SPOILER ALERT: Is anyone else a little concerned about the queerness in The Following? Im really only a handful of episodes in, and at first I was thrilled by the twists and seemingly reasonable, down-to-earth, not-sensational handling of queer behavior in the overall context of the show... but then, I was like... hmm the people who are behaving queerly are part of the killer cult while the hero is *still* a white cis hetero male, and the crux of the conflict is that hero and anti-hero are both in love with the same object, I mean woman. Is this stemming from pulp tradition and hiding behind the uber contemporary trend toward ultra-grotesque with queers a la American Horror Story etc? Both? Maybe they dont know theyre doing this? I have no idea if the writers are straight men, but it seems that when they are, they try to incorporate queerness as if its anything else thats neutral, and still end up repeating historical tropes, i.e. gay sociopath/killer. I noticed that The Following also treats race this way, with Kevin Bacons boss being a large black man, the cultleaders lawyer a black woman. I do not believe that is from blind casting, but are intentional choices, and the conversation of power dynamics, while extremely present, is simply being ignored and literally white-washed. Am I off the mark? I mean, maybe the writers are a bunch of punk queer POC, but I really doubt that. Especially since all of the targeted victims are women (even for the female cult members).
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 16:27:34 +0000
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