Much assembly required : cartoons, comics, and the transmedia quarantining of queer women of color

This project analyses the use of transmedia storytelling by two cartoons, The Legend of Korra and Adventure Time. These two cartoons use transmedia comic book expansions to separate the queer aspects of certain characters’ identities away from the television show and into the transmedia supplements. In examining this separation of queerness between mediums, I argue for the emergence of transmedia quarantining, where queer women of color in these shows have their queerness removed from the television screen for exposition in a secondary medium. First, this project situates these two shows within the post-network era and recognizes multicasting as a method by which the shows’ parent networks navigated the challenges posed by era-specific changes in television. In multicasting, adults are incorporated into the audiences of these cartoons through the hyperdiegetic appeal of transmedia storytelling. Within multicasting, however, there is an implicit prioritization of one audience over the other. Children take precedence over adults in this dynamic, and queer women of color are subsumed by the monolithic adult audience. These shows use comic books to develop the queer aspect of these characters’ identities. Taking into account the low thresholds for success in comics, particularly those based on preexisting properties, I propose that these shows are able to reap the advantages of multicasting to loyal comic readers without engendering financial risk. However, the prioritizing dynamics of multicasting are recreated in comics. The medium’s associations with white, heterosexual men remarginalizes queer women of color as devalued audiences, despite the fact that they are pushed to comics in search of representation. The final component of this thesis is a textual analysis of the shows in question; by conducting an analysis of the narrative construction of these characters as queer women of color, I demonstrate that their identities are already obscured prior to moments of transmedia quarantine. By separating the queer component of these characters into a different medium, these cartoons are able to claim representational diversity. In doing so, the queer women of color seeking out this representation are disproportionately affected by these storytelling strategies.Radio-Television-Fil