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Things I am not posting about this week:

1. Brexit
2. Guardian fandom, slash as an abstract concept, and the difference between queercoding, queerbaiting, representation and tokenism, and how that has played out across media and cultures in the last twenty-five years
3. The difficulty inherent in switching constantly between Guardian liveblogs and Guardian episode recaps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4. How it looks like I'm going to end up having to dig out my old Mike Gravel for President merch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
5. The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing and why it gets my goat when people erase the difference
6. My current project, inspired by the search tips post, of going through my entire 600 pages of logged-in AO3 history to bookmark and tag stuff I want to hang on to

I am not writing posts about them, but feel free to ask me anyway, the rants are on tap.

I did, however, post to

fictional_fans about what types of fanfic are good for readers who don't know the canon, so you should go there to talk about that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I mean, I am definitely not the most advanced queer/fandom theorist in my circles! But I think of queercoding as, basically "it's the love that dare not speak its name, but we're willing to speak pretty much everything else"; and queerbaiting as "You dare me to say it, huh! Well I did so there! (no homo)".

I think they both can be called fanservice, and they can definitely shade into each other, and the same show can be queerbaity in some lenses and queercoded in others (and 'you people are imagining things' in yet others.) (I think it's also possible for things to be queercoded without the creators' realizing, if they put in things from RL that they aren't aware enough of queer culture to understand, although once you get to TV shows there's usually enough people involved that *somebody* knows what they're doing.)

Looking at your list of fandoms that I actually know things about, I think due South was pretty queer-coded. There was a lot of hinting around and putting in Easter Eggs for the fans, and it wasn't hastily papered-over with onscreen protestations and obligatory heterosexuality like queerbaiting usually is, and it feels like the creators are reaching out in fellowship to the queer and slash fans, not trying to exploit them without committing.

I think a lot of the 'classic'/pre-WWW slash fandoms had a fair amount of queercoding, more-or-less. And it's something I've noticed in more recent fandom, that there don't really seem to be as many fandoms like that anymore. And I think it's because in Western media, you can't really nudge-nudge-wink-wink about homosexuality right now: it's way too much a part of the centered public discourse, but also a really fucked-up part of the media landscape, so if you try to queercode these days, people - and not just fans - will immediately start loudly talking about how gay it is, and then the entire production team have to either commit to gayness, or walk it back and deny how gay it is in order to avoid scaring the execs and have nobody talking about anything else. So we get canon gay (often tokenizing) or queerbaiting, but very little of that liminal space of possibility where slash used to live.

And in a way that's good! It's not the love that dare not speak its name anymore. People who want to make stories about queer relationships don't have to code it anymore! If we're lucky there's even good representation! But it's still fucked up in a lot of other ways. And it means it's really tough to get that kind of slow-burn build in relationships that fandom likes so much for both slash and het, because canon creators feel this pressure to either make it explicit, to cash their diversity tokens, or go the queerbaity route where they try to play to both the slash fans and the homophobes at the same time. You can't slide the queercoding under the radar at all. And that liminal space - that let fans take the space canon was offering, and turn it into the kind of queer representation that they, specifically, wanted - is much smaller.

I think you still see it work sometimes in movies - this is where the Marvel Movies are remaining so beloved of slash fandom for so long, I think, because they can sneak the queercoding (see: Sam Wilson is absolutely the romantic lead) into individual installments and not be forced to walk it back until the next movie, which doesn't work for something like a TV series. (I think there's also queercoding in kids' cartoons still - Steven Universe is most definitely queercoded - but as it becomes more acceptable to have actual representation in them, there's less queercoding.)

And then you get Guardian, which comes out of an entirely different cultural context - and it's a context in which 'make the gay explicit' is not an option, it has the kind of utter necessity for speaking only in code that was in, say, some of the really queer Hays-code-era American movies. But it's also from a culture that doesn't have quite the same relationship between anti-queerness and toxic masculinity that the US has, the relationship that makes a lot of large media corporations still shy away from going full queer. And alos (from what I understand, anyway) the current Chinese censorship has a lot less cultural grounding than stuff like the Hays code did. So Guardian can have exactly zero shame about making the queercoding as obnoxiously obvious as they can within the letter of the law. (tbf, some of the Hayes code movies got pretty obvious too, cf: Some Like It Hot.)

So anyway, at least for someone like me personally, who associates slashiness in canon pretty directly with queercoding, Guardian feels like it's just spewing the slash out of a firehose. :d

*nodnodnodnodnod* I've had various versions of this conversation over lunch with the same fellow fan many times. ("Why aren't there any new slashy TV shows? Oh, that's why!") It's really interesting seeing your take on it -- thanks!

And it's something I've noticed in more recent fandom, that there don't really seem to be as many fandoms like that anymore. And I think it's because in Western media, you can't really nudge-nudge-wink-wink about homosexuality right now

I think this is why I've had so many OT3s in the last 10 years -- because you can still nudge-nudge-wink-wink (or even lean into a queercoded relationship) if one of the people has a different-sex partner, because assumed monogamy and bi invisibility are still alive and well. So with White Collar, it was incredibly slashy and could be because of Elizabeth, and a lot of Kdramas have "they all love each other, but only these two are officially getting together" kind of love triangles. And while acknowledging the fucked-uppedness of assumed monogamy and bi invisibility, I'm very happy in that space.

And also in the firehose (LOL!) that is Guardian. :-D

Honestly, I think a significant part of why I like that coded liminal space so much is because (as we established on this journal previously) I hate all canon ships, so I want ships that are safe from ever being ruined by canon :P But yes! Poly coding is definitely something I'm seeing in mainstream media these days (and has been around since those Hays code movies too, cf Singin' In The Rain.) It's interesting the way it interacts with the portrayal of deniable queerness, too - if you have well-developed canon het right there, it seems like it's a lot easier to get away with old-fashioned queercoding. You don't have to have Eliot and Alec loudly deny any possible gayness, because you can just point to Parker in the middle and get away with letting the homophobes pretend canon m/f means they can't possibly be into each other while making it perfectly clear that they are.

It actually reminds me a lot of the 'conduitfic' meta I was seeing in slash fandom fifteen/twenty years ago, talking about how slashers would use a female character as a 'conduit' to let the male characters have sexual interaction without directly confronting homosexuality - I feel like we're seeing that more and more in queercoded canons now, as slash has mostly stopped bothering.

...of course that does in large part rely on bi invisibility in mainstream media to get away with it, sigh.

Oh, that makes sense. I would consider Xena pretty queercoded. And the ending of Some Like It Hot is pretty on the nose. I guess queerbaiting to me felt like Lexa getting killed RIGHT AFTER she and Clarke finally had sex, although I still get JUST SO ANGRY when I think about it I might not be clearheaded. But the actress apparently had to/wanted to leave the show (I think she went to the Walking Dead prequel?), they wanted to yank heartstrings, so they killed her off. But IDK if that counts as baiting, since they did actually have a love scene.

Xena is definitely one of the prime examples of queercoding in fandom canons, yeah!

Once you get into openly canonically queer characters I think you get off the queerbait vs. queercode question and run into a whole different gamut of issues, 'killing your queers' being the most obviously visible, but there's also another whole spectrum between bad tokenism and actual good representation.

there's also another whole spectrum between bad tokenism and actual good representation

YES, definitely.