Placing the Queer Audience: Literature on Gender & Sexual Diversity in Film and TV Reception

by: Rob Cover & Duc Dau , June 14, 2021

International literature on the representation of gender and sexual diversity in film, television and popular culture has burgeoned over the past decade, with a number of major anthologies (e.g., Davis and Needham 2009; Pullen 2012; Hart 2016; Juett and Jones 2010), the dedicated journal Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture (since 2016), many international conferences and a number of monographs, chapters and journal articles. Much of this work builds on early writing on the representation and interpretation of non-heteronormativity in cinematic and television texts, particularly that of Vito Russo (1987), Larry Gross (1991; 1994), Richard Dyer (e.g., 1993) and Keith Howes (1993). Across these early canonical writings, the focus of the work was simultaneously scholarly and activist, accounting for instances of representation of gay men and lesbians within a media framework that persisted at times in stereotyping and self-censorship. This early work also foregrounded the idea that ‘positive’ representation, visibility and recognisability were to be understood as both significant and necessary for the wellbeing of younger gender- and sexually-diverse people, who may first encounter such diversities in media rather than in everyday life (Cover 2002), and for broader social change by providing the public with fictional portrayals that were more sympathetic towards LGBTQ people than are found typically in news media. Arguably, this early textual representation and positive visibility framework has provided a genealogical scaffolding that influenced later and recent work on the topic, particularly resulting in the dominance of textual analysis as methodology; approaches focused on valuing positive, negative, stereotypical or radical representation, and for advocating for visibility representation as a form of political recognition. 

Although scholarship devoted to the analysis of gender- and sexually-diverse representation on-screen has not been systematically rendered as a field of study—despite the above texts, volumes and initiatives devoted to it—like all scholarship, it has worked in a haphazard way to create its object of research. (De Lauretis 1987: 37-38) In this respect, it operates loosely as a field at two conceptual levels. At the first, it constitutes the establishment of what ‘counts’ as a cinema or television text that can be understood as an ‘LGBTQ text’ or a text representing narratives, themes and/or characters that are gender- and sexually-diverse. At the second level, given the role of media in providing the discursive framework by which identities are produced, coded, stereotyped, made available for citation and sustained in repetition (Butler 1990), the field of scholarship establishes the canon, which then goes on to become the resource by which gender- and sexually-diverse subjectivities are framed, coded and re-produced over time. (Cover 2000) While not all scholarship that we identify in this article does so, a number of notable cases (e.g., Steinbock 2018; Benshoff & Griffin 2004) do provide frameworks for what ‘counts’ as a queer text. 

Like any scholarly field, whether self-recognising or not, the scholarship of media and textual artefacts attempts to fix its boundaries and adapt over time, and also has a fluid relationship with its artefacts, whereby a filmic or televisual text that at one time is framed as that which is external to the field is later read as an artefact of its own, and not necessarily because scholars have decided on its suitability for inclusion as an object of study. The capacity of a field to revise its objects over time is one which often operates alongside a high art versus low culture dichotomy. (Storey 2001) For example, Arthur J. Bressan Jr’s erotic art film Passing Strangers (1974) has shifted from being recalled as an underground pornographic text to an important, historical film depicting 1970s gay male culture in San Francisco—not simply because scholars analysed it, but because gay commercial network Here TV was instrumental in restoring and marketing the film as a landmark text. The field is, therefore, interrelated with the complex network of institutional, commercial and audience practices that competitively play their own roles in determining and articulating objects worthy of study and adapting over time the determination of that which is a ‘queer text’ from that which is not. 

Given the speed at which something we might thus call the field of scholarship of ‘gender- and sexually-diverse film and television representation’ has developed, its fluid relationship with its objects of study, the multi-disciplinary backgrounds of contributors to the field, the diverse range of theoretical and analytical perspectives deployed, and the implications for gender and sexual studies that come from the significance of media in everyday twenty-first century life, there is value and significance in unpacking the state of the field, its dominant approaches and how these together shape understanding. In assessing the present state of the field, we argue that this genealogy has resulted in a relative scarcity of empirical or intellectual work on audiences in studies of LGBTQ film and television, and fewer studies that actively interrogate practices of reception and the role of audience formations in interpretation and understanding. This is surprising, given the significance of minority audiences to the shaping of something which can be apprehended as a scholarly field. There are of course important exceptions that foreground a strong consideration of audiences, some of which we discuss below. There are also audience studies found in broader research on queer slash/fan fiction, including slash fiction written about ostensibly ‘straight’ film and television characters as a form of resistant reading of heteronormative discourses (Willis 2006), and in studies that both examine and actively ‘queer’ interactive digital gameplay. (Shaw 2014) These are likely to have future influence on the field of gender and sexual diversity in film and television entertainment, though at the time of writing continue to form separate sub-fields, and are thus excluded from this study. 

Our research points to the fact that the field would benefit from additional studies that seek to understand how audiences—including both gender- and sexually-diverse and ‘mainstream’ audiences—engage with texts containing LGBTQ content, in order to help understand not only how those texts are read, but how they are formative in constituting identity, belonging, social acceptance, and cultural engagement. In a rare critique of extant queer film and television studies, Amy Villarejo (2009) noted that:

the social, industrial and political conditions of a given text’s production (as opposed to the elaboration of its context) are simply not germane to the project of its analysis. Few are interested, as Janice Radway is in Reading the Romance (1984), in actual readers’ practices, or, as David Morley is in Family Television (1986), in viewer responses, preferring instead the implied reader and hypothetical spectator.

This indictment of the field we are labelling ‘scholarship on gender- and sexually-diverse screen representation’ rightly indicates the relative narrowness of the field as a whole, pointing to the need to situate textual analyses in contexts more germane to the wider media process (creative production, distribution and reception), to the understanding of the audience as diverse and active, to the polysemy of reading practices, and to an acknowledgment of the complex, multifaceted authorial and creative processes that go into the production of film texts and television series. While there are more exceptions than perhaps indicated in Villarejo’s statement, the tendency towards humanities-derived, literary studies approaches has tended to simplify the very idea of the audience, or to imply a researcher standing in for it. This is therefore a space in which cultural studies approaches can be helpful both in re-asserting the figure of the audience (Ang 1991), and in bringing together methods derived from both humanities and social sciences, marking the importance of empirical research as well as textual analysis as the basis for scholarship in the form outlined initially by Stuart Hall (1980a). Polysemic reading and re-reading through fluid intertextualities is, of course, an important scholarly project—one which is always unfinished as emerging conceptual and standpoint perspectives present new positions for new readings. Nevertheless, the relative absence of audience work potentially renders these scholarly readings as ‘authorities’, thereby disallowing the important voices of the everyday user to contribute their meanings to wider understandings of the texts. 

This article draws on work undertaken for the Australian Queer Screens study, which represents the first Australian Research Council funded research into audience attitudes to gender- and sexually-diverse representation on cinema and television screens. While the wider study undertakes interviews with audience members of English-language ‘queer’ screen texts, analyses of fan writers who draw on and adapt such texts, and empirically tests the validity of national and international ‘canons’ of gender- and sexually-diverse film and television, for reasons of space the present article reports on analyses of literature in the context of our apprehension of these works as constituting the field of study to which the wider project responds. We therefore document in this article a non-exhaustive sample of some of the published research on gender/sexual diversity (principally LGBTQ) in film, television and popular culture, in order to draw genealogical traces across the different frameworks for conducting research on this topic, and what therefore might better be drawn out in order for the future field to be more attentive to the role of audiences in the media process. We are particularly interested in the conceptual and cultural frameworks that condition that which is considered to be queer screen media and popular culture research. 

Although queer studies of digital gaming and fan fiction have enormous potential to contribute to an audience (or interactive audience) framing of queer film and television, we exclude those studies from the present research on the basis that such important influence is yet to come. Instead, we focus on four key facets or trends that can be genealogically traced back across the longue durée of queer screen media research: 

(1) the dominance of studies of individual and groups of texts via literary analysis and traditional film studies models, primarily those that seek to uncover the underlying discourses that frame those texts, condition their filmic narratives, and enable theoretically-drawn readings. 

(2) the preoccupation of much research of the past and present on socio-political questions of visibility, including the analysis of what constitutes good representations and negative or harmful representations as the means for assigning ‘value’ to texts. 

Both of these are important queries, but understanding how their significance warrants, we argue, a turn to the productive potential of empirical audience analyses to supplement and solidify this nascent field. The remainder of the article turns to the nascent examples of studies that incorporate audience perspectives and concepts in order to better theorise the role of queer screen representation in the constitution of non-normative gender and sexual identities. We thus: 

(3) explore some of the limited reference to audience in analyses of gender/sexual-diversity and screen media, primarily on how assumptions and constructions of an audience member, identity, and assumed practices of identification dominate.

(4) perform a brief analysis of the small number of studies that have undertaken empirical audience research. 

We conclude with some remarks on how the field can benefit through a framework that incorporates the broader media process in order to produce an intelligible, coherent and encompassing account of the social role and cultural importance queer screen textuality and representation. 

Textual Analysis Dominates

The contemporary focus of much international film and television research on gender- and sexually-diverse characters, themes and narratives is primarily on textual analysis via in-depth literary readings of particular screen texts or groups of screen texts. Although much of the research and writing that focuses on textual analysis since the 1990s has involved culturally-situated, socially-significant, discursively-analysed and intellectually-insightful readings of texts (e.g., Dyer 1993; Waugh 2006, among many others), the emphasis on in-depth readings of texts has tended to be conducted in isolation from the social conditions in which they are produced and engaged with by audiences. 

More perceptive analyses note, of course, that the conditions in which queer cinema in the 1990s was produced include the social and political. As R. Ruby Rich (2013) argues, several elements converged to create those conditions: the arrival of HIV/AIDS and U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s poor public response to the health crisis, the invention of camcorders, the rise of cable TV and the increasingly popular use of video cassette recorders that revolutionised the distribution of film. These political and economic climates provided the conditions for the proliferation of gender- and sexually-diverse screen texts as texts that would be available for consumption with a neoliberal North American sociality: what Lisa Duggan (2003: xiv) has referred to as, ‘the upward redistribution of resources and the reproduction of stark patterns of social inequality’. Arguably, the new availability and growing proliferation from the mid-1990s of LGBTQ representations in mass-circulation film (Cover 2000) produced the conditions for a scholarship that drew on its activist roots by seeking to critique the quality of representation of LGBTQ characters within the context and discourse of the text itself, either to determine the accuracy of those depictions in relation to a perceived extra-textual reality, the value of those portrayals for broader representation of gender/sexual minorities and for ‘speaking’ on behalf of minority communities (e.g., Hart 2016), or in the context of whether those representations undo earlier or constraining stereotypes (e.g., Edwards 2010), including overcoming stereotypes that linked gender- and sexually-diverse personages to, for example, serial killers. (e.g., Curtis 2010; Rigney 2008) While much scholarship made reference to the broader cultural context in which we define and analyse a ‘queer screen text’, the ensuing analyses are almost always undertaken through a close reading that extinguishes those contexts from the reading, and assumes a singularity of meaning.

If a field of study is active in the constitution of the object it names, then the methods it deploys to analyse those objects presents a knowledge framework through which to understand its role in the production of meaning. (Foucault 1980) As a method, textual analysis looks to the symbolic, semiotic and discursive formations by which meaning is productively activated from specific reading standpoints. (Bennett 1983; Becker 2006) It thus productively enables insight into the historical, cultural, political and ethical dimensions from which a reading is undertaken, while drawing attention to the institutional, intertextual and contextual perspectives by which the raw material of a screen text is constructed. While it is important to recognise not only that it is an important pursuit, but that textual analysis achieves economies by providing an understanding of a text through an engagement that does not demand the funding of empirical analysis, it establishes an object that is understood through specific frameworks of sophisticated connectivity, context and intertext that do not necessarily reflect the meaning-making labour of an audience. Thus, while worthwhile and significant, a portion of the understanding of the text—and the wider objects constituted into a canon by the field that deploys textual analysis—is incomplete when the everydayness of practices of spectatorship are not equally part of the field. 

To put this argument another way: analyses that are based on the textuality of visual screen media texts, as exclusive from the social and cultural contexts of their creation and consumption, tend to ignore the significance of contextual flows in two respects. The first is that much analysis extracts the film or television text from the creative and interpretive contexts and intertexts with other texts, including the significant mutual referentiality that, from an audience perspective, drives interpretation and meaning (Barker 1999), giving the text itself not only polysemic potential but multiple valences of purpose, identity and textuality. To focus only on uncovering the authorial and authorised meaning of a singular text is to keep queer screen studies stuck precisely in the practices of scholarship about which Roland Barthes (1977) warned us in announcing the death of the author as a means of ensuring a focus on the practices and roles of the reader. Jeffrey Weeks (2017), for example, has pointed to the global connectivities of the experience and knowledge frameworks of gender and sexuality. For Weeks, these incorporate: ‘[f]lows of media that make sexual information, news, gossip, styles, scandals, personalities, stereotypes, role models, personal dramas, legal changes, reactionary pronouncements, crimes and misdemeanours instantly known everywhere’. (2017: 192) These flows as they are encountered not in the text, but in the context of viewership, condition reading practices and meaning-making for queer texts in ways which complicate the country of origin of the text, the location of viewership, nationalistic perspectives on sexuality and gender. 

Visibility Fixations

The greater balance of scholarship that constitutes the object of study as gender- and sexually-diverse screen characters, themes and contexts, yet has a specific focus not on the textual but the extra-textual conditions of its dissemination, fixates on questions of visibility. This has especially been the case in the scholarship of the past decade—somewhat against the grain of younger, gender- and sexually-diverse issues, politics and perceptions which are less focused on concerns over invisibilisation, and are more concerned with frameworks for equity and inclusivity. (Marshall et al. 2019) The emphasis on visibility is, as Samuel Chambers (2009) correctly notes, the result of gay and lesbian screen studies emerging from the same roots as the 1970s and 1980s gay rights movement, and that the movement for gay rights based its claims at least partly on liberationist articulations of coming out, visibility, and inclusion through recognition of presence. To be not-visible or, indeed, under-represented, is to be ‘oppressed’ and excluded from social participation. This claim has its genealogical origins in early Gay Liberation discourse having a resultant impact on early analyses of LGBTQ screen representations and absences. (Altman 1971) The framing of queer visibility as the core social concern of LGBTQ screen media has subsequently remained central to much research and writing. Joshua Gamson (1998), for example, argued that talk shows were pivotal in making sexual minorities visible in the United States and elsewhere, forging a path for their wider entry into mainstream media. Much of the later focus on the importance of visibility, however, has especially been in relation to the view that positive representation and minority role models are valuable for the mental health of young people in particular and for society in general. (Capsuto 2000) This has provided the field not only with a history of discussing visibility in relation to the analysis of individual texts, but also a social framework that warrants visibility as urgent. Nevertheless, as we argue later, this link between visibility and mental health has not been empirically tested from within media culture scholarship. 

The origins of the visibility fixation emerge in the earliest of gender- and sexually-diverse screen studies, particularly in Russo’s Celluloid Closet (1987: 244), where he argued that ‘[i]nvisibility is the great enemy. It has prevented the truth form being heard’. For Russo (1987), this critique of visibility and social concern about invisibilisation led to his valuable research on the subjugation of queer visibilities across much of the twentieth century, based primarily on both censorship and self-censoring regimes in the motion picture industry, an assumption among industry personnel that the figure of the homosexual was anti-social and dangerously anti-social and anarchic, and on the foregrounding of a particular kind of masculinity in film that left little room for either gay male or lesbian sexuality, bodies or desires. This framework led Russo (1987) to argue that homosexuality was represented primarily as incompatible with heroism, and through a perspective that offset any possibility that core male characters, such as buddies, were non-heterosexual. Submerged portrayals called upon a spectatorial standpoint that allowed readings of characters and relationships as non-heterosexual only by those already familiar with the topic—a well-recognised understanding, but one which assumes two kinds of audiences (the clueless straight audience and the savvy queer audience). This aspect of conceiving visibility (and non-visibility) as depending upon which of the two core audience groups one belongs, both in the 1980s and today, warrants empirical investigation to ensure audiences are represented as diverse, nuanced, complex and governed by a much less concrete interpretative capacity built on the availability of discourses rather than identity and affiliation. 

One pointed critique of later twentieth-century queer screen representation that comes out of Russo’s trajectory is centred on the particular kinds of acceptable presentation of gender- and sexually-diverse characters as ‘safe’ and ‘harmless’. This critique is primarily based on the assumption that mass-circulation films depicting diverse characters or themes are addressing themselves to heterosexual audiences who are assumed to demand invisibility unless it is ‘safe’. (Russo 1987: 325) Other early texts, such as Broadcasting It, Howes’ (1993) encyclopaedic collation of LGBTQ representations in international films and television series, seek to make apparent the sheer extant visibility of gay men, lesbians and trans people on international screens. Visibility critiques in contemporary scholarship on LGBTQ screen media tend to draw more on Russo’s framework than on the celebration of visibility articulated by Howes, ostensibly making a political, social or health-oriented claim for the need for visibility, and following this by testing their claims through textual analysis of the form discussed in the section above. 

For example, Dragos Manea (2016) undertakes an important analysis of historical television series which ‘straightwash’ otherwise gender/sexually-diverse subjects, such as the Starz/Fox series Da Vinci’s Demons (2013-2015). Such series, as Manea argues, either essentialise past non-heteronormativity into gay stereotypes or, as in the case of this particular text, disavow popular historical assumptions about Leonardo Da Vinci’s potential non-heteronormative desires, behaviours and activities. While not querying invisibility per se, other texts argue that these kinds of visibilities are, as per Russo’s analysis of the later twentieth-century North American cinema, visible in ways which are not germane to quality representations for and on behalf of LGBTQ communities. For example, Hart’s (2016) edited collection of essays is representative of similar arguments in relation to television series, particularly in its general argument that, apart from a few exceptions, queer television characters achieve mainstream visibility at the expense of minimising much of their queerness. In Hart’s collection, DeLong (2016: 108) concludes that ‘[t]he image of the model minority lesbian was never constructed to satisfy queers’. Ellen DeGeneres, who played one of the first openly lesbian characters in a sitcom in the 1990s, is identified as one instance of the model minority lesbian: white, stylish though soft butch, nonthreatening and wealthy. Male queer characters on television are also prone to being reduced to nonthreatening entities, sometimes depicted as ‘asexual’ rather than (non-normative) sexual beings (Dhaenens 2014: 524) or the ‘forever single’ gay best friend. (Cover 2000) 

Visibility per se is often celebrated, particularly when scholars enumerate changes that demonstrate increased representation of LGBTQ characters on television and film (e.g., Erhart 2016). However, most scholarship on queer film and television that articulates a concept of visibility has, over the past decade and a half, moved away from the idea that visibility itself is vital, and more towards a concern for kinds of representation, whether it is considered positive or negative, and often within the assumption that negative portrayals will have a negative effect on a linear conceptualisation of progress in civil rights for gender- and sexually-diverse people and communities. For example, in the introduction to his anthology in queer popular culture, Thomas Peele (2007: 5) cautions against the uncritical celebration of visibility, arguing instead that while texts with gay characters such Glee (2009-2015) and Modern Family (2009-2020) have value in making non-heteronormativity visible, the reliance on stereotypes of gay men and lesbians and their proliferation across film and television does not eliminate heteronormativity or interpersonal violence and hate crimes, but may risk exacerbating them. Likewise, he argues that negative stories that situate a gender/sexually-diverse character within a narrative grounded in despair, murder or unhappiness—such as Brokeback Mountain (2005), Transamerica (2005) and Capote (2005)—are counter-productive by sending ‘incorrect’ messages about the lives of diverse subjects. 

Others have argued that visibility itself can be unproductive if the emphasis is on the visibility of one aspect of a minority group in a way which does not represent intersectional diversity. For example, DeLong (2016) points to the problems of increased visibility of white, upper-middle-class lesbians on television series in the United States, indicating that the imbalance of representation increases diversity and class erasure. Important here, of course, is that intersectional representations of subjects belonging to multiple minorities or subjugated groups are more endemic in television and film produced in the United States than, say, Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom, leading us to note that attention to creative practices and to audience tastes would be helpful in ensuring that claims about visibility, erasure and invisibility are not themselves universalised in ways which wipe out important creative work in complex visibilities undertaken elsewhere. 

One aspect that is emerging but not yet widespread in scholarship that celebrates visibility is a critique of the very register in which visibility is measured. (Joyrich 2009) That is, how visible or invisible (e.g., supporting or central character in a film; number of minutes of screen time; context of relationships to other characters, etc.) and how positive (in contrast to what else; options beyond positive/negative dichotomies; how to measure)? Important questions are beginning to be asked around how visible some discrete groups of gender- and sexually-diverse subjects are in the context of broader celebration of so-called LGBTQ visibility. (Bell-Metereau 2019; Phillips 2006; San Filippo 2013) Melissa Rigney (2008) has noted that the invisibilisation of trans people has been an ongoing issue, and—other than temporary cross-dressing and transgender serial killers (Straayer 1996)—there is arguably a considerable dearth of trans, non-cisgender and gender-diverse representations in contemporary film and television for which a framework of visibility and positive representation can be valuable. That is, a nuanced approach to valuing visibility can help remedy the erasures that emerge through celebrating the visibility of one under-represented group while failing to consider exclusions among others—a key issue of erasure that the umbrella banner of LGBTQ has often established for bisexual (Bryant 1997) and transgender subjects. A recent study by Andre Cavalcante (2018), however, makes inroads into transgender audience studies through participant interviews of affirmative experiences of reading media texts. For the participants of Cavalcante’s study, ‘technologies of vision generated powerful experiences of self-recognition and conferred feelings of “realness” and legitimacy—exactly what is at stake in living a transgender life’. (2018: 103) Media thus operates as a medium through which transgender audiences are able to cultivate a sense of self-identity and identify inhabitable worlds often unavailable to them.

Secondly, there is a need for studies which critically engage with questions on the extent to which we can measure visibility, for example, beyond arguments that on a particular day in June there were x representations of queers of colour across all broadcast television programs, down from a year earlier. The past twenty years have seen very significant shifts away from broadcast flows and in-person cinema-going, through time-shifting, video recording (Cubitt 1991), consumption of television series of choice via DVD box sets and their related shifts to temporal viewing practices (Cover 2005a), consuming television and film via download and streaming in ways which remove the tyranny of program scheduling altogether. (Lobato 2019; Cover 2005b) Thinking, therefore, in terms of the numbers of instances of positive visibility across particular flows within time-periods of programming or number of films released in a year may be a useful indicator for the extent to which creative production embraces diverse representation, but is not necessarily as meaningful or impactful to audiences who generate alternative flows and viewing practices, and who may encounter such instances very differently. Again, thinking through the genealogy of visibility representation in LGBTQ screen scholarship from the present standpoint is an opportunity to begin asking what that scholarship might need to paint a picture of representation that is meaningful to the audience, and how such data can be gathered on the relationship between screen time and what is visibility to different types of audiences in differing spectatorial contexts. In other words, this is not to denounce the critical study of visibility and positive representations which have broken a range of conceptual binaries, but rather to consider how more complex contexts of viewing practices might be helpful to understand the contemporary cultural conditions of non-cisgender representations and practices of screen recognition. 

Assumptions about Audiences 

The 1990s was an important decade in cultural, film, screen and television studies for a number of reasons, but particularly for the increasing turn towards reception studies, building on the frameworks developed by cultural studies in the United Kingdom, particularly David Morley’s (1986) testing of Stuart Hall’s (1980b) encoding/decoding models of audience interpretation and the production of meaning. John Fiske’s influential Understanding Popular Culture (1989a) and Reading the Popular (1989b) and Janice Radway’s (1984) Reading the Romance exemplified the movement towards making sense of both texts and the cultural circumstances of their reception and/or consumption by overcoming an arbitrary dichotomy of art versus popular culture. This analytic framework posits the important view that popular culture, including texts that may not convey ‘artistic value’ in the subjective and discriminatory sense of high art, are sometimes more valuable to specific audiences and utilised in ways which may be unforeseen in production or invisible to a scholarship focused on the text and its contextual meanings. Such work continues to point to the merit of analyses that take into account the views, understandings and uses of the text by popular audiences. Cultural studies approaches that drove scholarship towards a necessary focus on the audience also included the reconceptualisation of the audience as active, self-conscious, multiple, fragmented and engaged. (Ang 1991)

The various historical shifts towards audience scholarship exemplified by cultural studies, however, was not as pronounced in queer film/television studies. Rather, the field is broadly dominated by scholarship which undertakes important examinations of representations, cultural contexts of meaning and visibility, but in ways which are not matched by as much scholarship that tests such knowledge frameworks among audiences, and some of which reads film and television texts on behalf of audiences in ways which assume universality of meaning. Arguably, much of this has to do with the cost of audience research and the relative historical scarcity of major research funding for queer media topics up until the past decade in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Oceania. The combination of funding flows and the establishment of much gender and sexuality scholarship within the humanities rather than the social sciences results in work which has, by necessity, made assumptions about audiences. For example, the following quote indicates how a textual reading is sometimes seen to represent audiences: ‘[a]gitation, repulsion, and attraction are not only sensorial and emotional states that Max stimulates in the audience; his fictional friends also perceive his sublimity, but they are not quite sure how to manage it’. (Ciamparella 2016: 86) While grounded readings are, of course, very valuable to making sense of textuality, and an argument that the character of Max in The L Word invokes mixed reactions by virtue of a complex identity depicted through the pregnancy of a trans man character, the assumption that this is the reaction of ‘the audience’ is more problematic. Studies which empirically test reactions in fan communities—such as Edwards (2010)—present an alternative account of nuance and complex audience meaning-making. 

There are two areas of assumption about audiences that emerge here. The first is that what comprises the figure of the audience is very often ‘straight people’; the second, to which we will return below, is that even when audiences are understood to be diverse or queer, identity is viewed as being fixed, essentialist and always preceding the encounter with the screen text. We will address these two assumptions in turn. With regard to the former, much queer scholarship on mass-circulation film and television has assumed that the creative outputs of these industries are designed with a straight audience in mind and, as described in our discussion of different kinds of ‘visibility’ above, the presumed needs or tastes of straight, cisgender and normative audiences are often believed (in very simplistic terms) to have directed the characterisation or use of ‘safe’ stereotypes of, in particular, gay men and lesbians. (Verhoeven 1997) It has, indeed, been argued that the focus on heterosexual audiences indirectly marginalises or at least minimises the reception of queer media by queer audiences. As film theorist Brett Farmer (2000: 4) argues, scholarship aimed at identifying and castigating the effects of Hollywood’s heterocentric agenda is undoubtedly valuable, ‘but with its exhaustive taxonomies of pernicious stereotypes and its impassioned diatribes against an alleged universal filmic heterocentrism, it has effectively marginalised gay spectatorial desires out of existence’. In other words, academic film theory might effectively closet gay spectatorship, like so many other forms of queerness—though, as Farmer acknowledges, this occlusion of gay and lesbian spectatorship in film theory and criticism is being increasingly challenged. (2000: 5) 

Assuming that the intended or actual spectatorship of screen texts that can be analysed as gender- and sexually-diverse representations is, of course, interesting because it not only opens scholarship up to respond to problematic reception of minorities on cinema and domestic screens, but serves as a relatively benign method by which to sociologically test the views of the ‘mainstream’ on topics of gender and sexual minority becoming apparent in the everydayness of screen entertainment. Notably, film historian Scott McKinnon (2016), whose empirical work we discuss below, believes that to label a queer movie as one intended for straight audiences is to ignore its queer audiences and their reception of the film, along with the pleasures these queer audiences might receive in viewing the movie. McKinnon’s study of the reception in Sydney of films aimed at gay men argues that ‘many gay men may take pleasure in a story that is specifically centred on a romance between two men’. (2016: 149) Thus, by suggesting that such a film is for a straight audience, one is implying that queer subjects are still required to undertake ‘perverse’ viewings even if the story is about lives (somewhat) like their own—that they are only incidentally involved as viewers ‘even when centrally located on-screen’. (McKinnon 2016: 149) McKinnon’s critique here draws on Janet Staiger’s (2000) concept of ‘perverse spectators’, viewers who do not interpret the text as expected. One example Staiger (2000) uses is of gender- or sexually-diverse subjects who have inserted their lives and interpretive frameworks onto heterosexual cinematic storylines. Staiger’s argument is similar to Alexander Doty’s claim that traditional narrative films that are ostensibly addressed to, and are assumed to be for, straight audiences, yet which contain ‘intense tensions and pleasures generated by the woman-woman and man-man aspects within the narratives’—for example Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Internal Affairs (1990), and Thelma and Louise (1991) —‘often have greater potential for encouraging a wide range of queer responses than such clearly lesbian- and gay-addressed films’. (1993: 8) Doty’s argument builds on his earlier work exploring the gay cult of Judy Garland, which he argued appropriated the star for its own purposes. (Doty 1987) In Staiger’s (1992) exploration of the perverse spectator, she maintains that context—including viewers’ interpretive strategies such as aesthetic preferences and practices, prior knowledges and expectations, and experiences of the screening location—is more significant than textual features in explaining interpretive events. This particular strand of considering the context of the audience is, as we show in the next section, limited to a small number of texts, although it has been influential in helping to address assumptions by queer researchers that the texts being analysed for their narrative, discursive foregroundings and broader textuality are created and produced for particular ‘types’ of audiences, opening the field to consider these audiences in more nuanced ways in line with earlier work within cultural studies.

Empirical Research and Audiences

As outlined above, much of the scholarship on gender- and sexually-diverse screen media is limited to textual analysis, criticisms related to visibility and representation, and work which makes untested assumptions about audience members and identity. This is not, of course, to suggest that there has been no scholarship that undertakes empirical analysis of audiences at all (e.g., Dhaenens 2012), including the perspective of social psychology (e.g., Green, Brock & Kaufman 2006). There are several significant instances of empirical audience studies that are worth outlining here for the power of their theoretical contribution to the field. The first is Evan Cooper’s (2003) ‘Decoding Will and Grace’, which has often been cited by subsequent writers in considering questions of the role of diverse representation in producing social change among broad heteronormative audiences. The second is Frederik Dhaenen’s study of Flemish-speaking viewers’ readings of queer Hollywood texts. The third is Scott McKinnon’s interviews with sexual minority audience members of historical and current film in Sydney, Australia. While this sample is too small to be telling, it is notable that there is a range of methods deployed across the three: survey questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, and ethnographic accounts derived through interviews. It should be remarked, however, that these are all studies of cis men, and that such scholarship must, if the field is to advance, also be undertaken in relation to the representation of trans and nonbinary people and women. 

To posit the need for a greater focus on audience analysis and on actively asking the audience rather than assuming universal experiences or presumptions of identity fixity is, to an extent, to continue the important, although sometimes forgotten, work of Jack Babuscio. In his essay, ‘Camp and Gay Sensibility’, Babuscio (1984) sought to ascertain the relationship between camp, gay identity, and gay sensibility, and to relate these considerations to a hitherto neglected aspect of film studies: the production of audience solidarity and a greater sense of identification among (particularly) gay men. While Babuscio problematically considered ‘gay sensibility’ to be stable and inherent in an individual subject, coloured by oppression and experiences that are ‘different from the mainstream’, he nevertheless articulates an early framework for thinking about how a screen text participates in shaping one’s perception of the world rather than being merely a commodity that is consumed. (1984: 40) That is, the text does something to and with an audience, constructs it and frames ways of perceiving itself as subjects and as community. To find out what that means without presuming two kinds of audiences (straight/cisgender and non-heterosexual/gender-diverse) is to take the necessary next steps for the field of queer screen studies to tell us not how such texts can be read or what they are—but what they do. 

Cooper’s (2003) much-cited study of college students’ reception of gay sitcom Will and Grace (1998-2006, 2017-2020) was ground-breaking in providing an account that tested audiences for the ways in which they responded to queer representations. In the study, several classes of college student, all identifying as heterosexual, were asked to watch one or two episodes of Will and Grace and to then fill out a questionnaire, seeking to understand how a mainstream audience, limited here by its socio-economic, perceived liberal perspective and age commonalities, might respond to the representation of characters classified as members of an ‘outsider group’. (Cooper 2003: 521-522) Its key finding was that while participants were broadly accepting of minorities and minority characters, including those who are normally figured as more marginal due to male flamboyance (e.g., Jack), most were accepting of the text, but the text itself did not necessarily improve the attitudes of the audience or make them more accepting of gender/sexual minorities. This finding, that could only have emerged from empirical work, is highly significant for a field that has made assumptions about good portrayals and bad portrayals, about the importance of visibility for increasing social acceptance and for the common view among creative producers that ‘safe’ queer characters are more likely to be acceptable to audiences than those who are sexually active and gender-transgressive. Of course, one of the issues with an empirical method is the temporal context: a 2003 study about college students’ reception of a text that was popular at the beginning of the century is not necessarily going to tell us much about audiences almost twenty years later, whose reading practices are informed by a wholly different set of social, political and intertextual circumstances. 

Dhaenens’ (2014) study sought to show that queer texts that are sometimes seen to be radical and resistant in and of themselves never can be, and that resistance only occurs in the reading practices of the audience. His articulation of both straight and non-heterosexual regular television viewers begins by seeing audience as neither passive nor active, but as ordinary in the everydayness of encounters with texts which can be meaningful encounters no matter how mundane (an important popular cultural studies approach—see, for example, Fiske 1989; Staiger 2005). His study aimed to determine how Flemish television viewers of contemporary British and North American televisual texts such as Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Torchwood (2006-2011) and True Blood (2008-2014) read queer representation and, in particular, articulations of queer resistance. Recruited via snowball sampling, participants had to be between 18 and 35 years of age, a ‘fan’ of at least two of the preselected series, willing to talk about issues related to queer sexuality and able to participate twice. They were required to ‘read’ scenes from shows with queer characters and were interviewed in focus groups with semi-structured, open questions. Dhaenens concluded that, despite the fact that notions of (queer) resistance and heteronormativity were not introduced in the focus group interviews, the study confirmed the assumption that audiences are able to touch upon or hint at queer resistance and criticism of heteronormativity. The participants demonstrated that audiences focus not only on what is represented but also on how it is represented. Very significantly, Dhaenens found that, apart from minor differences, there appeared to be no major differences between the group of gay participants and the group of heterosexual participants, as the participants discussed and agreed or disagreed in similar ways. This would indicate that, in the context at least of television texts that ostensibly do some ‘queering’ of gender and sexuality and disrupt or critique common-sense understandings of the hetero/homo binary, there is much less security around queer readings by gender/sexual minority audience members and normative readings by straight-identifying audience members than articulated by other queer screen scholars (Griffin 2016; Hart 2013) who do not deploy empirical methods to underscore their arguments. 

Finally, McKinnon’s (2016) extensive study of Sydney audiences of films with gender- and sexually-diverse content from the 1950s to the 2000s presents an excellent example of audience research. McKinnon begins by acknowledging that, although it is indisputable that film has played a powerful role in the social changes for sexual minorities over the past century, its significance cannot be apprehended through textual analysis alone but through understanding the ‘place, context and ongoing memories of film viewing’. (2016: 11) He interviewed audience participants about their memories of encountering diversity on-screen, with particular attention to questions around the constructedness of memory and the geographic spaces in which such films were encountered (through cinema-going, home video viewing, etc.). McKinnon argues that it is not the films themselves but the memories of spectatorship that ‘act as sites in the construction of personal narratives’. (2016: 146) Although there is a tendency in McKinnon’s work to assume a non-heteronormative identity is always prior to watching the film, the fact that the articulation of the identity is shaped through the utterance of unstable memory helps push the field of study into a more poststructuralist approach to identity formation, in the context of the encounter with discourse. While there is no suggestion, of course, that a film can ‘make one gay’, the framework through which that identity congeals as an identity is conditioned by the encounter with that discourse. McKinnon’s valuable point here is that the practice of audiencehood, and how it is recalled later, is far more important than how the text makes minorities visible or presents them as good or bad minorities. 

Conclusion

If we are to apprehend such a thing as a field of scholarship focused on the representation of gender and sexual diversity on screen, and if such scholarship plays a role in the construction of the object—representation itself—then giving it a future means pushing at its limitations in order to provide it with an opportunity to reflect back on its analyses of texts, visibilities and assumptions about spectatorship. Griffin (2018) rightly points out that the nascent field is, indeed, marked by a diversity of approaches but that today we might consider the most significant work to be that which pushes at various boundaries. Without valuing empirical audience studies as greater or lesser than the humanities’ textual analyses, it remains that an understanding of audience interpretations, uses and practices in relation to the same screen objects provides the best opportunity for both self-reflection in the field and for continued development beyond its limitations. We have argued in this article that although there is some important emerging work that actively studies audiences, the field of queer film, television and screen studies has tended to be dominated by a genealogy that encourages textual analyses and studies of representation in favour of empirical audience work that introduces new conceptualisations of spectatorship and the diversity of meaning—two areas of further boundary-pushing that will benefit the field by enabling a broader picture of the social role and cultural importance of queer on-screen representation. To make such a claim is not, of course, to suggest that individual instances of extant scholarship are in any way lacking, or that scholars have made incorrect choices on methodology. Rather, it is to envisage the field as a whole in terms of what it is capable of communicating about LGBTQ film and television representation, and its significance to the people who engage with it in diverse ways. Studies of fan fiction about film and television with queer content, as well as fan activity that actively queers ‘straight’ characters, alongside studies of queer practices of gaming and of queer gamers, are potentially instructive and provide a ready-made path for further development of the field. 

In this article we have focused on the attention given by scholars to deciphering meaning and intent in the text, and to concerns around the quality and value of visibility and certain kinds of representations, as well as on both the assumed understandings of audiences and the nascent work that is beginning to test audiences empirically. Our core argument—that empirical, sociological and methodologically-diverse audience research is needed if we are to understand the role and importance of gender- and sexual-diversity in screen entertainment media—is not to suggest that other kinds of research do not have value, but that attention to the broader picture of the work is not yet complete. At the same time, the coherence of a field limited by its dominant methodologies has the concomitant potential to limit the constitution of its objects. Where scholars have been responsible for the labour of making certain texts ‘count’ and others serve as ‘canonical’, looking to how those operating outside academic frameworks to find out how they perceive, apprehend and comprehend texts as ‘queer’, and how they queer other texts, opens the possibility of more fluid framing of the objects. By attending to both the cultural contexts in which creative practices for screen production occur and the practices by which audiences make meanings—and make texts meaningful and meaningfully queer—we can arrive at a stronger framework by which to understand why popular cultural texts are meaningful.

Notes:

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme under Grant DP180103321.