Transing the small screen: loving and hating transgender youth in Glee and Degrassi

Abstract

The teen television shows Glee (2009-) and Degrassi (2001-) are notable for diversity in gender and sexuality representations. Glee represents a variety of masculine women and feminine men as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters. Likewise, Canada's Degrassi franchise has portrayed non-heterosexual characters in significant and controversial ways. Its most recent incarnation, Degrassi (previously Degrassi: The Next Generation) is discussed in this article, alongside Glee, in relation to their recent inclusions of two transgender-identified teenagers bringing transgenderism to the fore of these programmes' discussions of gender and identity. As trans youth are highly vulnerable due to both systemic ageism and cisgenderism, it is not surprising that both detail narratives of discrimination and assault driven by bigotry and ignorance. Conversely, they also explore more positive aspects of the lives of young people, such as friendship and romance (even as these cause their own problems at times), also enjoyed by trans youth. As such, the themes of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ manifest in interesting ways in both of these televisual texts and guide this article's analysis. While challenging assumptions that trans lives are governed by negative emotional states, these representations continue to reify stereotypes, not only of transness, but also of boyhood, girlhood, race and their intersections. Both representations are grounded in material and emotional journeys (or movements) and the concept of the ‘moving body’ (Keegan, 2013) partly informs these readings. The privileging of certain modes of trans personhood and embodiment over less normative (unseen, unacknowledged, and thus invisible) ones is at stake in these representations, but they also lay the groundwork for diverse future depictions. By addressing this gap in research, this article elucidates how gender (diversity) is being constructed for consumption on adolescent television and its potential for (re)thinking trans/gender, identity, and embodiment for young people in contemporary Western societies.

Keywords::

• transgender youth
• adolescent television
• discrimination
• relationships
• Glee
• Degrassi

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ann Vickery, Dylan Holdsworth and Kristine Moruzi for kindly providing feedback to this article at differing stages, to Deakin University for all its support, and especially to the two anonymous reviewers whose insight and encouragement helped me overcome a number of obstacles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. This article's definition of ‘transgender’ follows from its popularisation in the 1990s as a catchall term for any and all identities or practices that transgress gender norms (Stryker, 2006, p. 4). Bettcher (2014) explains that it ‘is often used to refer to people who “do not conform to prevailing expectations about gender” by presenting and living genders that were not assigned to them at birth or by presenting and living genders in ways that may not be readily intelligible in terms of more traditional conceptions of gender’ (Terminology section, para. 1)

^2. In The Simpsons, Judge Harm is revealed to be a trans woman (Meyer, Scully, & Kirkland, 2001) educator Brunella Pomelhorst takes a leave of absence for gender reassignment (Price & Anderson, 2006) and Homer's cousin is revealed to have changed genders (Martin & Kirkland, 1992). In an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina and her aunts use magic to become men (Bakay & Baldwin, 1997). The children's cartoon SheZow is about a boy, Guy Hamdon, who assumes the superheroine role of SheZow, dressing in hyper-feminine attire.

^3. Kurt is described as looking ‘like an eleven-year-old milkmaid’ (Brennan & Scott, 2009).

^4. See Enke (2012) for a thought provoking discussion and criticism of the neologism cisgender.

^5. When living as a woman, Coach Beiste was often compared to butch men such as John Goodman and Michael Chiklis, as a joke by Coach Sue Sylvester.

^6. Finn Hudson tells Kurt that he does not understand ‘no means no’ (Brennan & Stoltz, 2010); Sandy is fired for touching a male student (Murphy, Falchuck, & Brennan, 2009).

^7. Sue drugs and blackmails Principal Figgins with photographs of them in bed together (Brennan & Falchuck, 2010); Beiste expresses a desire to intimidate Sue by ‘go[ing] all Deliverance [1972] on her’ (Falchuck & Stoltz, 2011) with allusions to sexual assault.

^8. There are documentaries such as the 2007 film Red Without Blue about male-assigned young adult twins, one who is a trans woman; and the 2005 8-part miniseries TransGeneration about four transgender college students. There are also trans child representations in the 1997 film Ma Vie En Rose and the 2011 film Tomboy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Sandercock

Tom Sandercock is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia). His doctoral research centres on the analysis of transgenderism and gender diversity in literature and screen texts for young people. He has been published in the feminist cultural studies journal Outskirts: feminisms along the edge.