Nowadays, to be a queer fan means to be angry. Angry because we are invisible in most cultural products. Angry because we are seeing the same contrite tropes played out on-screen over and over again. Angry because we are the butt of jokes more often than not. Angry because we are being lured to watch with a promise of representation, only to find out that what we were hoping for never was and never will be. Angry because we are made to feel like our lives do not matter, that they are just plot points, jokes, conflicts, crises, and puzzles...

With an increasing number of queer characters on mainstream television and a heightened level of interaction between producers and fans within convergence culture, the interpretive strategies utilized by fans to navigate and identify instances of queerbaiting have become more complex.¹ As fans appropriate queer readings of texts, they also draw on varied paratextual sources such as studio marketing and their past experiences as viewers. It is through this intertextuality that I locate a sense of movement between not only texts and sources but also histories. Within these movements, it is interesting to reflect on the queer temporalities of fan experience...

The first season of Black Sails (2014–2017) is presented as an orgy of death, sex(ual violence), and aggressive masculinity, albeit one entrenched in the politics of power and money. With Michael Bay as executive producer, the show appears to be geared toward a prototypical heterosexual male audience. The only allusions to queerness in the first few episodes are the—arguably male-gazey— lesbian sex scenes between two of the female main characters.¹ Nevertheless, underneath its seemingly straightforward presentation, Black Sails develops a tightly plotted multilayered narrative that has at its core a radical approach to queer romantic relationships that subverts...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (hereafter Cursed Child) opened in London’s West End in May 2016 to overwhelmingly positive critical reviews in the mainstream and trade press.¹ Fan response, however, has been mixed, with some commentators labeling the relationship between the two male protagonists, Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, as characteristic of queerbaiting, a “fan-conceived term” given increasing academic consideration in recent years.² So far, queerbaiting has largely been explored in relation to television, especially in terms of how the tactic is employed in shows such as Merlin (2008–2012), Supernatural (2005–), and Sherlock (2010–2017) in order...

Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) was a US hour-long syndicated action program. Originally developed as a female spin-off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999), Xena quickly became more popular with viewers and continues to be influential in popular culture discussions of representations of women and female heroes. Xena is also well-known for the subtextual and possibly queer relationship between the two lead female characters. Set in ancient Greece, the series follows Xena (portrayed by Lucy Lawless), a formerly evil warrior attempting to atone for her past mistakes, and her friend Gabrielle (portrayed by Renee O’Connor), a young woman who...

The tension between fans and creators within the phenomenon of queerbaiting is often played out as a contest over textual meaning, that is, of whether the queerness fans see is actually there and whether the creators intentionally put it there.¹ However, recent discourse around queerbaiting presents a shift in focus from the evidence of queerness and the intentions of creators to the harmful effects of this perceived act of exploitation and homophobia. A recent example of this debate occurred when the cast of The CW’s Supergirl (2015–) was asked to sing a song that summarized season two of the...

The famous private detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Dr. John Watson, seem to be the perfect duo for a “queerbaiting” strategy. This is not surprising, since the sexual ambiguity between them was already present in the original literary text. Through his choice of words, using double meanings or depictions of situations that suggested same-sex desire, Arthur Conan Doyle created ambiguous texts that were perfectly suited for the literary and club culture of the late Victorian era.¹ Accordingly, the reappearance of the two characters in recent popular culture texts has only prolonged the uncertainty regarding their sexuality. The recent BBC...

While discussion of queerbaiting has often focused on fictional representation in popular culture, this term is also sometimes used in reference to celebrities. Celebrities who are not openly LGBTQ+ but hint at sexual experimentation through language, action, or the use of symbols (such as rainbows) open themselves to allegations of marketing to queer audiences while safely maintaining their status as “straight.”¹ Along these lines, former boy band One Direction has been accused of queerbaiting, with media articles citing examples of “close friendship,” “gropes,” and “mock-kisses” between band members as evidence.² However, simultaneously, many One Direction fans have engaged in “shipping”...

The definition of queerbaiting is constantly evolving as media producers, fans, and academics interact over the reception and creation of queer content in popular media. While queerbaiting has emerged primarily from a discussion of the Western television industry’s practices and media content, this thought piece considers how the concept can be applied to Japanese popular culture. By studying homoeroticism in certain Japanese anime through the lens of queerbaiting, this piece hopes to contribute to its evolving definition.

Queerbaiting is mostly used to refer to media producers’ tendencies to introduce or build up on homoerotic subtext, then dash the hope of...

While the concept of queerbaiting is relatively new to the academic sphere— particularly given that it was not coined as a term defining a conscious act made by cultural producers until the internet era was firmly established—traces of the practice it describes can be seen as early as 1979, when Gene Roddenberry chose to engage with eager female Star Trek (1966–) slash fans. In a footnote in the novelization to Star Trek: The Motion Picture Roddenberry, writing through Kirk’s voice, acknowledges “rumors” shared about a love affair between Kirk and Spock—which Kirk ambiguously denies—before coining the...

A famous comic book superhero came out as gay in 2012. He had been operating since 1940, was a long-standing member of the publisher DC’s roster of costumed adventurers, and had even gotten a feature film bearing his name only a year previously. Even though all noted is true, I argue that this was still a case of queerbaiting, where the publisher teased the queering of a major superhero but only delivered on a fringe representation in a manner particular to the genre trappings of American superhero comics. The newly queered character—who was a version of the character Alan...

While queerbaiting is usually an accusation fans reserve for insinuated but unfulfilled romantic or sexual relationships between same-sex characters in television and film-based texts, with this essay, we show how fans understand queerbaiting in the video game genre with a discussion of Overwatch (2016–), Blizzard Entertainment’s globally popular first-person shooter game. Unlike television or film, games allow fans to embody characters, which, as we show here, results in both similar and different critiques of queerbaiting. In this piece, we analyze fans’ responses to the two-pronged strategy of Blizzard’s long-promised reveal of an explicitly queer character, Tracer, and the addition...

With audiences surpassing the NFL’s Super Bowl, the Eurovision Song Contest is not only the largest annual television event but also its queerest. Some have labeled the contest the gay FIFA World Cup or Olympics.¹ Although it is not a gay event per se, Eurovision has become over the years a de facto celebration of queerness. Most queerbaiting scholarship focuses on drama series, but queerbaiting functions differently in nonnarrative event television like Eurovision.² At Eurovision, there are no characters or storylines as such. Even so, producers and performers are able to suggest queer content and meaning in a variety of...