To further discuss the question—how LQBTQ+ community is represented in television dramas—raised in my last blog post, I’d like to take the high-profile Netflix series Heartstopper (2022) as an example. Heartstopper was released on 22 April 2022. It gained instant popularity in the first week when it was released. The story is centred on the school lives of two British teens, Charlie Spring, a recently outed gay schoolboy, and Nick Nelson, a popular rugby player. It also portrays the lives of Tao Xu (Charlie’s protective best friend, Asian), Elle Argent (a black trans girl who transferred to a girls’ school after she came out as transgender, one of the best friends of Charlie and Tao), Tara Jones and Darcy Olsson (a lesbian couple).

Some reviews on this series reveal the reasons why it received overwhelming acclaim. In an article from AV Club, Saloni Gajjar comments that Heartstopper “aces this portrayal of the bashful hope and gutting anxiety that accompanies young love”, and it “subverts notions by keeping its protagonist proudly gay”. What makes this series distinguishable from its precedent LGBTQ-based teenager stories is that it doesn’t demonstrate a typical narrative of discovering self-identity with agony and pressure. Instead, the tone of the story is warm, wholesome, and uplifting. The tension of drama of the narrative is established through the suspense of whether Nick could reciprocate Charlie’s feelings for him. It is about baffling young love.

In contrast to many gay romances in which tensions build on the agony of the protagonist to discover their sexualities, the portrayal of the process of Nick’s grasping and accepting bisexuality is rather smooth and less dramatic, and thus less stereotypical—perhaps not everyone who identifies themselves as one of the queer community have to go through difficult times when discovering and accepting their sexuality. What has to be further explained is that by this I am not suggesting that the process of sexual self-discovery is not difficult or the effort of sexual self-discovery of individuals who fall outside heteronormativity should not be emphasised. Instead, I consider this kind of narrative as a new strategy for LGBTQ+ storytelling. It also shows the queerness of the series in itself—it subverts the conventional dominant narrative structure of queer television.

The representation of Elle, a black trans girl also demonstrates the differences from other teen dramas. The disclosure of transgender identify of Elle in the story is rather implicit. The audience can only deduce it from the only clue that she transferred from a boys’ school to a girls’ school. Since a queer approach “strives to suspend sexual and gender identities rather than underscore them”(Jagose, 1996), more normalised queer characters are probably worth-trying representations.

Bibliography:

Joyrich, L. (2018) ‘Queer Television Studies: Currents, Flows, and (Main)streams’, 53(2), pp. 133–139.

Blackburn, M. V., Clark, C. T. and Nemeth, E. A. (2015) ‘Examining queer elements and ideologies in LGBT-themed literature: What queer literature can offer young adult readers’, Journal of Literacy Research, 47(1), pp. 11–48. doi: 10.1177/1086296X15568930.

Avila-Saavedra, G. (2009) ‘Nothing queer about queer television: Televized construction of gay masculinities’, Media, Culture & Society, 31(1), pp. 5–21. doi: 10.1177/0163443708098243.

Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne Press.

Ruiting Yang

11/28