Queer Awakenings
2023
research - queer culture - video
On queer communities on TikTok, people have been sharing their "queer awakening" characters - fictional figures from their childhood that troubled them and created emotions they maybe knew they weren't supposed to feel or couldn't name, often linked to their later realization of their own sexual identities. These TikTok users grew up during the globalization of family-friendly content in the 90s and early 00s, which built for them a collective memory. Given the limited queer representation in mainstream media during that time, young queer people often projected their emerging queerness onto anyone or anything in mainstream media. By analyzing the TikToks and their comments, it becomes evident that some characters had a higher impact than others. My research aims at understanding why certain characters resonated with queer youth. No one interprets a story in the same way, and some characters had more “queer reading” potential than others. But this does not solely come from a one-sided interpretation of the viewer: there are often reasons for a character to connect with queer people. For example, queer coding and queer baiting aim at speaking to a queer public through codes that aren’t recognizable by a straight audience.