Disrupting Hegemonic Heteronormativity Through Queer Intervention Strategies: the Negotiation of Queercoding and Queerbaiting in Fandom Spaces
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Disrupting Hegemonic Heteronormativity through Queer Intervention Strategies: The Negotiation of Queercoding and Queerbaiting in Fandom Spaces. Masterarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA) an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Elisabeth SCHNEIDER, BA BA am Institut für Amerikanistik Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. M.A. Stefan Brandt Graz, 2018 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Brandt for supporting me in pursuing this topic, My theatre family for their unconditional love, My friends and family for their moral, financial, and emotional support, And Wellbutrin XR for making all of this possible in the first place. 2 For Wanda, light and love of my life. 3 Preface This thesis was born out of quite a complex mixture of emotions, chief among them ohnmacht, anger, frustration, sadness, and hope. Frustration at being erased from dominant media narratives, as if one’s superpower were invisibility. Anger at being treated like the butt of a joke, every laugh track another dart in a board already creaking under the weight of all the prejudice hurled against you. It is hard to describe how utterly exhausting it is to see oneself find tragic ending after tragic ending after tragic ending onscreen. Slowly, with time, the possibility of one’s happiness becomes a distant afterthought. Because these representations chip away at you bit by bit, eroding your sense of self, making you question whether or not you actually deserve a happy ending. Sadness because none of this seems to be changing – ohnmacht in the face of the fact that none of this seems changeable. Still, above all, there is hope. That hope is neither placed in the media producers, nor the system they operate in – that hope is placed in us. The audience, the fans, the marginalized, the powerless. Because we are not as powerless as we might think we are. Within our communities, our practices, our creative engagements with texts lies an immense power for the transgression and even subversion of the hierarchies that marginalize us. If we want to, we can rewrite the whole system – and we damn well will. 4 Table of contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................................6 1. Cultural Studies – Fandom Studies – Queer Studies: An Attempt at an Intersection ...............................................................................................................................9 2. The Representational Politics of Hegemonic Heteronormativity ..........................12 2.1. Hegemonic Heteronormativity: Omnipresent and Invisible .........................................13 2.2. Queer Representation (?)...............................................................................................18 2.2.1. Queers on Screen: A Brief History ..........................................................................21 2.2.2. From the ‘Greedy Bisexual’ to the ‘Man in a Dress’: The Tropes and Stereotypes of Queer Representation .....................................................................................................25 2.3. (Why) Representation Matters ......................................................................................37 3. Queercoding and Queerbaiting: Sisters in Arms ....................................................44 3.1. Queercoding: A Representation that is None ................................................................45 3.2. “Please Do Not Bait the Queers” ..................................................................................47 4. Negotiating Queerbaiting in Fandom Spaces ..........................................................57 4.1. “Here We Go, Charlie Brown… I’ll Hold the Ball and You Come Running Up and Kick It”: The Fandom Discourse Surrounding Queerbaiting ..............................................57 4.2. Rebelling Against the Cultural Hierarchy: Fan Activism .............................................60 5. Queer Intervention Strategies ...................................................................................66 5.1. The Transgressive Potential of Fan Art ........................................................................68 5.2. Re/Representation through Fanfiction ..........................................................................71 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................78 Appendix .................................................................................................................................81 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................83 5 Introduction Whoever creates culture shapes our understanding of reality. Visual media products such as television shows, video games, or movies are crucial in determining how we perceive the world around us: they define our understanding of normalcy by mirroring structures of hierarchy circulating in Western culture at large – a culture that is deeply imbued with principles of hegemonic heteronormativity. Running like an invisible thread through all our socio-cultural institutions and practices, hegemonic heteronormativity methodically subjugates, marginalizes, and disempowers people based on the assumption of a universal heterosexuality (Yep 171). This is mirrored in (almost) all cultural products, reproducing structures of homophobia1 on a systematic level (Warner 6). Structures of marginalization are stabilized and naturalized through cultural products that erase queerness2 and force audiences to adopt a heteronormative point of view. Audiences then, seeing such products, get a very detailed view of how the world around them is supposed to be – hierarchization and all. Crucially, such representations of normalcy impose a very stringent set of norms and 1 This will be the first and only mention of the term in this thesis. By referring to queer-oppression, queer- marginalization, anti-queerness, or queer-antagonism instead, I hope to better capture the systematic nature lurking behind such sentiments. Portraying anti-queerness as a phobia posits it as a clinically defined disorder, thereby absolving individuals from the responsibility of their own actions and erasing the motivation that stands behind their antagonism. Homophobia, transphobia, or biphobia (to name just a few) are not phobias. They are not born out of fear and they are, most of all, not irrational. Rather, they are prejudices that are perpetuated in Western society in a systematic, institutionalized manner, directly leading to the marginalization, discrimination, abuse, oppression, and violence against queer people (Dreyer 5). 2 ‘Queer’ is an especially difficult term to define under any circumstances. Historically used as pejorative term denoting abnormality (Beasley 163), it has since been reclaimed and redefined and is now primarily used as an umbrella term for all those falling outside of the heteronormative system – meaning all those whose sex, gender, and/or sexuality somehow does not fit the norm and who are thus experiencing discrimination and marginalization (Warner 6; Beasley 163). Usage of the term in this manner however, can lead to the erasure of intersecting marginalizations and risks privileging certain (more conformist) groups over others (Beasley 173– 74). Much like queerness itself, ‘queer’ can therefore not be clearly defined because its meaning can never be fixed. Rather, it “is constantly being defined and redefined, problematized and negotiated, created and questioned” (Sinwell 329), but it is always, always put into opposition with heteronormativity. It combines defiance against ‘normality,’ and gender, sex, and/or sexuality based marginalization with (political) resistance and will also be used as such in this thesis. 6 regulations on the viewers themselves. Media representations very dichotomously structure identities into ‘natural’ and ‘deviant,’ providing audiences with role models whose behavior they are supposed to either emulate or avoid (Aytas et al. 1126). Queerness overwhelmingly seems to fall within the latter category and as such has been prone to discrimination, stereotyping, and even outright violence in both the media and in real life. Queer viewers are largely denied any (positive3) figures of identification – negatively influencing their identity development and political agency (Yescavage and Alexander, “Bi/Visibility” 178). The history of queerness onscreen is especially fraught with prejudice and marginalization – something that only now has slowly started to change. If queerness is represented nowadays, it is prone to harmful4 practices aimed at maintaining a heteronormative hierarchy. Queerbaiting has recently very prominently emerged as one such tactic: through a subtextual coding of characters as queer, overt representations are denied, yet queerness is still ambivalently present. This strategy is meant to ‘lure’ in queer audiences for economic profit, and is used by media producers to expand their viewer base without risking to alienate any members of the mainstream audience. Through (creative) engagement with the practice, queer viewers attempt to counter such hurtful strategies – radically breaking with cultural conventions of cultural production. The production of (mass) media has long been an exclusive domain, limited to those few belonging to the top of the socio-cultural hierarchy. Those