This edited collection will draw attention to how the mainstreamification of queer identities has crafted a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences.
Queer critics and queer theory as a whole tend to frame queer identities as marginal (Sedgwick, 1990; Halberstam, 2011), and these landmark scholars have cemented a foundational understanding of queerness that is now at odds with current shifts in media production. The chapters here will present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual genres and shows in an effort to reconsider the marginalisation of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges pre-existing notions that such mainstreamification necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. Therefore, the project argues the converse: that heteronormative assumptions are outdated, and new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
