Representing queerness: modes, manners and methods

Emerging from the Queer Representation: Pasts, Presents and Futures conference that the guest editors organized in 2021 with the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the works in this issue theorize multiple ways queerness can be and has been represented on-screen, in print and online in recent years. In this introduction, the editors consider the myriad contexts at play in the construction of ‘queer’ and how ideas about queer temporality, spatiality, kinship and embodiment are surfacing in media across the world. Where each contributor to this Special Issue looks closely at specific examples of non-normative lives, gender non-conforming people and/or same-gender desires being depicted in media texts, the editors use this introduction to highlight the overlapping understandings of queer representation that these articles and reviews, as a collection, are proposing. Whether arising from narratives which subvert expectations of coming out as the sole way of legitimizing queerness, works which utilize colour and movement to signify queer potentiality or through queer performances which undercut established ways of being in the world, the authors and reviewers each posit a version of queerness, in this issue, that is capacious, expansive and plural. Together, as the editors explain in this introduction, their works probe what queer visibility means at a time when neither the presence of LGBTQIA+ stories on our screens nor the unending tide of worldwide anti-queer policies seem to be abating.