Screening queered fantasy: queer subtext, queer text and the renegotiation of genre conventions in Torchwood and True Blood

Contemporary media research on queer representation has suggested that there are different strategies to represent queers – those who do not consider their gender or sexual identity and/or their acts as strictly heterosexual. Most often these studies draw on queer theory, a poststructuralist theory stating that our contemporary Western society is dominated by the discourse of heteronormativity. Queer theorists as Butler, Warner and Sedgwick argue that our society foregrounds the heterosexual ideal and consolidates its supremacy through reiterating it as universal and fixed. Strategies of resistance can expose how the heterosexual ideal is nothing more than a construction that systematically discriminates articulations of ‘otherness’. Considering that popular media too are embedded in heteronormativity, it should be noted that heteronormative principles are ubiquitous in popular media texts. Nonetheless, Doty (1993, 2000) argued that these articulations only become heteronormative through reading it as such. By revealing how a text may also be understood as queer, the construction of heteronormative discursive practices might be revealed. Nonetheless, Jenkins (1995) emphasized that resistant reading alone does not suffice for challenging heteronormative constructions. Roberts (1999), drawing on Jenkins, suggested the necessity of including queer characters rather than being satisfied with queered interpretations of a text. Foremost, resistance is not only created through reading practices, but can exist as well at the level of the text. Jenkins and Roberts suggested that science fiction series allow queer to exist at a subtextual level. In general, the fantasy genre is concerned with transgressions of the natural, whether or not by the making, unmaking or remaking of worlds and human identities (Sobchack, 1997). As such, the actions and identities of vampires, cyborgs, mutants or aliens can be read as subtexts for queer desire or queer identity. However, fantasy characters who express queer desire or self-identify as queer have only sparsely found their way to fantasy television series. Therefore, this paper wants to study how in contemporary popular fantasy series Torchwood and True Blood queer themes are represented. It will be argued that, on the one hand, in both series queerness can be read at a subtextual level (for instance by means of metaphorical, iconic or intertextual imagery). On the other, the series transgress subtextual interferences and present actual queer characters. By representing queerness at both a subtextual and textual level, the series renegotiate former genre conventions of fantasy. To illustrate how both strategies are employed, this paper will conduct a post-structuralist textual analysis of a selection of episodes. In particular, a body of genre conventions of fantasy will be compared to the cinematographic and narrative choices the series took to represent queer subtext and queer text