124642 VO BEd 04.2: Cultural Theories and Popular Culture (2024S)

From Pose (FX 2018-2021) to Heartstopper (Netflix 2022-ongoing), from Moonlight (Barry Jenkins 2016) to Nanette (Hannah Gadsby 2018), from Frank Ocean to Lil Nas X and Janelle Monáe, today's popular culture would not be the same without queer shows, films, comedy, or music. Yet the relationship between queer and popular culture is complicated, multifaceted, and constantly evolving. Queer individuals and communities have always played a significant role in shaping and contributing to popular culture, but popular culture has not always embraced queer identities and experiences. Nevertheless, queer audiences have perfected subversive strategies that have allowed them to enjoy, live, and contribute to popular culture long before the queer movement of the 1990s or even the Stonewall riots.
In this lecture, students will learn about the vexed relationship between queer identified performers, audiences, and popular culture, as well as the relationship between LGBTIQ+ movements and popular culture. Historically, queer people were often marginalized or negatively represented in mainstream media and popular culture, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and erasing their voices. However, queer performers have navigated popular culture, including film, television, music, literature, and social media, to address queer audiences through codes or other opaque forms, and queer audiences have always found ways to queer popular culture. Some genres of popular culture, such as queercore, riot girl, burlesque, drag, voguing, or musicals, have historically emerged as queer countercultures and subsequently become mainstream.
We will look into different musical, cinematic, and performative genres to discuss how queer individuals, groups, and movements have carved out spaces for queer culture, supported the queer community, and represented queer identities and issues. We will learn about subversive artistic and performative forms such as camp. Moreover, we will discuss theoretical and analytical concepts such as the celluloid closet, homonormativity, queering, queer reading, queer heterotopia, whitewashing, pinkwashing, heteronormativity etc.