Research Seminar: Zoë Shacklock (Film Studies) “The Category Is: Streaming Queer Television”

Streaming television is often seen as a progressive space for queer representation, due to the wealth of queer people and stories found across its programmes. Yet for queer people to be seen on streaming television, they must first be made visible at the level of the interface, which determines which programmes are presented to users and in what ways. This paper argues that streaming television acts as a discursive formation that constructs knowledge about what it means to be queer, and what recognisable queerness looks like. If queerness is interested in disruption, destabilisation, and mutability, streaming interfaces, conversely, rely on predictability and categorisation. I explore how the two key features of streaming television’s interfaces – categories and algorithms – construct an understanding of queerness as normatively visible and inseparable from consumer choice. To borrow from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lynne Joyrich, I argue that streaming media constructs an epistemology of the category, in which queer life must be predictably categorised in order to be visible.