ratherembarrassing:

delphcormier:

ratherembarrassing:

IT’S NOT QUEERBAITING IF THEY’RE ACTUALLY QUEER

WRONG. It can still be seen as queerbaiting the audience if the character or ship in question only exists as a token, and then is ultimately erased from the story for shock value in a way that suggests expressing who they are has consequences. Ever heard of Clexa?

thank you for allowing me this opportunity to expand on my point at length, because i’m not wrong.

fandom has existed for a very long time. it is its own culture, with its own customs and behaviours and language. this last one, language, is the key issue i want to focus on here, because fandom has its own language, just like any other culture. and that means that, just like all other cultures, language shifts, evolves, and outright changes.

what that doesn’t mean is that, without intention, terms WITH AN ESTABLISHED MEANING are used to mean something completely different. shifts in meaning occur for a lot of reasons, but there IS A REASON. that reason might be humour, it might be ignorance, it might be education, it might be that the concept a word encompasses expands.

“queerbaiting” didn’t originate in fandom. the word was first used to describe members of the police force “baiting” gay men into revealing themselves as queer by indicating they were available for sexual activity, only to arrest the men once they had indicated they were interested. this is a pretty specific scenario that has obvious connection to the components of the word itself.

fandom had adopted this term by at least the late 90s as a pretty direct transposition of the entire scenario being described. in the place of police we have media creators, but the idea was still the same: engaging in conduct meant to lead queer people to believe the media was queer.

the issue of what conduct constitutes queerbaiting is heavily debated, but the end point remains the same: the media was only meant to make viewers THINK it was queer, without ever making it explicit.

now. when you are talking about doing something to make queer (or queer-interested) people watch your media, queerbaiting as described above obviously falls within that “something” category. but so does having actual queer characters. and if we start using the term queerbaiting to encompass the entire concept of attracting queer (-interested) viewers, you lose all nuance as to the ways in which people tend to fuck us over.

what’s happening with queer women on television at the moment is fucking atrocious, and it deserves to be loudly decried as publicly as possible. but when i level accusations of fucking me over at shows like rizzoli and isles or once upon a time, i absolutely do not want to conflate that with shows murdering their queer characters. because that is way fucking worse, to be honest, and it should explicitly be called out as such. adopting the term queerbaiting here not only has the effect of diminishing the harm done by those who engage in it as defined above, but it muddies the actual issue of concern. it doesn’t matter that they made us watch, it matters that they keep murdering us, whether we’re watching or not.