Hey it's Rowan and today I'm gonna be talking about queerbaiting.
So what is queerbaiting? It is the term that refers to what happens when people in
the media
usually television or movies add homoerotic tension between two characters
to attract more liberal and queer viewers with the indication of their not
ever having got together for real in the show or movie.
So this is a fairly recent phenomenon... previously you did have characters who
were what we
often referred to as "coded queer" but that has
often got an extremely negative connotation to it. Characters that were
coded queer were often villains,
the idea being that people who had the attributes of a homosexual person
were inevitably not going to be the hero or the good guy.
Queerbaiting is a little bit different, and its just as insidious I think.
And the reason why I think that is because we are in a climate now where
it is acceptable to have queer people on-screen,
And what's ironic about this is that sometimes in the shows where
there's queerbaiting happening there are also queer characters,
but these characters will also be lesser characters, not the main characters.
I think sometimes the implication that you get as a queer person is that
it's okay to have you, but only in the background, that we couldn't possibly
have
hero characters ,you know, STILL that we couldn't have hero characters who
are also queer.
So how does queerbaiting manifest itself on these show? Well I think often there
are sort of
two roads that go into it. One is the explicit and one is the implicit.
So on the explicit side we often have the idea of the "no homo" humour.
The biggest example of this is probably in BBC's Sherlock.
The idea that other characters mistake your two characters who've been
queerbaited
as a couple and this is treated as a hilarious joke that couldn't possibly be
true.
This laughter at the assumption that someone might be
in a relationship with someone of the same gender means that you're
also laughing at the viewers. That you're laughing at the people who are trying to
find representation of themselves within the media.
But we also have the implicit. Now the implicit is often in the way
that a story is scripted or the way that a show is shot
which means that they're just hints of parallels or themes that come up
between the heterosexual couples who are very much canon
and the queer couples who are being queerbaited.
So the
apparently platonic scene that a lot of people read as romantic
would be shot in the same way as the explicitly romantic scenes. A good
recent example of this is actually Agent Carter.
There's conversations between Howard Stark and Peggy Carter which are
about their love for Steve... and it's very clear in the script
that they are paralleling their love, they're saying that their love
equivalent to each other.
Peggy: You don't get to use my reactions to your lies as a reason for your lies. Howard: I knew how much Steve meant to you because
I know how much he means to me.
There's also some implicit ways of doing queerbaiting which are to do with
ambiguous lines, or ambiguous setting,
So a really strong example of this which made me so hopeful and then so annoyed when it happened
was the character of Stiles in Teen Wolf.
Stiles: I thought you liked girls?
Cat: I do like girls
Do you?
Stiles: Absolutely
Cat: Great.
Stiles: So you also like boys?
Cat: Absolutely...do you?
And it's the kind of internal
personal coming up experience when you
realize for the first time that you might be queer, that a lot of queer people identify
with. So for a lot of queer people that scene was quite an obvious personal coming out scene
for Stiles. And yet we now move on to
the external idea of queerbaiting. So this isn't jusT
within the shows themselves. Because of the way that media works now
because of how much of a reciprocal relationship a lot of the stars and writers
of shows have, we also get to see the
the writers and the directors and the showrunners have to be accountable for
their decision-making.
And here's where it gets really tricky, so
the way that they'll deal with queerbaiting is that often they can't shut it down
completely
by, you know, taking all these references out of the show
because that defeats the point of what queerbaiting is which is,
to be honest, a marketing ploy. So that they can both appease queer people and
give them characters that they think that they might be able to identify with but
also not make the character so explicit that they alienate
homophobic viewers. And they know that queer people are so starved of
representation in the media but they will hang on for season upon season on
the hopes that these characters will
actually admit the fact that they are queer. So the way the showrunners and
writers and actors often are made to deal with these things in order to keep this
marketing ploy afloat
is to either not actually technically deny anything.
So an example of this I have right here is from the show Supernatural, that during a Twitter
talk
Adam Glass. who is a writer for Supernatural was asked some questions about
the characters of Dean and Castiel, and instead of saying
"These two characters are heterosexual they will never get together"
what he says is "what's so great about these characters is that they mean so much to so many of
us
so why limit them to just one thing they could be
all of them?" So someone else basically said " Well that's queerbaiting my friend"
and he replied with "Far from it only my humble opinion
I believe it is not my place to define them they belong to the fans."
There are also other techniques people behind the scenes will employ. So
something they will just refuse to talk about it. So this has
been kind of a bit of a controversy at a number of conventions for particular fandoms
that questions will be kind of censored or people will explicitly
be told "You're not allowed to ask us questions about this particular pairing or this
idea
of queerbaiting". And the other thing they do is put these characters into
what I think they think are "heterosexual" relationships, so essentially just
relationships that are one man one woman
and sort of say "Well, you know, this means that they're straight!"
Even though we all know that you can still be queer and be in a relationship
between a man and a woman because you know there isn't just
gay and straight on the spectrum of sexuality". You know queer characters are
becoming more acceptable and it's just a reallu
weird situation where these shows aren't
acknowledging this. And I think one of the reasons why, pretty fucking stupidly,
is the fact that they think that they're doing shows for men.
And so they feel like they can't possibly have
a queer character for a show which they see as being about men,
which is total bollocks because, you know, men can be queer as well!
This is the kind of story line that goes on in heterosexual
couple's relationships all the time in TV shows. The idea of the "will they won't they?"
So you have this will they won't they get together? And sometimes they break up and
they get back together and they talk about them being
"endgame". All this kind of stuff. This is something happens to heterosexual couples
all the time
the difficulty with queerbaiting is that we know in our heart of hearts that
it will never get to the "will they" it will always be a "won't they".
So queerbaiting. How can we combat it?
Can we combat it? I think its really really difficult
and one of the main reasons why it's difficult is because no one is
acknowledging who is in charge
of these decisions. So we as fans, or as people were interested in media, or in
critiquing media
will probably find it difficult because there is such secrecy around why these
decisions are made.
So is it because the writers just decided it wasn't gonna happen?
Is it because the actors are uncomfortable with homosexual characters and playing
them?
Is it because the studios don't want it to be going on in shows that they're funding?
I'm really hopeful that it means that new shows will acknowledge that this racket is
going on and then be like
"okay maybe this is something that we shouldn't do" but I also kinda
don't know if that's going to happen. New shows have come out like Constantine
which has a canonically bisexual main
character, and yet they very quickly announced that he was not going to be
bisexual in any way.
But on the other hand we have shows like The 100
which now has a canonically bisexual main character!
As I said this whole thing really is a marketing ploy..
and the whole point about marketing is that it's about money
and as long as people are still invested in the shows this marketing ploy working...
why would they change it? If you guys have any thoughts about queerbaiting, whether it's
to vent your fristrations at it happening
or to talk about some shows which are actually doing queer characters right
please leave a comment below, I really wanna have some recommendations from you guys.
If you'd like me to do a video which goes into more depth about any of the
characters, shows, or concepts which are covered in this video
also let me know. Until I see you, bye!
Subtitles by the Amara.org community