As a teenager, everything I knew about being queer was gleaned from a small number of queer films and television series. I watched them in secret and held onto their messages and themes with fervent passion. Pieced together by way of sporadic and late night viewings of these films, my understanding of queer life was overly simplified. My real life, in comparison, seemed consistently incongruous with these films or television shows. Simply put, my coming-out story was, to me, a disappointing and banal tale. It did not fit into what I would learned to expect from the films and television series from my youth. As I have documented in my writings on queer television, I moved out of home at age 17 and came out to my mother via an email that concluded with a brief postscript: “p.s. I’m a lesbian.” Thinking back on this moment, I cannot say how (or indeed whether) she replied, for I cannot quite remember. I do, however, remember that she was noticeably silent when I saw her a few months later. We were having a cup of tea when I finally summoned the courage to raise the issue. “So …” I said, choking on my Earl Grey, “about that email. It’s probably … you know … just a phase. But I thought I should tell you.” She replied with a calm “Cool,” and then it was done. I had come out. Film and television had led me to believe that this would be a climactic and defining moment, an affirmation of my identity as a queer person. In reality, it was a bizarre anticlimax that concluded with a confusing statement wherein I semi-renounced everything I had earlier affirmed. I have often wondered why I uttered those last few words, why I insisted that my sexuality was a phase. I was effectively taking back the queer identity that I had wanted to talk about for so long, at the very moment that I was speaking about it for the first time.
This is not a surprising move when one comes to realise that non-normative sexuality is typically represented, for adolescent characters at least, according to a similar pattern of affirmation and renunciation. In 1987, one year before I was born, Canadian teen series Degrassi Junior High (1987–1991) (one of the first teen-oriented television series to represent teen homosexuality) featured an episode titled “Rumor has it,” in which a teenage girl developed a crush on her female teacher after hearing a rumour that the teacher was a lesbian (episode 1.6). The episode concluded with both the teacher and the student confirming their heterosexuality. The incident was never spoken of again within the series.
Teen television’s first queer boy was similarly fated. In 1994, US television’s first ongoing queer adolescent character, Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), was introduced on the short-lived teen drama series My So-Called Life (1994–1995). Rickie was the only queer character on primetime US television in the mid-1990s and, as Glyn Davis suggests, “with his subtly camp eye rolls and hand gestures, single gold earring, penchant for eyeliner, soft voice and preference for hanging out in the girls’ toilets, Rickie was always fairly clearly coded as queer” (128). However, he did not verbally articulate his sexuality until the final episode of the series, meaning that his affirmation was promptly renounced, subsumed by the ongoing flow of the televisual medium. As Davis argues, Rickie’s final scene was centred on his coming out “which would seem to suggest such a confession as a potential narrative end point … But should it not have been a beginning?” (128).
Not much had changed by the time I reached adolescence. Throughout the 2000s, many representations of queer girls were brief and characterised queerness as “a passing phase” of both adolescence and television, suggesting the queer girl characters of this period were valued only as an issue to be dealt with in a once-off episode or other limited way (Beirne, “Screening the dykes of Oz” 7). In 2004, 2 years before I came out to my mother, the typically conservative Australian soap Neighbours (1985–present) featured a brief storyline in which lesbian character Lana (Bridget Neval) kissed her heterosexual best friend Sky (Stephanie McIntosh). As I examine in Chap. 3, the two characters remained friends but the storyline ended unsurprisingly with Sky confirming her feelings for her boyfriend and Lana leaving the series shortly after (Beirne, “Screening the dykes of Oz”). Later in 2004, a similarly problematic queer storyline occurred on the popular US series One Tree Hill (2003–2012). Michaela Meyer discusses this storyline in terms of its depiction of “transitional bisexuality”—that is, when bisexuality is depicted as a transitional identity between heterosexuality and homosexuality (“Representing bisexuality” 374). Within it, the queer girl character Anna (Daniella Alonso) deliberated over her sexual identity, outing herself as bisexual (episode 2.15). But two episodes later she declared that she was, in fact, “gay” (episode 2.17). Anna was subsequently written out of the series.
At the beginning of 2005, my final year of high school, another high-profile romantic storyline was developed between Marissa (Mischa Barton) and Alex (Olivia Wilde) on the popular US series The O.C. (2003–2007). Alison Burgess argues that this storyline “began as something new and exciting, representing a nuanced and fluid understanding of women’s sexuality” but eventually it “reified the dominance of homophobic and heteronormative discourses in popular culture” (211–212). As I discuss in Chap. 5, the Marissa/Alex relationship was based around the representation of queerness as a brief rebellion or experiment. Her mother, Julie Cooper (Melinda Clarke) described it as “probably just a phase”—“After all, it was for me,” she stated mid-way through the storyline. When the relationship inevitably expired, Alex was written out and never spoken of again, while Marissa exclusively pursued male love interests, her “phase” never again mentioned.
Quite a few years have passed since I had that conversation with my mother and, funnily enough, I am still queer. Unlike the queer characters within these television series of my adolescence, for whom queerness was represented as a temporary departure on the journey towards adult heterosexuality, my queerness was not “just a phase.” In 2015, it is tempting to argue that things have changed and that film and television no longer depict queerness as a phase. My mother has become an incredibly supportive figure, and perhaps more importantly, queer girls now seem to be key characters in major television series as well as the protagonists and love interests in both short and feature length films around the globe. They were also the darlings of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival where Abdellatif Keniche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour won the highest prize, the Palme d’Or. Notably, the prize was awarded not only to Keniche but also to the film’s two stars, Adele Exarchopoulous and Lea Seydoux, for their roles in the intense story of a 15-year-old girl who dreams about her first love and develops a passionate relationship with a college girl.
Despite this progress, queer girls still continue to function within limiting narratives premised upon the same patterns of affirmation and renunciation. This book aims to consider how these patterns occur, why it is problematic and how some screen texts have responded. While the same-sex attraction of girl characters is typically represented as “just a phase” of unruly adolescent development, queer boys tend to be represented through narratives of trauma (of being bullied, for instance) that culminate in the assertion (and often societal acceptance) of boys’ sexuality. This plot device is likely the result of the gendered manner in which adolescence is culturally constructed. For instance, where screen media texts suggest that the development of physical and emotional intimacy between girls is a normal part of girlhood, the same level of intimacy between boys would typically come to signify nascent homosexual desire. For this reason, queer girls have come to exist within screen media in a unique manner, much the same way as José Muñoz argues of queerness itself as “innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments” that disappear at the very instant we finally feel we have a grasp of them (“Ephemera as evidence” 6).
This book is about these fleeting representations. It is not, however, concerned with issues of visibility, or positive representation for that matter. Instead, it makes a series of critical interventions. It closely examines queer girls in screen media from the late 1990s onwards, asking: What are the most common narrative, formal and ideological patterns in representations of desire, romance and intimacy between girls in contemporary screen media? Have there been recurring themes and structures of temporality in these figurations of queer love between girls? If so, what does the persistence of those themes and structures reveal about our understandings not only of queer sexuality, but, more broadly, of girls’ gendered experiences of love, sex and growing up? Are there alternatives to the dominant way of representing queer girlhood? What are the ideological functions of those alternatives? How might they critique heteronormative models of human development or “coming of age” that underpin many contemporary screen texts? Can they offer new understandings of girlhood, sexuality and growing up that affirm a queer future without later renouncing that same affirmation?
In response to the first of these questions, through analysis of a wide range of queer girl-themed texts from both Western and non-Western teen television series and teenpics, art-house, queer and independent cinemas, as well as new forms of digital video, this book analyses the centrality of a heteronormative temporal logic in representations of queer girls and girlhood. It locates and describes a pervasive modern discourse on same-sex attraction that has asserted the impossibility of queer futures: such attractions are dominantly depicted in way that emphasise the transitoriness of queer desire and subjectivity. As in Degrassi Junior High, Neighbours, and The O.C. queer girls have dominantly been represented through particular formal and narrative devices that, in many instances, render the queerness of the queer girl “just a phase” to be overcome through the heteronormatively driven “coming of age” storyline underpinning many contemporary texts. Discussing this in relation to media texts from the early 2000s, Susan Driver argues:
A brief shy kiss, a tomboy transgression, an ‘innocent’ crush, and playful flirtations are often valued only as temporary departures from a normative course toward feminine heterosexual adulthood. Within media portrayals, a girl’s queer transgressions commonly reinforce, rather than disrupt, her development into a normal woman. In other words, elusive signs of gender and sexual variance become framed in terms of a privileged and inevitable heterosexual resolution. (Queer Girls 7)
What will become apparent throughout this book and what is also evident in Driver’s reading is that queer experience is routinely temporalised as “a passing phase” within contemporary screen media. This is particularly so for female characters, and as I argue throughout the following chapters, this is because the figure of the “girl” is consistently bound up with heteronormative ideas of adolescent development. For screen media’s queer girls, queer sexuality is rendered as a juvenile desire or a subjectivity to grow up and out of. Yet this book’s central claim is that while the dominant temporality of such representations is problematic—resulting in the trope of queerness as “a passing phase” some texts do offer promising alternatives in their more complex, queerer approaches to temporality. These alternatives lead me to the remaining questions driving this book: How queer girls are temporalised in this way, what the alternatives are, and what these might mean for broader cultural understandings of girls, growing up and sexuality. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 are framed around these latter questions. In each chapter, I identify a particular way that screen media texts have temporalised queer girls as “a passing phase” before locating alternative representations that challenge or problematise the pervasive norm. In the penultimate chapter, however, I also turn my attention to the potential of digital representations to contest the dominant temporalisation of the queer girl as simply being in “a passing phase.” Digital media accomplishes this alternative view by fragmenting temporal moments, cultivating a particular disjunctive rhythm and, through this, forging new temporal connections. In the book’s concluding chapter, I consider the issue of growing up through representations of queer girls beyond girlhood.
In order to comprehend how these texts function, close textual analysis of all of the films, television series and videos has been undertaken and is featured throughout each of the chapters. While the question of audiences, and in some instances fan activity, would complement this analysis, logistical considerations have simply precluded the opportunity to conduct audience-based research in this instance. Instead, this book provides a large-scale text-based analysis that considers how elements such as mise-en-scène, style, narrative structure, montage and music operate within screen media texts with respect to the representation of queer girls, while closely examining how these aspects work inside or below the obvious, dialogue-based moves of the plot. Many of these aspects are overlooked by studies of queer representation but are of vital importance to any study of screen media, as David Bordwell suggests in his discussion of film:
Style matters because what people call content comes to us in and through the patterned use of the medium’s techniques … Style is the tangible texture of a film, the perceptual surface we encounter as we watch and listen, and that surface is our point of departure in moving to plot, theme, feeling—everything that matters to us. (Figures traced in light 32)
To further explore how contemporary screen media temporalises queer girls as “a passing phase” this book also draws on the critical insights offered by queer theory and queer studies of film and television. Examining queer girls through a queer paradigm, I mobilise the radical potential of “queer” throughout the book to challenge the apparent stability of heterosexuality and destabilise normative conceptualisations of both girlhood and development.
Terminology
One of this book’s key propositions is that the queer girl operates within screen media and broader cultural discourse as both a represented and rhetorical figure. The term “queer girl” is used throughout the book to refer to an adolescent (typically high-school aged), female-identifying and female-desiring subject that operates as both a representation within texts and a rhetorical figure. I have opted to employ “queer” rather than “lesbian” because most of the characters I analyse are not explicitly identified as “lesbian” characters. These characters do not name the desires, intimacies and romances shared with other female-identifying characters as “lesbian,” which in some cultural contexts is precluded as a term of identification.
Through employing “queer girl” as a central term, I do not mean to offer a line of thinking that reduces a multitude of sexual categories and epistemologies to bland sameness. Nor do I intend to read screen texts from various cultural contexts through a Westernising frame. Acknowledging cultural difference throughout this book, I employ “queer” in order to situate my argument within a specific theoretical paradigm while making a conceptual move away from the rigidity of “lesbian” as an identity category. There is a beautifully animated short video “The Queer Umbrella: Responses to what it means to be Queer” created by YouTuber Rosa Middleton that provides a clear and concise definition of “queer” as I am employing it throughout this book. Narrated by Middleton, a queer girl herself, this video argues that queer is “a definitive, self-defining, anti-definition” (“The Queer Umbrella”). Queer, she asserts, is “a word for anyone who doesn’t feel they fit into the box that they’ve been given” and for many “it is about making your own box to tick” (“The Queer Umbrella”). Queer is a way of naming, describing, doing and being. It is a deliberately ambiguous term that Annamarie Jagose argues “depends on its resistance to definition” (1). In placing “queer” alongside “girl” I aim to mobilise the radical potential of queer theory in order to destabilise the typically heteronormative categorisation of “girl.” Combining these terms, I elucidate a rhetorical figure at once fixed and fluid, discrete and deliberately vague. In doing so, I follow Susan Driver, who employs “queer girl” throughout Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting and Creating Media “as an imperfect term that is both distinct and purposefully pliable enough to allow for contestation surrounding the very boundaries that construct and restrict ideals of girlhood” (3).
Because of its deliberate vagueness, this terminology is not without its flaws. Throughout this book I have been faced with incongruences between the possibilities of the queer girl as a rhetorical figure and the realities of its representation. Namely, despite the fact that “queer girl” is conceived of as a radical (indeed, queer) figure, the represented queer girls that I have come across are largely cisgender, feminine in appearance and conventionally attractive. This is likely a result of mainstream media’s construction of female adolescent identity as exemplarily consumerist. It results in a distinct lack of diversity of gender expression in both studies of girls and representations of them. This issue is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this book. While I do hope that this work inspires other scholars to take this up in their research, the task of engaging with the temporalities of queer girls’ representation in post-1990s screen media means, on the one hand, restricting the focus of my analysis to this largely mainstream conception of what a queer girl looks like while, on the other, extending the ways in which scholarship on this figure has been done.
Visibility
In many important ways, this book responds to Amy Villarejo’s Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire, published in 2014. In this work, Villarejo encourages thinking against the “often contradictory discourses of representation justice, identification, and recognition that animate most academic studies of LGBTQ” appearance in television, and screen media more generally (5). Villarejo argues that there are some key claims about queer representation in the USA: that “we’re witnessing the explosion of gay TV,” “that gay men and lesbians hardly appear at all,” or that “while television has always been queer … it has only recently been or become recognisably gay” (2–3). Girls’ studies scholar Marnina Gonick is one of many who note and comment upon an increase in representation, suggesting:
The media is one of the sites where there has been increasing visibility and a trend toward more positive representations of Queer people and issues. Images of gay life are more prevalent … than in previous decades, and as a result young people are able to associate themselves with “alter...