Description
“And what if, rather than because it has a place for straightness, queer Indigeneity was centered as an analytic because it called into critical relation straightness in all its iterations?”—Jodi A. Byrd (2020).Trans/nonbinary, genderfluid, and gender nonconforming folks are increasingly present on contemporary television screens and streaming platforms. Characters such as Jim Jimenez (Our Flag Means Death), Bobbie Yang (Rutherford Falls), Cal Bowman (Sex Education), Casey (All My Friends Are Racist), Mae (Feel Good), Darren (Heartbreak High), and—without the explicit label—Willie Jack (Reservation Dogs) variously explore facets of trans/nonbinary gender expressions and experiences.
Queer As... is a deep dive into complex queer representation on TV, led by Wiradjuri trans/nonbinary Professor Sandy O’Sullivan. Our explorations probe the regularly reductive, “risk averse” representations of queerness in popular screen media, and pay close attention to the circumstances that lead to more expansive representations that embody resistance to the colonial enclosures of categorization. This leads us to attend not only to the “text” of television representation, but also to the machinations of production, casting direction, the writers’ room, and distribution; to examine not only what Stuart Hall called the decoding of the image, but also the processes of encoding.
On Stolen Land, Indigeneity is the ontology to which race, ethnicity, and nationality must define themselves in relation (or opposition). Reading for “the colonial project of gender (and everything else)” (O’Sullivan, 2021) in television narratives, I will explore trans/nonbinary representations in situated relationality. In what ways do trans/nonbinary representations in popular media attend to relationality? Is resisting the gender binary presented as a challenge to colonial logics?
| Period | 7 Dec 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | CSAA annual conference: 'Culture in Practice' |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 31 |
| Location | Adelaide, Australia, South AustraliaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |