Though BioWare’s fantasy video game Dragon Age: Inquisition garnered almost uniform industry praise for its immersive narrative and innovative approach to combat after its debut in late 2014, previews of a computer‐controlled adventure companion named Dorian in the months leading up to the game’s release inspired much less consistent audience reaction. In a June 2014 interview posted to the official Dragon Age website, game creator and writer David Gaider described Dorian as the “first fully gay character I’ve had the opportunity to write,” a comment that quickly aroused confusion and discussion among many of the game’s followers.¹ Gamers posted messages to Twitter and online forums questioning why Gaider would overlook the various characters in previous BioWare games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Mass Effect (2007), and even Dragon Age: Origins (2009) who could establish romantic relationships with other characters regardless of gender. Gaider quickly clarified that these previous characters were bisexual, whereas Dorian would only ever demonstrate a sexual attraction to men. Reflecting on the confusion months later in an interview with IGN, Gaider expressed the difficulties that come with addressing sexuality in contemporary video games:

I do wish now that I hadn’t said that he was “fully gay.” I know there was a significant part of the audience who believed that we’d already had gay characters in the series, and I had no intention of trying to educate them on the difference between bisexuals and homosexuals; still I should also have known that others could interpret what I said as a comment on bisexuality itself. It certainly wasn’t intended. I wish it hadn’t been a necessary consideration, that I could have just mentioned the fact as one among Dorian’s numerous characteristics and trusted everyone would treat it as such, but that’s evidently not the world we live in.²

Gamers’ confusion over the proper way to characterize Dorian’s sexuality, as well as Gaider’s exasperation over it becoming a flashpoint within the gaming community at all, speak directly to the interests of scholars approaching media texts from a Queer vantage. The perspective of Queer theory, discussed at length in this chapter, does not lend itself to easy definition as an analytical schema, which is part of the reason we reserve it for the final chapter in our section on Media Messages. Rather than a perceived weakness, however, this lack of coherence is Queer theory’s contribution to critical media studies. Generally speaking, Queer media scholars attempt to understand how media texts, as significant outlets of cultural discussion, contribute to the ordering of human understanding surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality. The specific understanding of queerness within this perspective – of ambiguity, performance, and play – becomes a powerful way to refuse this structured understanding, a refusal that in turn challenges prevailing cultural norms and the power relations that they reinforce.

This chapter is roughly divided into three major thematic sections, which we label “Visibility I,” “Visibility II,” and “Invisibility.” The first two take up the project begun in Chapter 8 (Feminist Analysis) by looking at traditional sexual stereotypes in the media and supposedly “positive” depictions of non‐normative sexualities. Here, we consider how certain images of sexuality replicated across media and time reinforce a hierarchical understanding of sexual behavior that privileges some social groups to the detriment of many others, even in instances that appear to be progressive. The final major section, “Invisibility,” discusses scholarship that attempts to identify a Queer presence in media texts despite a lack of any explicit reference to non‐normative sexualities within them. Here, our discussion of camp and the fourth persona (or “textual winking”) complicates the stereotypes addressed in the previous sections and, in some ways, provides avenues for their remedy. Before we consider the Queer analysis of the media, however, it is important to have a general understanding of Queer theory. We lay out the major tenets of this perspective in the following section.

Queer Theory: An Overview

For many people, the word “queer” is synonymous with the words “gay” or “homosexual” (often in a pejorative sense), but for Queer scholars such a simple equation is insufficient. Alexander Doty grapples with the complexity of the relationship between these words in his introduction to Making Things Perfectly Queer: “I want to construct ‘queer’ as something other than ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ or ‘bisexual,’; but I can’t say that ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ or ‘bisexual’ aren’t also ‘queer.’”³ Annamarie Jagose offers a productive resolution to this paradox when she suggests that “queer” generally describes behaviors, identities, or perceptions that “dramatize incoherence in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire.”⁴ In other words, queer refers to any number of elements in daily life that by their very existence reveal the limitations to and artificiality of the sexual norms in a given cultural context. In many cultures, the notions of gayness, lesbianism, or bisexuality perform this operation and are queer as a result.

Let us pause here and consider the full meaning of this definition. Sexuality is an enduring emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction toward others based upon their gender or sex. As Gayle S. Rubin points out, manifestations of one’s sexuality – or sexual acts – assume a clear and stable hierarchy of value in many contemporary Western cultures:

Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid. Clamoring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. Solitary sex floats ambiguously. The powerful nineteenth‐century stigma on masturbation lingers in less potent, modified forms, such as the idea that masturbation is an inferior substitute for partnered encounters. Stable, long‐term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sado‐masochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.⁵

The hierarchy that Rubin describes here is called heteronormativity (or heterosexism), a social system that privileges male/female sexual coupling over any other possible arrangement or expression of sexuality. The act of stigmatizing anyone who does not clearly fit this image is called sexual othering. Notice in Rubin’s discussion, however, that even within the realm of heterosexuality there are fine degrees of privilege and value. Heterosexual couples who marry or produce children are often thought of in better terms than those who remain unmarried or childless. Under a system of heteronormativity, then, even people that we might conventionally label “straight” may experience some degree of judgment or unequal treatment on the basis of their sexual practices – though certainly not as intense as the treatment of those who find themselves further down the scale.

We can see examples of heteronormativity and sexual othering widely in American culture. Many popular films and television shows take “the family” as a narrative foundation, and this family most commonly takes the form of a husband and wife with two or three children. There are some variations on this theme (the addition of a grandparent or pet, or a parent who has passed away), but the core image is most often the married, reproducing, male/female dyad. Comparably fewer media texts center on same‐sex couples, polyamorous arrangements that involve more than two adults, or sexual relations that involve transgender individuals. Moreover, in the real world, striving for or identifying with this core image typically grants individuals access to a variety of social advantages denied to others, including insurance benefits, hospital visitation rights, and more. Even the American‐English language reveals the inequity between those who fit the norm and those who do not. There are countless derogatory terms that one can use to degrade a person who does not sit atop the sexual hierarchy, and many of these words (like faggot and slut) have become epithets that can broadly refer to anyone in a negative fashion. It is difficult to imagine an analogous word that one could use to ridicule a married, straight parent on the basis of these qualities. Feminist scholar Adrienne Rich argues that these privileges are so engrained in American society that we effectively live under a system of “compulsive heterosexuality,” where people (and women in particular) are coerced into identifying with the norms of male/female coupling from birth.⁶

In one sense, the notion of “queerness” refers to all of those sexual practices and identities that exist outside of the heteronormative ideal. It is a term that testifies to the possibility of something outside of this norm, to the very reality of something beyond it. The word also refers to the project of revealing this norm to be an arbitrary construction. As Queer scholar Michael Warner observes, “to be fully normal is, strictly speaking, impossible. Everyone deviates from the norm in some way … [S]ex can never be normal. It is disruptive and aberrant in its rhythms, in its somatic states, and in its psychic and cultural meanings.”⁷ Any attempt to represent a sexual practice as “normal” or “ideal” is misguided in the eyes of Queer scholars. Consequently, while the interdisciplinary academic project known as Queer theory seeks in part to reclaim and valorize non‐normative expressions of human sexuality that otherwise attract stigma (an act sometimes referred to as queer “world‐making”⁸), it is also deeply concerned with deconstructing the received understandings of sexuality that arrest human desire into sensible patterns in the first place.

To help make sense of this second commitment, consider a little‐known historical fact. The first use of the term “heterosexual” in the United States occurred in a medical journal in 1892. The article’s author, Dr. James G. Kiernan, coined the term to refer to individuals who experienced sexual attraction to both men and women. As Queer historian Jonathan Ned Katz notes, “the hetero in these heterosexuals referred not to their interest in a different sex, but to their desire for two different sexes.”⁹ Today, we would likely think of individuals who experience such desire as bisexual, but the difference between Kiernan’s understanding and our own illustrates a critical belief that underpins most Queer scholarship: sexuality and gender are historical conventions rather than biological truths or inherent aspects of identity. Different cultures have made sense of human sexuality and gender differently throughout time, which effectively renders different “realities” of sexuality and gender to the people living within those cultural contexts. Put another way, today people might use identity categories like straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, cisgender, transgender, non‐binary, or genderqueer with the belief that they are expressing some internal and authentic element of themselves, but many Queer scholars argue that it is in fact the society in which they live that makes the existence of sexual and gender identity possible at all.

Two important Queer theorists help explain this counterintuitive notion. The first is the philosopher Michel Foucault. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Foucault frames sexuality as a discursive construction, or a product of social forces and ways of talking about the world at a given historical moment. For Foucault, one of the crucial moments that contributes to our contemporary understanding of sexuality occurred near the beginning of the 19th century, which witnessed an explosion of talk around “peripheral” sexual identities. Prior to this time, the majority of people in the Western world largely viewed sexual acts that violated the marital pact (sodomy, bestiality, etc.) as acts alone, or as isolated aberrations and passing indiscretions. A man could certainly have a sexual encounter with another man, but any public discussion of the matter largely concentrated on how it related to the institution of marriage – especially his own, if he happened to be married. Then, something changed. Medical and legal documents in the 19th century began to discuss and frame these acts not simply as passing transgressions, but as indicators of more enduring, often “perverse” sexual identities. Suddenly, one could talk about sexuality in ways that did not exclusively relate to what married couples did behind closed doors. Foucault explains the change pointedly: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”¹⁰

What happened to bring about this change? Working backward through time from this example and from others, Foucault argues that sexuality – conceived of as a vital aspect of one’s personal identity – is largely a product of class warfare in the 18th century. He contends that the legitimacy bestowed by bloodlines and aristocratic titles began to crumble during this time period, and as a result the bourgeoisie or ruling classes throughout the Western world needed something new that could distinguish their members from the working classes they exploited. This new distinction was sexual identity. “With the investment of its own sex by a technology of power and knowledge which it had itself invented,” Foucault writes, “the bourgeoisie underscored the high political price of its body, sensations, and pleasures, its well‐being and survival.”¹¹ For the first time ever, then, powerful people began talking about themselves as if they possessed a thing called a sexuality, a part of themselves that demanded special attention and protections from medical and legal establishments. Only after being firmly instilled as a quality of the upper class did the concept of individual sexuality spread to the lower working classes, extending to them medical and legal protections as a way of maintaining a healthy, reproducing workforce in a rapidly industrializing world. Once everyone had a sexuality, however, a proliferation of increasingly specific sexual identities appeared in the following century as a means of further dividing the world into privileged and oppressed groups.

The second important Queer theorist in this tradition is Judith Butler, who develops Foucault’s line of thinking via her concept of gender performativity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Performativity is a difficult concept to define, but it generally refers to a school of thought that traces the source of internal identity structures to external actions. Butler’s theory of gender performativity, then, argues that actions that appear to be the manifestation of an inner quality called gender are in fact the forces that constitute one’s personal gender in the first place. Put differently, for Butler, an internal and primordial feeling of gender does not unilaterally influence the way that a person behaves, as many people traditionally believe. Instead, the way that a person behaves actually creates the sensation of possessing a quality of identity called gender.

In order to understand this dynamic more clearly, consider Butler’s own comparison of gender performativity to Foucault’s discussion of the human soul in his book Discipline and Punish:

The figure of the interior soul understood as “within” the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even though its primary mode of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility. The effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure … In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such.¹²

Butler is suggesting that we cannot understand the soul as something sacred unless we first characterize the body as that which can hold something sacred. Here, knowledge of the soul does not in turn influence knowledge of the body or what makes us human. Instead, the ways we produce knowledge about the body in social discourse in effect produce the sense of a soul inside it. Butler contends that the same principle operates in relation to gender: people act according to the gender conventions of a given society, and acting in accordance with these conventions over a period of time produces a sense of gender identity as an inherent quality. A little boy, for example, long before he understands himself as “masculine,” may find that his parents praise him for being “a man” when he happens to knock over a tower of blocks. The more often he receives this praise for knocking over blocks, or enacting fights between action figures, or wrestling with his cousins, the more likely he is to continue these actions in order to be “the man” that his parents and society appear to want him to be. Looking back on his childhood many years later, he may incorrectly identify such behaviors as a manifestation of an inherent masculine identity, when in fact Butler would suggest that these actions and the social system in which he lived actually produced this internal sense of masculinity for him.

Butler illuminates connections between gender and sexuality when she argues that the only “intelligible” gender identities in modern society “are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire.”¹³ Even though an internal sense of gender arises from our actions, once it is instantiated as an identity, these internalized conventions greatly influence the ways we exist as sexual beings. One need only consider sexual‐augmentation procedures (like breast or penis enlargement) to see that gender norms can influence what it means to be a sexual being quite literally. Furthermore, the gender conventions to which individuals adhere and from which they draw a sense of gender identity may be complicated constellations of different actions, but sexual actions are almost always primary within these formations. It is unlikely that the parents of the little boy in our example would deem him “a man” for simply breathing. That action has nothing to do with masculinity in contemporary American society. Playfully chasing a little girl on the playground, however, might inspire encouragement, because pursuing women is deeply entwined with notions of masculinity in the same cultural context (and, we would venture, in many others). This cultural confluence between sexuality and gender that Butler identifies helps explain why Rubin might associate straight sex workers with transgender people of any profession or sexual orientation in her cultural hierarchy of sexuality at the beginning of this section. By their very existence, both groups challenge historically conventional ways of aligning sex, gender, and sexuality.

A special value of Butler’s work for Queer theory is its concentration on acts as the seat of gender, or the link between society and the individual. Understanding gender as a series of acts means that people have the potential to act differently, which is also to say that they have the potential to construct gendered and sexual identities that differ from the mainstream. People certainly do not have complete freedom to do so, in the sense that any social system invested in maintaining convention will often find a way to censor or punish those who do not conform, but some limited acts that can disrupt the traditional formations of male/masculine/woman‐desiring and female/feminine/man‐desiring are possible. At the end of Gender Trouble, Butler offers the notion of drag as one example of this kind of disruption. Drag performances call attention to the lack of clear association between gender, sex, sexual practice, and desire; they exist despite the fact that they challenge conventional associations between the different nodes of identity. Butler points out that drag also draws attention to the notion of performance itself, revealing the vast continuum of combinations available when gender is performative rather than a constant element of one’s identity. Though drag is not entirely resistive, in the sense that it still relies upon coherent categories of gender even in its recombinations, it is a site of conflation and ambiguity from which resistance can be conceived.

Together, Foucault and Butler provide helpful theoretical perspective for Queer scholars seeking to valorize non‐normative sexualities and overturn those sexual norms that stigmatize individuals who do not conform to them. Each theorist provides a vocabulary for discussing sexuality, sex, and gender as historical contingencies rather than as inherent aspects of humanity, and this shift in turn provides a basis for scholars to imagine new expressions of and connections between these topics. At the same time, Foucault and Butler necessarily imply that all durable categories of identity expression in this realm – even those apparently more precise or specific categories that have appeared in recent years – are ultimately artificial constructs allowed by the discourse of the current age. This has caused some concern within Queer scholarship. How can one at once valorize something and recognize its artificiality? Mark Norris Lance and Alessandra Tanesini suggest that in the face of such paradox, it is best to conceive of sexual and gender identities from a political (rather than essential) perspective. “In our view,” they write, “to claim an identity for oneself is to endorse a cluster of attitudes, behaviours and judgements on the part of oneself and of society, and to undertake a commitment to defend their appropriateness … To say who one is, then, is not to describe one’s hidden nature, because it is not to describe at all.”¹⁴ From this perspective, calling oneself lesbian or non‐binary is more a commitment to future thoughts and actions than a definition of who one essentially is in the present moment, and this commitment has the potential to alter how a society discusses these matters and the norms surrounding them.

Media scholars who operate from a Queer perspective often consider how highly circulated texts within a given culture either help reinforce heteronormative understandings of sexuality or present novel configurations capable of challenging them. They are especially interested in critiquing the ways that media texts paint a picture of the world where sexuality fits conveniently into specific categories according to conventional meanings, and through this critique they hope to create a world that is more equitable toward individuals who do not fit these categories and conventions. It is important to point out, however, that in performing this work, many Queer scholars are not opposed to individuals who may identify as straight or who partake in sexual acts that we might conventionally label “heterosexual.” In the same way that Feminists work against sexist systems and not individual men (as we discussed in Chapter 8), Queer media scholars attempt to undermine the systemic normalization of male/female sexual relations and not necessarily individuals who desire to engage in them. Though the focus on upsetting constants makes the perspective a difficult one to pin down, the following sections on visibility will look at some of the persistent issues that Queer theory has brought to light in relation to media representations of sexuality.

Queerness and Visibility I: Sexual Stereotypes in American Media

Recall from Rubin’s hierarchy that the privileged sexual norm in American culture is not merely the male/female couple. The true ideal is a male/female couple that is also sexually exclusive (or better, married) and that demonstrates a clear commitment to reproduction and the continuation of society. Similarly, the system stigmatizes not only those who blur distinctions between the sexes or harbor desire for members of the same sex, but also those who prefer to have sex with many partners or engage in practices that might be construed as socially harmful (like sadomasochism or prostitution). These clustered associations take especially evident form in many of the stereotypes that circulate through popular media texts. In this section, we explore how texts have historically positioned heterosexual relations as common, monogamous, and wholesome, while simultaneously portraying various queer sexualities as uncommon, promiscuous, and deviant.

Monogamous/promiscuous

Depictions of heterosexual couples in popular media historically emphasize elements of monogamy, devotion, and marriage, while portrayals of other kinds of human sexuality often stress promiscuity and infidelity. Almost any romantic comedy film made in the last 50 years can corroborate the first stereotype, and films with narratives that do not conclude in the couple’s sexual exclusivity or marriage – like Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall – are typically cited as exceptions within the genre. This is not to suggest, however, that people who identify as heterosexual are always monogamous in media (FX’s animated series Archer would be far less entertaining if that were the case). Media images of promiscuous straight people certainly do exist, but given the prevalence of opposite‐sex desire in media just discussed, these images represent one of the many ways of “being” straight in popular consciousness. Queer sexualities appear far less often in the media, but when they do, they usually feature an almost insatiable drive that encourages sex with multiple partners.

A good example of this contrast is at the center of the 2010 cult film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, based on the popular Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. In the film, guitar player Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) falls in love with the beautiful Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but in order to secure their relationship he must first defeat seven of her ex‐boyfriends in a series of fantastic battles modeled after the world of video games. Scott’s best friend and mentor throughout these trials is his gay roommate, Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), who, in contrast to Scott’s almost chivalrous devotion to Ramona, flirts with and beds a string of interchangeable male partners throughout the course of the film. Though Scott begins to pursue Ramona while still technically dating his girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a brief exchange between Scott and Wallace suggests that he is violating fundamental rules of heterosexual partnership, rules which Wallace is free to ignore:

WALLACE:

You have to break up with Knives, that poor angel, today.

SCOTT:

But it’s hard…

WALLACE:

If you don’t, I’m going to tell Ramona about Knives. I swear to God, Scott.

SCOTT:

What? [Wallace’s most recent fling walks through the room into the kitchen.]

WALLACE:

Hey, Jimmy.

SCOTT:

[Pointing] Double standard!

WALLACE:

I didn’t make up the gay rule book. Look, you got a problem with it, take it up with Liberace’s ghost.

SCOTT:

You’re a monster.¹⁶

The film ends when Scott successfully defeats the seventh ex, leaves Knives for good, and overcomes his previous romantic shortcomings in order to join Ramona in a presumably monogamous relationship. Wallace, on the other hand, seems content with his most recent sexual acquisition by the end credits, but the film does not frame him in nearly the same redemptive or positive terms.

The Dolce & Gabbana advertisement in Figure 9.2 provides another example of how queer promiscuity can manifest in the media. The nature of the image may be unclear at first glance, which in fact draws the viewer in even more deeply. After extended contemplation, we would suggest that the ad depicts an “audition” for those hoping to model for the famed fashion house. As the two seated figures in the background inspect the nude candidate before them, the standing model unzips his pants and prepares to assume a similar reclining position. The model seated all the way to the left undoing his tie can only be a third candidate. The overall impression of the ad, then, is that the men seated together will not be satisfied until they have looked at multiple naked men, perhaps more than even those displayed in the image. Nothing in the ad says that any of these men identify as gay or bisexual, but its resonance with the stereotype of queer promiscuity is difficult to deny.

A final, perhaps more nuanced example of queer promiscuity comes from the HBO series The Deuce, about the historical rise of the pornography industry in 1970s New York. The program focuses in large part on Eileen “Candy” Morell (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a sex worker who aspires to move out of street prostitution and into directing films for the burgeoning industry. Though one might be tempted to characterize the program’s depictions of sexuality as heteronormative because Candy’s customers are exclusively male, remember that Rubin locates sex workers – prostitutes and porn actors – among the most “despised” sexual groups in contemporary American society. We would argue, then, that The Deuce depicts sex between men and women but is somewhat queer in this presentation by destabilizing the romantic ideal of the exclusive male/female couple. This complexity also extends to the show’s engagement with traditional sexual stereotypes. Candy’s desire to escape one kind of transactional sex with multiple partners only to help foster the same practice in others (via pornographic films) might be read, in a sense, as reinforcing historical associations between queerness and libertine behavior. In short, the program is disruptively queer to the degree that it focuses on sex with multiple partners, but the specifics of its narrative also imply that it is nearly impossible to escape this practice once one has engaged in it. While critics have praised The Deuce for its unflinching realism and the character of Candy in particular as an image of female empowerment, it is important to think about how the program might forward less progressive understandings of sexuality and gender as well.¹⁷

Queerness and Visibility II: Problems with “Positive” Representation

Thus far, we have discussed some of the damaging stereotypes that characterize queerness in American media. Deconstructing these stereotypes is an important first step in understanding how media depict sexuality more generally. Another important area of research within queer visibility, however, looks at how increasing numbers of apparently nonstereotypical or positive representations of queerness in fact continue to bolster heteronormativity. Though there are certainly more media images of queer individuals today than ever before, it is important to understand that visibility (the number of queer characters or personalities present in the media) and representation (the way that those individuals act, feel, and engage with the world) are two different concepts. The increase in queer personalities in the media – and perhaps an attendant reduction of queer stereotypes – does not necessarily result in an increase in politically potent images. Instead, they often enact heteronormativity in other, less visible ways.

Kevin G. Barnhurst represents queer visibility in the media as a paradox.¹⁸ Increasing the visibility of certain queer characters, personalities, or themes necessarily overlooks others. As certain aspects of queer life become more prominent in the media, others become ignored. Visibility results in invisibility. The drama of the coming‐out tale, for example, often dominates many media texts that feature gay or lesbian characters, but the resulting centrality of “coming out” to gay and lesbian life in the popular consciousness obscures the very simple, everyday problems that these individuals share with straight people. Framing the disclosure of one’s sexuality in terms of drama, then, becomes a new way to “other” queer people. The same could be said about what Barnhurst calls “professional queers”: official media liaisons and heads of LGBT organizations, queer journalists, and so on. As the American population becomes more accustomed to seeing these “types” of gays and lesbians in media, it becomes easier to overlook the activities of nonfamous queer people in their everyday lives. Those who take their cues about gay life predominantly from journalists Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper, for instance, are likely to have a fairly narrow conception of what it means to be queer in the 21st century. Barnhurst’s framework is important to consider because it reminds us that increased visibility is not always diverse visibility. Some aspects are always obscured.

Other scholars have pointed out that particular examples of queer visibility are not always as progressive as they might initially seem. One of the most prominent historical examples of queer media visibility is the simultaneous coming out as lesbian of comedian Ellen DeGeneres and of her character, Ellen Morgan, on the popular television show Ellen in 1997. DeGeneres’ decision caused a firestorm of controversy, but media critics also hailed it as a milestone in the representation of sexual minorities in American television. After all, Ellen Morgan was not criminal or oversexed: she was simply a funny woman who happened to be attracted to other women. And yet, as Bonnie J. Dow has pointed out, the representation of lesbianism on Ellen was still problematic.¹⁹ The show positioned Ellen’s newfound sexuality as an issue that straight family members, friends, and coworkers either learned to accept or did not. It essentially constructed lesbianism as a problem and source of conflict. The show also poked fun at Queer politics for being too radical and portrayed homosexuality as an exclusively personal issue (which, in reality, it is not). In portraying lesbianism predominantly through the reactions of straight characters on the show and in ignoring the potentially threatening dimension of Queer politics, “Ellen was a sitcom about a lesbian that was largely geared toward the comfort of heterosexuals.”²⁰

Ellen is no longer on the air, but we continue to see a very similar logic at work in more contemporary media texts. As Vicki L. Eaklor notes, the 2010 film The Kids Are All Right features a refreshingly progressive family structure headed by a lesbian couple who are loving and normal, but who also very much enact a traditional husband‐and‐wife dynamic: short‐haired and butch Nic (Annette Bening) is the primary economic provider for the family, while long‐haired and femme Jules (Julianne Moore) tends the backyard garden all day.²¹ Especially as Jules begins to develop romantic feelings for Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the man who donated his sperm so that Nic and Jules could conceive their children, the film begins to mimic any number of typical romantic dramas with heterosexual characters. Similar criticism could be leveled against the central gay couple in ABC’s long‐running program Modern Family. For much of the series, the extremely flamboyant Cam (Eric Stonestreet) spends his days at home caring for his daughter, while his uptight husband Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) financially supports their family as an attorney. Rather than embrace the unique social and economic potentials of their same‐sex relationships and imagine their circumstances differently, the queer couples in these texts actually present somewhat conventional understandings of gender and sexuality. We might praise them for complicating the notion of “family” in the current era, and perhaps as well for addressing social and political difficulties that queers face to a greater degree than Ellen, but we should not overlook how both are designed to reinforce traits or values that mainstream, presumably heterosexual viewers would recognize and enjoy.

Thus, we can see that the mere presence of positive queer characters or themes does not guarantee an unproblematic representation of sexual minorities in American media. Visibility and representation are not synonymous, and a prominence of queerness does not always guarantee an absence of heteronormativity. Media texts that feature queer characters have grown increasingly complex in the ways they represent human sexuality, but many of these contemporary texts are simultaneously affirming and damaging. As a result, we conclude our analysis of Queer visibility with a brief discussion of the effects that this representation has on media audiences.

Consequences of Heteronormative Media Representations

In Chapter 8, we outlined some of the consequences of sexist media representations for actual women and men in their everyday lives. In this section, we continue that project by considering the potential effects of heteronormative media representations on queer and non‐queer individuals. At this point, the last chapter in the Media Messages section of this textbook, you should have a fairly clear sense that media representations have both positive and negative effects on individuals in the real world. We often turn to the media, consciously or unconsciously, in order to form values about the world we live in, and those values influence the impressions we have of ourselves and society. When we form values and impressions on the basis of heteronormative media representations, we run the risk of continuing current and unequal power relations.

The various sexual stereotypes we see in the American media contribute to a social system defined by restricted sexual expectations. The cumulative images of common, monogamous, wholesome straight people and uncommon, oversexed, deviant queer people present the idea that there are limited and preferable ways of existing as sexual beings. These images are absolutely detrimental to queer individuals, making them seem bizarre and threatening. However, they also do some harm to heterosexuals by laying out a fairly limited life script, a fact underscored by the supposedly positive but starkly uniform images of “heterosexualized” queer characters in media today. It is absolutely true that heteronormative practices lead to a system in which queer people bear the overwhelming brunt of discrimination and hatred, but these practices also make it difficult for straight people who might wish to resist the doctrines of marriage or raising a family. In this way, stereotypes of sexuality permeate and structure the lives of every individual.

Moreover, the relative absence of queer individuals in the media results in limited models of identification for actual queer populations in the real world. In his account of modern gay life, The Culture of Desire, journalist Frank Browning recalls the importance of such identification in exploring his own sexuality while attending high school:

What all of us were doing was sorting through the rush of sensual responses our bodies were offering up, calling on all the available plots of family, church, television, and paperback novels to enable us to savor some and discard others … By what we said, and by what we contrived to be overheard saying, we learned (or didn’t) whether we were exploring the same mysteries, whether we were inhabiting common plots.²²

Early on, Browning discovered that his “story’s plot showed no sign of connection to any of the other plots other young men were following.”²³ People draw upon stories in media to learn more about themselves, and heteronormative systems of power limit the number of images with which members of disempowered groups can identify. Whereas young straight people have a variety of (presumably) straight characters and personalities in the media to emulate, queer individuals have fewer unproblematic images to consider. This requires young queer people to be more media literate and vigilant in order to separate useful, positive images from stereotypical, negative ones.

The lack of symbolic resources is an important effect to consider, especially in an increasingly media‐saturated world like ours, but heteronormative representations extend beyond the individual to reinforce public prejudices and help shape social policies that affect entire queer populations. The fact that the overwhelming majority of characters and personalities in the American media are straight contributes to a social system that often marginalizes the interests of queer people or endangers them outright. For example, though federal bodies in the administration of President Barack Obama affirmed that sexual orientation and gender identity were categories protected from discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Justice Department under President Donald Trump concluded the opposite, suggesting that legal protections for queer individuals today are ill‐defined and subject to shifting political whims.²⁴ In addition, in 2017, the National Coalition of Anti‐Violence Programs noted an increasing trend in violent acts committed against the LGBTQ population over the previous 5 years, with transgender women and gay/bisexual men experiencing especially high levels of assault.²⁵ This time frame includes the 2016 mass shooting at the queer nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, which resulted in the deaths of 49 people and stood at the time as the most deadly shooting in US history. These trends make clear that heteronormative media images that portray queer people in unfavorable light are more than merely unfortunate. To some degree, they help authorize a public consciousness that presents a very real threat to the lives of many queer individuals.

Given the many problems of queer visibility, as well as the social issues influenced by these problems, the possibility for genuinely positive, powerful, or resistive representations of queerness in mainstream media may seem unlikely. In the next and final section on queer “invisibility,” however, we suggest that returning to the ambiguity at the center of Queer theory and resisting the notion of definite representation may be the best hope for such a project in the media today.

Queerness and Invisibility: Camp and the Fourth Persona

Why, asks Richard Dyer in a famously circulated essay, do so many gay men seem to love film star Judy Garland?²⁶ There is nothing explicitly “gay” about her. She did not publicly identify as a lesbian during her lifetime, and she never played an openly lesbian character in a film. And yet, somehow, Garland functioned as an integral part of a developing gay subculture during the second half of the 20th century. As Dyer notes, underground gay magazines and newsletters often featured stories about Garland’s life and provided in‐depth coverage of her live musical performances. For many years, gay men even used the phrase “Friend of Dorothy” as a code for their sexual preference in public spaces, referencing Garland’s most famous role in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

How can an aspect of the media like a celebrity image or feature film that never explicitly mentions queerness come to signify a Queer understanding of the world and/or attract queer audiences? “Invisibility” is our catch‐all term for two mechanisms that make this relationship possible: camp and the fourth persona. Both concepts explain how queerness may exist “between the lines” of an otherwise mainstream or heteronormative media text, providing hidden material that queer audiences and those sympathetic to queer experiences might discover and activate. Both mechanisms may be wielded consciously or unconsciously by media creators, and it is not always possible to say that either are clearly “there” in a given media text. As one might imagine, such ambiguity often allows for the effective evasion and undermining of heteronormative social standards, as well as a unique set of new problems.

The Fourth Persona

Another means by which queer experiences and perspectives might find subtle expression in mainstream media is through the use of the fourth persona. Within rhetorical studies, persona refers to a subject position within a given text. The rhetorician Edwin Black is credited with defining the first and second personas.³³ The first persona in a media text is the sense of the author that the text projects. Listening to a song or watching a music video by the pop musician Shawn Mendes, for example, imparts a certain impression about the singer to listeners: here is a young, lovesick man from Canada who enjoys good times and the company of women who often already have a boyfriend. Regardless of whether audiences approve or disapprove of this image, they will nevertheless recognize it as the “preferred” sense of Mendes being projected by the text.

By extension, the second persona is the image of a text’s target or preferred audience, again indicated through particular textual features. Listening to songs or watching music videos by Mendes imparts the distinct impression that his music is intended for adolescent girls and young women. Specific features of these texts give rise to this impression: the frequent use of hip urban spaces as a backdrop in the videos indicates the age of the preferred audience, and the regular invocation of the words “girl” and “she” in the lyrics indicates its gender. Middle‐aged men are free to enjoy Mendes’ songs, but doing so will likely result in feelings of guilt, as though they are poaching on someone else’s territory. In this instance, middle‐aged men (and middle‐aged women, and adolescent boys) would constitute the third persona of the text, or the audience that the text purposefully ignores but which nevertheless haunts it through its absence.³⁴

The fourth persona is another projection or impression of the author indicated though textual features, but it is a projection that only some audiences will ever notice.³⁵ Its innovator, Charles E. Morris III, suggests that the persona maintains this quasi‐hidden quality by dividing the audience of the text into “clairvoyants” (a subsection of the audience who can sense the persona) and “dupes” (a much larger section of the audience who fail to detect it and concentrate instead on the image of the first persona). The use of a fourth persona, then, allows the author of a text to “pass” strategically, appearing to the dupes as one thing and to the clairvoyants as quite another. Importantly, a fairly strict division between these groups is what distinguishes the fourth persona from something like an inside joke or an intertextual reference. In these latter two instances, someone may not understand a particular reference, but will still typically recognizes that it is meaningful for someone. He or she is simply not the intended audience. In the operation of the fourth persona, however, the dupes do not even realize that a reference has been dropped. They continue to believe that they have received the real or correct impression of the author, unaware of what the clairvoyants detect.

How do clairvoyants come to recognize the existence of the fourth persona when so many dupes miss it? Morris suggests that part of the reason they are “clairvoyant” is because they share something intrinsic with the author, a link that also forms the basis of the persona. Furthermore, the persona takes concrete form as a textual wink, or a feature of the text that only the clairvoyants will find meaningful based upon their similarity to the author. The wink is a signal for clairvoyants to look more critically at a text than the dupes do, scrutinizing it for additional understandings about the author and/or the text itself.

The X‐Men franchise provides an excellent example of how the fourth persona operates in popular media. For more than 50 years, and across numerous platforms (including graphic novels, television, film, and video games), the X‐Men has imagined a world much like our own except for the inclusion of an evolutionary subsection of humanity known as “mutants.”³⁶ Mutants possess a unique genetic trait called the X‐gene that grants them extraordinary powers like telepathy, flight, and superhuman strength. Because these powers frighten normal humans who lack such gifts, numerous organizations and scientific/military programs are dedicated to controlling the mutant population. These controls include mutant registry programs, attempts to “cure” mutants of their condition through medical suppression of the X‐gene, and secret experimentation on mutants with the goal of weaponizing their abilities for geopolitical warfare. This widespread paranoia and persecution naturally encourages many mutants to hide their powers from friends and family and to join underground organizations once they are revealed.

As Joseph J. Darowski observes in his introduction to a recent critical edited collection on the franchise, “the concept of ‘mutants’ has been used as a metaphor for a wide range of issues, including race, gender, ideology, religion, and sexuality.”³⁷ The various essays in the collection reveal that media audiences have viewed mutants as stand‐ins for a number of persecuted social groups throughout history, including women, Jews, and even hippies. There are a number of reasons, however, to think of mutants as an especially suitable metaphor for queer individuals living in a heteronormative society. Mutants are often born to non‐mutant parents and go on to live in self‐selected “families” or groups of other mutants if their biological relatives reject them. Their powers typically lie dormant until puberty, and they begin to realize that they are inexplicably different from their peers once they finally manifest. Finally, many mutants can and do “pass” as typical humans in their daily lives because the ascendance of their powers comes with few to no physical markings.

Given this resonance, it is not surprising that openly gay director Bryan Singer has folded textual winks for queer audiences into his films X‐Men (2000), X2 (2003), X‐Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and X‐Men: Apocalypse (2016). An especially striking example occurs halfway through X2 when Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) reveals to his family that he is a mutant after he and a group of friends have had to flee Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, a covert mutant boarding school. While trying to affirm their support for him in front of his friends, Bobby’s visibly uncomfortable parents also stumble over their words and ask questions that reveal their ignorance of his person:

In 2003, many non‐queer audiences of the film might have viewed this exchange only as a parallel to the various conversations that can occur between parents and teenagers trying to express their individuality through unconventional lifestyle choices. For queer viewers, however, the particular questions that Bobby’s parents ask likely carried a heightened significance. Questions like, “How long have you known that you were gay?” and “Are you sure that you’re gay?” are regularly directed toward queer individuals once they have come out publicly.³⁹

It is likely that even general audiences who view this X2 scene today have some sense of how it might function as a textual wink for queer viewers, especially because (as we have previously noted) the mainstreaming of queer sexualities in mass media has introduced many more people to the worldviews and experiences of sexual minorities. This expanding awareness might seem to threaten the utility of the fourth persona and its reliance on distinct duped and clairvoyant groups, but it is still possible to find examples of genuinely hidden textual winks for queer audiences in contemporary media – especially within the evolving X‐Men franchise. In 2017, the Fox network premiered a television series called The Gifted, a program set in the X‐Men universe with Singer as an executive producer. The series pilot focuses in part on the experiences of Lauren and Andy Strucker (Natalie Alyn Lind and Percy Hynes White), teenagers who reveal themselves to be mutants in a destructive accident at school and who are subsequently pursued by a government body known as Sentinel Services. In order to protect Lauren and Andy from capture, the Strucker family flees their home and bunkers down at a nondescript motel in order to plan a way to escape the city. While walking around the motel, Lauren and Andy have a poignant conversation about the events that led up to their escape. After Andy expresses remorse for not being able to control his powers and inadvertently causing the destruction at school, Lauren, who has been aware of her abilities for several years, lends him some perspective about mutant powers: “It gets better. At first it’s like, it’s like a sneeze, something that just happens. You have to work at it.”⁴⁰

For most viewers, Lauren’s advice here probably sounds like nothing more than the typical wisdom of an older and more skilled sibling. For queer viewers of The Gifted, however, her precise choice of words would likely carry special significance. The “It Gets Better” Project is an online support campaign established in 2010 by gay activist and journalist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller. It documents the experiences of queer adults in both video and written form and makes these testimonies widely available through digital/social media in order to reassure queer adolescents that they too can live through the pain and difficulty that often comes with being young and other than straight.⁴¹ The commonality between Lauren’s words and the name of the campaign may seem arbitrary until one considers the immediate context of the conversation (a veteran outsider encouraging a younger and distressed outsider to be hopeful for the future), as well as the larger context of the franchise and the specific historical resonance between hidden powers and queer identity. That Singer actually directed this particular episode only solidifies the chances that these words were intended as a signal to queer viewers that there was something more than entertainment to be gleaned from Lauren and Andy’s exchange.

As another “invisible” means by which queer perspectives find a voice within a heteronormative media landscape, the fourth persona has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as camp. While its hidden quality gives it a certain subversive edge, allowing clairvoyants to playfully undermine the heteronormative readings carried out by the dupes, its tendency to evade detection by large sections of the audience means that many will never realize that something novel is occurring. Perhaps the fourth persona is most important, then, as a way for queer authors and audiences (and, really, any members of the same “hidden” social population) to communicate with one another secretly through popular media texts. In a world where queer presence in the media is rare and representations are often problematic, the fourth persona may play a key role in providing queer individuals with some sense of community.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have considered how media representations of sexuality contribute to a system of unequal power relations between individuals in society. By drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Queer theorists seek to critique these representations and deconstruct heteronormative social systems. Part of this project involves the analysis of how the mass media portray sexualities differently in popular texts. Another part concerns the difference between visibility and representation, understanding that the mere presence of queer characters is not enough to make a text progressive. A final part looks for “invisible” aspects of queerness that somehow find a way between the lines of otherwise heteronormative texts. From these activities, we can see that Queer analysis is a diverse project with many different goals. In a sense, this applicability across multiple fronts is fitting for a perspective that refuses to be clearly pinned down.

Again, like in Chapter 8 on Feminist analysis, we stress here that Queer analysis as a theoretical perspective on the media is not just for scholars who identify as queer. Stereotypes and unquestioned understandings of sexuality work to place limits on everyone in relation to issues of personal identity, practice, and desire, regardless of how we conceive of ourselves in the bedroom. While heteronormative social systems place greater limits on individuals who identify as queer, resulting in both symbolic and material disadvantages, those who identify as straight are also inscribed into relations of power. Only the vigilant and careful consideration of media representations of sexuality can begin to overcome these systems of unequal relation. From this perspective, only by “queering” everyone can we begin to make the world a more equitable place to live.

SUGGESTED READING

1. Bennett, J. “Born This Way”: Queer Vernacular and the Politics of Origins. Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 2014, 11, 211–30.
2. Benshoff, H.M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
3. Berlant, L. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
4. Bersani, L. Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
5. Billard, T.J. Writing in the Margins: Mainstream News Media Representations of Transgenderism. International Journal of Communication 2016, 10, 4193–218.
6. Brookey, R.A. and Weterfelhaus, R. Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet. Critical Studies in Media Communication 2002, 19, 21–43.
7. Burston, P. and Richardson, C. (eds.) A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995.
8. Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary edn. New York: Routledge, 1999.
9. Copier, L. and Steinbock, E. On Not Really Being There: Trans* Presence/Absence in Dallas Buyers Club. Feminist Media Studies 2018, 18, 923–41.
10. Doty, A. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
11. Dunn, T.R. (Queer) Family Time: Brothers & Sisters and Managing Temporal Anxieties. Western Journal of Communication 2015, 79, 133–50.
12. Engel, M. Perverting Play: Theorizing a Queer Game Mechanic. Television & New Media 2017, 18, 351–60.
13. Gamson, J. Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
14. Gn, J. Queer Simulation: The Practice, Performance, and Pleasure of Cosplay. Continuum: A Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 2011, 25, 583–93.
15. Gross, L. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
16. Halberstam, J. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
17. Hart, K.R. (ed.) Queer TV in the 21st Century: Essays on Broadcasting from Taboo to Acceptance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016.
18. Katz, J.N. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995.
19. Maris, E. Hacking Xena: Technological Innovation and Queer Influence in the Production of Mainstream Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication 2016, 33, 123–37.
20. Martin Jr., A.L. The Queer Business of Casting Gay Characters on US Television. Communication, Culture & Critique 2018, 11, 282–97.
21. McLaughlin, L. Discourses of Prostitution/Discourses of Sexuality. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1991, 8, 249–72.
22. Russell, V. The Celluloid Closet, 2nd edn. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
23. Sedgwick, E.K. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.
24. Shugart, H.A. and Waggoner, C.E. Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in US Popular Culture. Tuscaloosa, AL: Alabama University Press, 2008.
25. Sloop, J.M. Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
26. Smith, C., Attwood, F., and McNair, B. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2018.
27. Warner, M. (ed.) Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
28. Warner, M. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
29. Weiss, A. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.
30. West, I. Queer Generosities. Western Journal of Communication 2013, 77, 538–41.