Queer (mis)recognition in the BBC’s Sherlock

This essay considers the representation of sexuality and male intimacy in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ BBC series Sherlock. Noting a contemporary emphasis on visibility as a paradigm for the televisual depiction of non-heterosexual identities, I read Moffat and Gatiss’ adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in respect of a late Victorian epistemology of knowledge centred on what can be ‘seen’ alongside Eve Sedgwick’s account of the homosocial as a space in which relations between men remain heavily freighted. In doing so, I argue that the broadly post-homophobic cultural space imagined within Sherlock presents new questions for the depiction and reception of same-sex desire and relationships between men