How the Media Hijacked Queer Bodies

By Charlie Tetiyevsky

It used to be I didn’t think that there was any way I should look, but now there are expectations.

Now that we’ve started to be presented with mainstream images of queer bodies we have to negotiate an intrusion upon what was previously, to me at least, a contentedly isolationist Otherness. I knew I was queer before I knew what “queer” really was or looked like—maybe even more when I simply existed in my own queerness than after I saw the corporate version emerge.

There was lots of googling, like: “what is a queer body” and “am I genderqueer” and “can I be non-binary if I have tits” and “do I need to change my pronouns” as if the internet would tell me something I didn’t already know, which is that I was stubborn and not about to change fuckall for anyone but myself.

Whenever we’re talking about queer grrrls in the mainstream media, though, it’s the same old shit in a different package: tall and chiseled with a strong, androgynous jaw and those pretty, delicate eyes. That neotenized, catamite-with-a-cunt look. Not hairy, not chubby; tinged with masculinity but typically fuckable. You can’t avoid how ubiquitously attractive the image is: some days I’d give my left tit, or both, I guess, to look like Rain Dove or Jenny Shimizu or Elliott Sailors.

Once a group is visualised in a context meant to make money (advertising or film/television), it’s that very specific and isolated image of that group that becomes commodified and therefore normalised. I am as thankful for Shane McCutcheon as any queer girl, both because she signaled the entry of the queer-lookin’ into mainstream-ish TV and because she’s hot (haay). But in the years since The L Word, what other aspirational visuals of queerness have really emerged? There are all of these androgynous babes (now featuring undercuts!) on billboards in underpants, but when does the presentation of only a single, Ruby Rose-style queerness become not enough? Is it okay to demand a wider spread of images be presented instead of this one trope over and over?

It’s not a matter of being conventionally attractive or not, but rather of projecting this one specific vision of queer womanhood and putting those physical expectations into the minds of young queer kids who are already dealing with enough.

There’s nothing I can do about the images we are shown, but in the same way that an understanding of body diversity has started to pervade the hetero world so too does it need to be applied within a discussion of queer bodies. There’s already so much dysphoria as it is without also having to waste time wading through the baggage inflicted on us by corporatised queerness. If we can just cut down on even one set of expectations we place on our bodies, maybe things can get a bit easier.

So hear me when I tell you, if no one’s told you before, what I wish I’d heard years ago: that your body is a queer body no matter what it looks like. What you do with it is your decision, how you feel about it is no one’s choice to make but yours. But just know that you don’t need to do or be anything, wrap or stuff anything, use this pronoun or that or neither, wear makeup or avoid it, to be the queer you that you are. Your queerness doesn’t depend on who you date or fuck or if you have kids or don’t or if you do this or that or anything about you.

If you’re feeling cornered by your identity, take solace at least in the fact that the feelings you feel and choices you make about how you look do not contradict or contravene your queerness—and from there do what you will, fearlessly.