The (broken) promise of queerbaiting: Happiness and futurity in politics of queer representation

Michael McDermott

21 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Cultural Studies

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender and Feminist Studies Gender, Feminism, and Media Cultural Identity and Representation

Abstract

‘Queerbaiting’ is a pejorative fan-coined term that refers to the media practice of deliberately hinting at, or advertising, queer representation to attract and gain the investments of LGBTQ viewers without ever following through on this promise. Utilizing a range of queer theories of affect as well as data gathered from online discussions with fans, this article explores how fans are reading, conceptualizing, and mobilizing concepts of queerness and emotion in critiquing the practices and motivations behind queerbaiting. I argue that queerbaiting discourse is deeply invested in orientations towards the future marked by the promise of happiness. I assert that through these politics, queerbaiting is positioned as opposing the liveability of queers.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

References

2010Cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity 2011Cruel Optimism 2010The Promise of Happiness 1995States of Injury 1994Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory.1991The Celluloid Closet : Homosexuality in the Movies 2007THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES 2009Feeling Backward

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.