“Feeling Backward”: Temporality and Queer Female Fandom
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
Embargoed
| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01front.pdf | contents and abstract | 395.25 kB | |||
| 02whole.pdf | thesis | 2.1 MB |
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After killing off their popular lesbian character, Lexa, creators of the television series, The 100 (Morgenstein & Rothenberg, 2014-2020), were accused of participating in the long history of queer female death onscreen through the “Bury Your Gays” trope. Through a written thesis and original documentary, this research focuses on the queer female fans of the series’ same-sex couple, Clarke and Lexa (the “Clexa” fans) and explores the temporal dimensions of this dark screen history. Drawing on queer theory, I examine the multitemporal experiences of Clexa fans and how they inhabit queer time: how they deviate from heteronormative life timelines and experience a sense of delay in the present; how they exhibit an anachronistic turn backward to linger in the history of queer injury; and how their digital archive practices express the contradictions and ambivalences of non-linear time. I argue that these experiences of temporal dislocation uncover the seemingly innate and pervasive nature of (hetero)normative time and how it persists in our liberatory present. The fans’ experiences of delay problematise dominant conceptions of adulthood focused on marriage and reproduction, giving rise to alternative forms of queer adulthood. The way Lexa’s death caused fans to relive past experiences with homophobia demonstrates a queer melancholic turn to the past, drawing out similarities across time and highlighting how the oppression of the past persists in the present. The online documentary I produced, Queer Interruptions (www.queerinterruptions.com), features these experiences of asynchrony and anachronism, grounding these abstractions in the lived experiences of Clexa fans. The website features non-linear navigation to allow for nuanced and personalised engagement with the research while also functioning as a digital archive—a repository of queer feelings. The work embraces the paradoxical temporalities of digital archives—where technological obsolescence and archival longevity are at odds—and demonstrates how queer temporalities take material form in complex and contradictory ways.
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