Conference News

clexafandocumentary:

Hi all! Just wanted to let you know that my paper on Clexa fans has been accepted for the Screen Studies Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference at Monash University! I’ll be going down to Melbourne in November to talk queer female fandom, queer time and all things Clexa 🙌🏽

The conference theme is ‘The Uses of Cinema’ and I will be discussing the ways in which Lexa’s death provides insight into contemporary queer fan experience. My abstract can be found below:

‘Feeling Backward’: Temporality and Queer Female Fandom

After the death of a popular lesbian character on the television series, The 100 (2014–), Twitter user Heather Hogan commented, ‘Straight TV writers will never understand how they can inflict time-traveling wounds that hurt us as scared gay children all over again’ (2016). Against the backdrop of the extension of marriage and adoption rights to gays and lesbians, this television death acts as a locus around which to explore the political and social dimensions of queer audience experience. Focusing on the fans of the same-sex couple, Clarke and Lexa (the “Clexa fans”) my research explores the temporality of fan experience and these “time-traveling wounds”. Drawing on queer theory, I aim to explore the ways in which Clexa fans experience a sense of temporal dislocation and inhabit queer time—a lingering in the past, a sense of delay in the present, and a yearning for a queer futurity. I propose to merge abstractions of queer theory with television studies and the ethnographic focus of fan scholarship through interviews with fans, which I will also explore within a documentary film. As a recent media event, this queer character death affords an opportunity to analyse the contemporary political, social and affective dimensions of time within queer fan experience.

References:

The 100, 2014-present, television program, CW, Burbank.

Hogan, H. 2016, ‘Straight TV writers will never understand how they can inflict time-traveling wounds that hurt us as scared gay children all over again’, Twitter post, 4 March, viewed 5 March 2016 <https://twitter.com/theheatherhogan/status/705814487786512384&gt;