the cast in the upcoming season four. As such, in this presentation I will further explore how Stranger Things has been and continues to be a positive installment of the new queer horror movement.

Este trabajo estudia cómo la serie Sex Education difunde transnacionalmente discursos sobre sexualidades no normativas, igualdad y diversidad LGbtiq+. Desde los Estudios LGbtiq+ se aplica un diseño mixto con metodología no experimental de tipo ex-post- facto usando instrumentos de medición e interacción transmedia y los informes iLGa World y Global Attitudes. Se confirma que Netflix, vía Sex Education, difunde transna- cionalmente valores de diversidad e igualdad sexo-genérica en países sin pleno amparo social y jurídico a dicha diversidad, propiciando la construcción de otras subjetividades.

In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how the detective genre was being reimagined in the twenty-first century.1 The series, I argued, challenged the normative detective figure in American crime genres and subverted norms of gender, sexuality, and disability implicit therein. The airing of the third season provides the occasion to reexamine the topic. The scene just discussed, and others in the third season, makes some of my arguments from the earlier article seem downright naïve. In that essay, I tried to carefully build a case for the “queer valences” of Lecter and Will’s relationship. These arguments became almost entirely unnecessary with the third season, in which the queer “subtexts” became more explicit. For example, Will confesses of Lecter in one scene from Season 3, “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him” (3:3 "Secondo"). Lecter expresses his affection in less direct ways. He leaves for Will a “broken valentine”, a bloody body mangled to resemble a heart. Will calls it “a valentine written on a broken man” or Lecter’s “broken heart” (3:2 "Primavera"). At the same time, the relationship between the two men remained non-sexual, intensifying the tension in the series, which most interested me originally. The ambiguous nature of the men’s relationship, the tension between homosocial and homoerotic affection, is intensified, not collapsed, in the third season. This fact only increases the value the series offers in interrogating masculinity, sexuality, and homosociality. In this article, I will examine how the third season of Hannibal should serve as a clarion call to reexamine our existing notions of homosocial desire. The series uniquely imagines an intimate, passionate, and ambiguously erotic image of male friendship. The series demands a kind of analysis that many critical approaches, popular and scholarly alike, cannot provide, as so many of these approaches demand a binary framework of friendship-versus-gay- romance. Hannibal, particularly in its third season, asks us to imagine a conceptual space where “erotic” desire and passionate devotion can exist between male friends.

Öffentlichkeitswirksames, politisches, queeres ‚miteinander Gehen‘ findet zum Teil in Form von Demonstrationen, Paraden und Märschen statt, die die Anliegen und die Sichtbarkeit von queeren Themen gezielt im urbanen Raum aktualisieren. Fokus dieses Artikels ist aber ein Gehen, das zwar ein dezidiert queeres ist, jedoch abseits dieser LGBTIQA+-inklusiven Schauplätze stattfindet. Dazu wird der Fokus auf einem Format des Reality-TV ("The Prancing Elites Project") gelegt und dessen Fassung und Hervorbringung von Formen des queeren Gehens.

Gunslingers. Demons. Military black ops. Sapphic romance. There is a seeming discord to these televisual tropes, but they all come together to create a whole greater than its parts in SyFy’s Wynonna Earp (2016-21). Initially pitched to the network as “Justified meets Frozen” by series creator and producer Emily Andras, this absurdist shorthand conveys a great deal about the series, which centers on sisters Wynonna and Waverly Earp as they protect their generically western town, Purgatory, from demons and other supernatural threats. The outlandishness of the premise is echoed by the outlandishness of the show itself; it’s deeply generically hybrid, occupying an interstitial space between westerns, police procedurals, horror, and mystery, with a constant thread of comedic self-awareness that undergirds the narrative.  The plots are often comically complex, the villains are excessively flamboyant, and the special effects are winkingly lowbrow—a combination very much in keeping with the high concept, low budget network aesthetic of SyFy.

This self-aware, lowbrow aesthetic means that shows like Wynonna Earp rarely achieve the kind of visibility that prestige TV does; its genre hybridity makes it difficult to categorize, which in turn means that contemporary viewing practices driven by the idea of “curation” often ignore shows like Wynonna Earp, which fly under the radar in terms of broader media coverage and are difficult to categorize tidily. However, that invisibility also gives the show room to grow into a narrative that centers both strong, complex women and queer characters, offering not just a transgression of genre but also a transgression of cultural scripts so often reified by mainstream TV. This paper will explore how the production of and the content within Wynonna Earp is consistently rhetorically transgressive in ways that deserve more scrutiny.