Lancaster University

Graduate Student, Sociology

Thesis Title: In/Visible Lesbians: Figurations of the TV Femme and the Queer Possibilities of Fandom

About

My research is concerned with the figuration of contemporary lesbianism on television. In particular, I am interested in the ‘mainstreaming’ of the figure of the femme, or the femme/femme couple, within contemporary televisual texts. Such couples constitute part of what we might term a new queer visibility within popular culture. In analysing these figures, my research considers the specificities of this visibility: the particular accounts of lesbian subjectivity mobilised by this visibility, the social context and the discursive workings of these accounts. In doing so it is concerned with the discursive negotiations of visibility itself, and the constitution and struggle over productive norms of lesbian subjectivity. My research is thus further interested in what such visibility simultaneously makes invisible, and the discursive constitution of norms and boundaries around lesbian subjectivity within such visibility.

I am currently focusing on the case studies of three contemporary examples of femme/femme (or fem/inine) televisual figures – Emily and Naomi (Skins), Brittany and Santana (Glee) and Sophie and Sian (Coronation Street). In following these figurations of femme subjectivity, I am interested in them as both materially embodied and semiotically constitutive. Considering these figures in their specific contexts, and as existing at various stratifications of gender, sexuality, class, race and so on, my research attempts to unpick the discursive formations and possibilities of lesbian subjectivity mobilised by such representation. Thus I posit that the visibility of these femme figures brings into being certain possibilities, meanings and identifications, as well as questioning their production of new boundaries, norms and abjections. In doing so I seeks moments of what we might term queer disruption, as well as the complex negotiations of appropriation and commodification with which such representations might also engage. In order to conceive of these negotiations and understand them within their representational context, I am also interested in the history of femme representation on television, and butch/femme as part of wider social and political history. Thus I am interested in the wider context of lesbian representation, as well as the particular constitutions of these new femme figures.

In light of this shift towards lesbian visibility, I am also interested in the ways in which fans engage and interact with these figures. Specifically, in the ways in which new technologies of spectatorship shift the ways in which these representations are experienced, and create particular possibilities for struggle over these figures and their meanings. I am therefore interested in considering the extension of TV production and spectatorship into online spaces, and thus more fundamentally from a passive act of consumption to a more dynamic process of production and creation; or rather, in the discursive negotiations of fandom. Considering materials such as television programmes themselves, the surrounding media, fan produced fiction and online fan spaces, my research asks what becomes of these figures in the hands of fans, how these spaces create forums for negotiating, reproducing and appropriating the processes of figuration, and the possibilities this holds for the mobilisation of lesbian subjectivity. Developing the notion of ‘queering’, I thus ask how fans might further queer the representative frameworks of lesbian sexuality they have available to them through the processes of fandom, and how the struggle over these figures plays out in such spaces.

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