In the first weekend of August, this year’s edition of QueerCon took place. QueerCon is a convention organized by QueerNördarna, a Swedish organization for “nerdy and geeky LBTQI+ people” that wants to pluralise geek culture and provide more room for LBTQI+ people in the gaming community. For the second year in a row, the convention was organised online, mainly through Twitch, Discord and YouTube. In one panel, issues of queerbaiting and queer subtext in popular culture were discussed. In this blog post, Andreas Ottemo outlines and reflects on the main arguments in the discussion that took place.
When I started taking gender studies courses around 2004-2005, the practice of engaging in “queer readings”, combined with the insight that most that cultural products, mainstream or not, “leak” queer themes was popular. Drawing on insights from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1985 book Betweeen Men and other sources, the basic idea is that even if the “author preferred” reading of a cultural product or literary text is not queer, culture itself is never 100% heteronormative and it’s therefore possible to either “read against” the text in search for possibilities to queer it, or to just uncover the “queer leakages” that are already present, although “buried” in the text.
During the work with our project, two concepts that I have spontaneously considered as closely related to the notion of queer leakage have come up in some material, namely “queer subtext” and “queerbaiting”. For instance, an episode of the Nördigt podcast briefly touches upon how the Marvel series Loki has been accused of queerbaiting, manifested for example in how Loki in one episode declares that gender-wise he’s had relations with “a bit of both”, confirming a bi- or possibly pan-sexual orientation. However, this is never explored in the series itself (where Loki rather falls in love with himself in female form). At the same time, the use of these concepts in the material that I have come across has struck me as rather nebulous, and the concepts have been used in somewhat different ways. Against this background, it was with great delight I noticed that one panel during this year’s QueerCon would discuss queerbaiting, and relate it to the adjacent concept of queer subtext.
The panel was made up of three people from QueerNördarna and can be seen here in Swedish. Reasonably enough, the discussion starts with trying to define the concepts involved. All three panellists pretty much agree that queerbaiting is mainly about marketing and revolves around pitching a TV-series or a movie as containing queer characters and/or queer themes but then not really following up on this in the actual text/product. For instance, in a trailer one can show two women kissing but then in the actual show, this is repackaged as a kiss that takes place as a “spectacle” within a cheerleading context. The panellists also explain that this is not only about marketing, but can be something that is actively planted within a product, such as in Supernatural, where one character makes explicit gay references for instance by recommending a particular night club that most viewers won’t recognise, but that anyone in the Miami gay community will know as a gay club.
They discuss the motivators behind this phenomenon and agree that there can be several reasons that big media companies engage in queerbaiting. One can be that companies like Disney want to make products that they can distribute worldwide, and while they might want to cater to queer communities in some countries, they also want their products to pass censorship in places like China, Russia and the Middle East. At the same time, they agree that these companies try to “have their cake and eat it too” domestically, in the sense that they want to attract a queer audience while simultaneously not offending less liberal/homophobic/anti-queer audiences. These companies can themselves be as imbued with homophobic/anti-queer sentiments as other parts of society. According to the panel, the label queerbaiting was invented around 2010 and originated in fandom on Tumblr that started to critique this practice, particularly in Supernatural and BBC’s Sherlock.
In contrast with queerbaiting, the practice of embedding a queer subtext within a media product has a longer history. One panellist explains that, depending on how you define it, one can find a lot of queer subtexts in “Old Hollywood” such as male lead characters constantly smoking a cigarette or having other “phallic” objects in their mouth. A more recent example is the series Hannibal where there is an obvious (albeit destructive) romantic relationship between the two male lead characters, but which is never explicitly confirmed as romantic. The background for engaging queer subtexts can be that authors would want to include a queer theme but are not allowed to do so, for instance because of corporate bosses or other censorship. There is much overlap here. The panellists comment on this, noting however that while queerbaiting is a lot about marketing and the intention behind certain marketing practices, queer subtexts are more about the content of the actual work of art itself. And importantly: the queer subtext is usually just one theme among many and not something that one draws on in the marketing of the product, and certainly not something one censors when exporting to other countries.
After contrasting queerbaiting with the presence of queer subtexts and discussing some borderline cases, the panellists finally conclude that queerbaiting is almost without exception a negative thing, and that this follows by definition. As one of them says, “we use queerbaiting as a label for a marketing practice that we do not approve of, where big companies try to make money from us”. Queer subtext is a harder case, where the panellists both see this as a natural aspect of artistic freedom and something that one can enjoy consuming, but at the same time as problematic against the background that there are so few explicitly queer mainstream media products out there.
So while historically it might have been both acceptable and motivated to engage with queer themes through “covert” queer subtexting, today it can be seen more as a “missed opportunity”. As one of them suggests, why not just make things explicit now that you can? They also agree that what one really wants today is not so much to wait for Disney to allow hetero people to write more queer stories, but rather for more queer authors to be able to rise through the ranks and get their own stories out to the public.
The notion of queer leakage did not, however, come up. To me, this was somewhat surprising since I think it is a closely related concept that would allow a further nuancing of the complexities around media companies’ intentions, author intentions and audience interpretations. It allows us to ask whether author intentions are important, even in the case of queer subtext, when so many media products can be demonstrated to leak queer themes and hence, if you will, can be considered to contain queer subtexts. It allows us to ask whether author intentions are at all important, even in the case of queer subtexts, when so many media products can be demonstrated to leak queer themes and hence, if you will, can be considered to contain queer subtexts. The panellists do touch upon the idea of “death of the author” and whether author intentions are important, but do not delve into this.
To me, this was a little disappointing because I think going a bit further could allow for a discussion about what it is that has actually changed over the last 20 years or so. Are we perhaps now at a point where counterhegemonic practices such doing queer readings and uncovering queer subtexts in media products have been instrumentalised by media companies and used as marketing strateges, in the sense that they intentionally use queer subtexts to queerbait? As my project colleague Heather speculated when we discussed a draft for this blog post: “I think queerbaiting is something that happens post slash fanfiction when writers know how fans read particular characters and deliberately provoke particular forms of fan engagement and then refuse and revoke the desires they have knowingly and cynically evoked”. If this is so, what does this mean for the progressive potentiality of queer reading and reading against texts?