1. Are We Out of the Woods Yet?: Connor Walsh and the Politics of Gay Visibility on U.S.
Mainstream Television
Jeffrey Ingold
201413110
Candidate Number: 75705
Professor Sadie Wearing
GI 403
January 15, 2015

2. INGOLD 1
Shortly after ABC aired the fourth episode of its new popular drama series, How to
Get Away With Murder (HTGAWM), Vanity Fair published an article online entitled: “Is
How to Get Away With Murder the Most Progressive Show on Television?”1 This article
represents a broader media narrative that has lauded ABC’s commitment to diversity with its
primetime shows, such as Black-Ish, Scandal, and Grey’s Anatomy.2 However, what has
differentiated HTGAWM is that the praise the show has received extends beyond its inclusion
of racialized minorities in leading roles to its secondary character, Connor Walsh. The Vanity
Fair author argues that HTGAWM is groundbreaking because it portrays Connor as a gay
character on mainstream television that “is allowed to have sex. Rather graphically, given the
context.”3 The media attention surrounding the show’s gay sex scenes provides an impetus
for assessing how Connor directly opposes prevailing U.S. televisual representations of a
“de-sexed [and] de-eroticized” gay masculinity.4 This paper will argue that a critical analysis
of Connor Walsh’s potentially subversive representation of a hypersexual gay masculinity
exposes how homonormative U.S. discourses reproduce particular gay subjects as invisible.
This analysis will engage with the work of Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault to explore how
discursive formations of homonormativity circulate to produce and regulate knowledge about
gay masculinities. Before it is possible to deconstruct the significations of Connor’s
representation of gay masculinity, it is necessary to first historicize him within the
contemporary discursive formations of gay men on U.S. primetime television. Following this,
the paper will critically engage with how Connor’s queer performance remains subjugated by
homonormative discourses. Building on this analysis, the paper will then utilize the concept
of “disidentifications” to raise complex questions about Connor’s subversive potential and
investments. Lastly, this paper will investigate how the visibility of Connor’s sexualized gay
masculinity is grounded in white homonormative discourses that silence heterogeneous
representations of racialized gay masculinities.

3. INGOLD 2
Connor Walsh: The Arresting Image of Gay Sex on Primetime Television
HTGAWM follows criminal defense attorney and law professor, Annalise Keating,
who selects the five most promising first-year law students in her class to work for her. In the
pilot, the audience is introduced to Connor as the show’s “sexy, sly heartbreaker,” who
seduces gay IT technician, Oliver, at a bar in a successful effort to elicit illegal information
that helps Annalise win her case, and earns him a position at the firm.5 Not only is Connor
established as a manipulative and sexually predatory character, but the show also depicts
Connor and Oliver engaging in sex. After the pilot aired, various media outlets called on the
show’s creator, Peter Nowalk, to defend the inclusion of this purportedly graphic scene.
Nowalk responded by stating that it was important to write “some real gay sex into a network
show to right the wrongs of all the straight sex that you see on TV.”6 Nowalk is calling
attention to how the structuring of primetime television around the notion of ‘family values’
has been employed to justify the prohibition of nonnormative representations of sexuality.7
Despite the proliferation of gay characters on mainstream U.S. television over the past two
decades, what makes the image of Connor and Oliver so striking is that it challenges
homonormative representations of gay men. Lisa Duggan defines homonormativity as “a
politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but
upholds them and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay
constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and
consumption.”8 Thus, homonormativity provides a salient framework for understanding the
historical and contemporary production of hegemonic representations of desexualized gay
men that signifies Connor as a destabilizing figuration.
Importantly, it is not within the scope of this paper to map out the historical trajectory
of gay characters on U.S. television. Instead, this paper will offer the reader a precise account
of how homonormative representations of gay masculinity function to perpetuate cultural

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taboos of gay sexual desire as positioned outside Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle.”9 It is here
that Foucault’s work in The Incitement to Discourse must be utilized to recognize how
homonormative discourses circulate through the regulation and policing of the visibility of
same-sex intimacy in televisual representations of gay men. 10 The archetypal example of
homonormative gay masculinity in U.S. television is that of Will Truman from Will & Grace.
The scholarship on Will has demonstrated how by being defined against the show’s
flamboyant gay character (Jack McFarland), Will was interpellated by audiences as carving
out an asexual, masculine gay image that in no way challenged heteronormative ideals.11 This
controlling image of the respectable gay men as lacking same-sex desire remains deeply
embedded in contemporary discursive formations of gay masculinities on primetime
television, such as the absence of sexual intimacy between Cameron and Mitchell on Modern
Family. Therefore, cultural meanings attach to being a gay man have been associated with the
creation of the ‘normal’ gay who is “expected to be gender conventional, link sex to love and
a marriage-like relationship, defend family values, personify economic individualism, and
display national pride.”12
In an effort to avoid essentializing representations of gay men on television, it is
worth briefly noting cable television’s contestations to mainstream stereotypes of
desexualized gay men. As subscriber television is not restricted by the same commercial and
legislative considerations that major networks are, cable television series have often pushed
the boundaries on portrayals of same-sex intimacy.13 Of particular interest is the program
Queer as Folk, whose “candid and joyful images of sex and lust were a defiant challenge to a
representational regime in which homosexual pleasures are either completely ignored or
associated to disease, contagion, and death.”14 It is important to juxtapose mainstream and
cable television portrayals to better capture the meanings and controversy Connor’s
performance has evoked.

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It is this history of representations of gay men on mainstream television that serves to
contextualize the media response to Connor and Oliver’s sex scene as mediated and
“influenced by social, cultural and ideological contexts.”15 More specifically, the significance
of Connor as a seemingly progressive depiction of gay men on primetime television is
intertextually produced through his similarity to the lustful gay men on Queer as Folk and his
difference from traditional homonormative televisual representations.16 Beyond historicizing
Connor within homonormative discourses that have regulated sexuality, it is necessary to
investigate how his narrative is played out in HTGAWM.
Connor Walsh and HTGAWM: Trying to be Queer in a Homonormative World
This paper’s analysis of Connor’s narrative in HTGAWM is informed by Stuart Hall’s
notion that popular culture is a site where hegemonic culture is simultaneously reinforced and
resisted, in a manner that leaves open the possibility of queer interpretations of gay
characters.17 It is this possibility for queer interpretations that encourages a critical reading of
how Connor transgresses traditional norms of gay masculinity on television. Therefore,
meaning does not inhere in Connor, rather meaning is produced in an active and unstable
process of interpretation. 18 The purpose of this critical reading is to first establish how
Connor disavows two familiar tropes of gay representation by operating analogously to that
of the femme fatale. The second dimension of this analysis will employ Judith Butler’s work
to demonstrate that Connor’s attempt to resignify normative representations of gay
masculinity is challenged by how he is interpellated by other characters that rearticulate
homonormative discourses.19
The classic femme fatale archetype is portrayed as a transgressive character who
operates outside conventional norms and their independence, ambition and sexuality threaten
hegemonic social structures.20 In a similar manner, throughout the show Connor is depicted
as capitalizing on his good looks to manipulate and seduce numerous men for both his own

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pleasure and to have an advantage over his classmates. As a threat to homonormative
masculine portrayals (and by extention, heterosexual masculinity), Connor’s performance as
a queer femme fatale “expose[s], unsettle[s] and/or subvert[s] the ubiquitous institutions and
practices of heteronormativity.” 21 A primary example of this is when pressed by his
classmates about his ongoing relationship with Oliver, Connor responds by saying: “I don’t
do boyfriends.” 22 Connor’s expressed aversion to monogamy defies contemporary
constructions of gay domesticity. Representations in popular culture of the ‘normal’ gay
couple or the gay man searching for love (but not sex) are reiterations of discursive practices
that validate the appropriation of heterosexual norms and values (e.g., monogamy and
exclusivity).23 Furthermore, by asserting his right to be sexually liberated, Connor’s behavior
can be read as subverting the trope of the gay man as a victim.
The victimization trope corresponds to portrayals of gay characters, such as Kurt
Hummel on Glee, who denounces nonnormative expressions of sexuality to reduce the risk of
harassment in a homophobic society.24 Rather than adopting the identity of a homonormative
subject, Connor’s non-conforming behavior is characterized by his unfettered access to
spaces assumed to be homophobic. When Connor flirts with Oliver at a straight bar, Connor
suggests that Oliver’s work colleagues want a show and Oliver just has to “say the word and
we can start making out.” 25 Thus, Connor deconstructs heteronormative spatialities
traditionally marked as spaces of homophobic oppression through explicitly expressing his
same-sex desires.26 Connor’s voyeuristic exhibition of sexuality in such spaces questions the
privilege of embodying an assimilationist homonormative gay masculinity. An important
qualification to raise is that Connor’s sexual freedom presents him as living in a “‘post-gay’
rights environment in which publicly acknowledging one’s homosexuality carries no social
consequences and denies that this marking matters in the lives of gays and lesbians.”27 The
problematic dimensions of this fantasy environment will be touched on later, in relation to the

7. INGOLD 6
homophobic terror surrounding racialised sexualities. Now, just as the femme fatale’s
masculine behavior threatens social norms, Connor’s dissident behavior deviates from
discursive formations of gay masculinity that reify patriarchal norms. Thus, Connor’s
performance as a queer femme fatale is grounded in his repudiation of social constructions of
the respectable gay man as either domesticated or a victim of homophobia.
Much like how the femme fatale is punished for being a threatening figure, Connor’s
peers stigmatize him for his attempts to queer and resignify meanings of gay masculinity.
Connor’s ability to access a privileged world of information through seducing gay men leads
his jealous heterosexual classmates to interpellate him as bad and immoral. 28 Connor’s
behavior of trading sex for evidence is positioned as violating normative expectations of the
appropriate behavior and place of gay men. Here it is useful to employ the concept of
governmentality to clarify how his classmates engage in processes of attempting to police and
manage Connor’s conduct to push him to align with homonormative ideals.29 In addressing
Connor’s promiscuity, his classmates shame him for “getting naked with so many boys you
can’t even remember their names.” 30 Thus, Connor’s classmates mobilize and endorse
homonormative discourses of the respectable and moral gay man as monogamous to mark
him as outside of the norm. The insidious implication is that homonormative discourses
function to splinter queer culture by vilifying the negative segments and commending the
positive.31
This fragmentation is personified in HTGAWM through Connor’s positioning vis-à-
vis Oliver. The pair engage in an ongoing sexual relationship, where Oliver pathologizes
Connor’s behavior as that of a “sex addict” who does not want to “do what actual couples
do.”32 Oliver’s desire for a ‘normal’ relationship renders him symbolic of the homonormative
discourses of gay masculinity that Connor is resisting. Furthermore, Diane Negra’s work on
Cher’s transgressive body is applicable here to demonstrate how the filtering of Connor’s

8. INGOLD 7
unruly sexual appetite through a discourse of ‘sex addiction’ sustains the bond between the
respectable, desexualized gay man and homonormativity.33 These negative interpellations of
Connor’s embodied performance of a hypersexualized gay masculinity are indicative of how
the production of gay subjectivities is entangled in unequal relations of power. Connor
produces meaning through interrupting hegemonic homonormativity’s “constant and repeated
effort to imitate its own idealizations.”34 Although Connor’s representation is significant for
demonstrating the unstable and disciplinary nature of socially constructed norms, he must
also be interpreted as a disidentificatory subject who negotiates the dominance of
homonormativity in forming his own identity.
Disidentification, Investment and Homonormativity
José Esteban Muñoz employs the term “disidentification” to describe the strategy of
minority subjects who “work on and against dominant ideology” where “one neither opts to
assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it.”35 Disidentification processes draw
attention to how these strategies displace traditional representational tropes and unequal
power relations. For Muñoz, disidentification is an important practice for contesting social
subordination, which is accomplished when disidentifying subjects transgress oppressive
regimes of heteronormativity.36 Muñoz’s work is important for discerning the significance of
Connor’s ongoing negotiation between queerness and homonormativity with respect to his
relationship with Oliver.
As Connor and Oliver’s relationship continues, Oliver suggests doing things that
normal couples do, “like the crossword,” instead of “just having sex,” but Connor asks Oliver
to “not turn sex into a bad thing.”37 On the one hand, Connor is acknowledging the socially
prescribed homonormative discourses that identify respectable gay men as desexualized. And
on the other hand, he is problematizing that discourse by investing it with new life in order to
carve out space for gay masculine identities infused with overt sexual desire. 38 Connor

9. INGOLD 8
embodies the position of disidentifying subject who challenges the hegemonic totality of
homonormativity. The work of Richard Dyer illustrates how, as a disidentifying subject,
Connor is exposing heterosexual society’s attempt to define gay masculinity in relation to
heterosexual ideals that are reinforced as natural. 39 Therefore, Muñoz’s work situates
Connor’s representation as a counterpublic contestation of discriminatory discourses.
An essential element of analyzing disidentificatory subjects is to interrogate
contradictions embedded within such counterpublic discourses. In Connor’s case, this
requires discussing how he is implicated in the reproduction of idealized homonormative
discourses. Even though Connor has expressed his antipathy towards a monogamous
relationship, when Oliver breaks up with Connor over him sleeping with other men, Connor
tries to explain that he “actually” likes Oliver and Oliver is “more than just sex.”40 The loss
of Oliver induces Connor to consider severing his attachment to his sexual freedom in
exchange for a stable, committed relationship. In Connor’s case, the citation of the norm
“becomes the means by which that dominant norm is most painfully reiterated as the very
desire and the performance of those it subjects.”41 Thus, Connor is developed as more than
simply a static repudiation of homonormative representations of gay masculinities and
instead, embodies the difficulties of negotiating the complex deployment of such discourses.
The central issue here is not to determine whether Connor’s contradictory narrative situates
him as more or less of a “normal” gay representation. Rather, a more productive line of
analysis is to examine how such contradictions operate as a site for discussing the investment
in the visibility of pluralistic gay identities on U.S. mainstream television.
As John Fisk has argued, an audience’s ability to identify with a show’s character is
enhanced when that character “contain[s] within them unresolved contradictions that the
viewer can exploit in order to find within them structural similarities to his or her own social
relations and identity.”42 The significance of this ongoing dialogical process of identification

10. INGOLD 9
between spectator and text resonates through Connor’s narrative that visibly characterizes
multiple and contradictory meanings of gay masculinity. This reflects the ability of viewers
to actively engage with and interpret the meanings offered by media representations and to
contrast them with their own social situations. 43 Connor’s negotiation of his queer self-
representation against calls from other characters in the show to embody the exalted form of
gay masculinity symbolizes the unstable and ongoing processes of identity-formation. The
visibility of negotiating such contradictions is highly significant in multiple ways for
processes of spectatorial investment.
Teresa de Lauretis’ work on spectatorship is crucial for understanding how television
shows interpellate individual spectators through identification processes that are intimately
connected to the spectators’ gender/sexuality. 44 The implication here is that Connor’s
visibility accrues meaning through audience identifications on the basis of his gender and
sexuality. In acknowledging how texts in popular culture can play a role in shaping one’s
identity, Fred Fejes has argued that media representations of LGBT characters are infused
with greater affective investment from spectators who may have limited contact with LGBT
role models in their personal lives. 45 Meaning that the increased visibility of LGBT
characters is itself significant with respect to the historical under-representation of
marginalized groups. This is not to conflate the increased visibility of gay and lesbian
characters with greater social tolerance as such portrayals tend to invisibilize systemic issues
of inequality and homophobia.46 This is a narrative that strongly reverberates through the
depiction of Connor in HTGAWM.
As previously mentioned, Connor’s character has elicited widespread praise for
representing a “modern” and “authentic” gay character on mainstream television whose
storyline is not burdened by issues of homophobia, but rather focuses on him as being as
cunning and sexually-driven as his hetero-counterparts on the show.47 This does not mean

11. INGOLD 10
Connor neatly fits into ‘straight-acting’ homonormative discourses, but what is being
suggested is that Connor has been deemed to be more ‘real’ than other gay characters because
he is not desexualized. This narrative of authenticity is what constitutes Connor as an
important site of affective investment for minority communities who desire televisual
representations that depict life “as it really is.”48 Furthermore, in building on Belinda A.
Stillion Southard’s work on postfeminism and Sex and the City, Connor’s sexual freedom has
been contradictorily depicted as a radical symbol of the greater acceptance of same-sex
intimacy, but also significantly depoliticized as being a normal human being with sexual
desire.49 What is missed in these competing discourses is considering how Connor is granted
visibility and intelligibility as existing both inside and outside homonoramtive hierarchies.
More specifically, this means engaging in questions of the politics of visibility vis-à-vis the
understanding that “visibility often comes with the price of having to conform or to be made
sense of within dominant cultural discourses.” 50 Put differently, this means deploying
Foucault’s notion of power as circulatory to engage with how HTGAWM’s depiction of
racialized gay masculinities reifies oppressive exclusions of particular bodies from the realm
of visibility.
It’s A White Gay Man’s World: The Invisibility of ‘Other’ Gay Masculinities
When Michaela Pratt, another student at Annalise’s firm, introduces her fiancé, Aiden
Walker, to her classmates she learns that Aiden and Connor had a previous sexual
relationship from their time at boarding school together. After Connor taunts Michaela with
the information, she confronts Aiden who adamantly denies being gay, claiming he was just
“a horny kid” and is “not some guy on the down low.”51 Undoubtedly, this scene provokes an
analysis as to how regulatory discourses about gender and sexuality are inextricably tied to
‘race’ where the possibility of a gay or bisexual black masculinity is eliminated. Aiden’s
citation of the “down low culture,” where black men have secret sexual relationships with

12. INGOLD 11
other men is significant for contextualizing “how much [of] black male homophobia is rooted
in the desire to eschew connection with all things deemed ‘feminine,’ and that would, of
course, include black gay men.”52 Moreover, Michaela’s fear that Aiden could be gay or
bisexual evokes a homophobic terror where ‘authentically’ black men cannot be gay.53 In this
narrative it is clear how the shaming of Aiden’s masculinity operates to reinscribe a cultural
logic of black homosexuality as a loss of proper gender. Furthermore, if one returns to the
“post-gay rights” world alluded to previously, what this scene clearly illustrates is that the
representation of Connor’s sexuality as essentially unremarkable can be contrasted with the
immediate dismissal of the possibility of an openly gay or bisexual masculine black man.
Black masculinity continues to be perversely surveyed by white homonormative discourses
that maintain the subordination and invisibility of diverse representations of racialised
sexualities. Thus, HTGAWM’s ‘progressive’ portrayal of gay masculinity is complicit in
perpetuating what Muñoz identifies as the “normativity of whiteness in mainstream North
American gay culture.” 54 As a text itself, HTGAWM may disrupt specific tenets of
mainstream homonormative representations of gay men, but it unquestionably reproduces
others.
What is critical is that the privileging of Connor’s visibility as a nonnormative
sexuality reiterates the dominance of white homonormativity in the mainstream media that
erases heterogeneous representations of gay masculinities. White homonormativity serves to
naturalize social constructions of the ideal ‘normal’ gay masculinity in a manner that upholds
a perception that white, able-bodied, good-looking, middle-class gay men are representative
of the experience of all gay men. 55 In a Lacanian sense, HTGAWM’s representation of
Connor’s identity as a ‘progressive’ gay masculinity is constructed through white
homonormative discourses that come at the expense of reifying oppressive racialized
discourses of sexuality.56 Connor’s ability to transgress the norm of the desexualized gay man

13. INGOLD 12
is predicated upon the privilege he is afforded as essentially embodying normative
representation of the acceptable white gay man. Therefore, as Sara Ahmed has argued, as an
effect of racialization, whiteness regulates what bodies ‘can do’ in a way that symbolically
erases the lives of queer people of color to reproduce hegemonic relations of power.57 In
HTGAWM this is evidenced by the way norms of gender, race and sexuality adapt to
Connor’s representation of gay masculinity, but also reproduce black homosexuality as
abject. What this evokes is a central issue of the politics of visibility: demarcations between
bodies that are and are not recognized within homonormative discourses.
Televisual representations must therefore, be understood through De Lauretis’ notion
of being a “technology of gender” that functions to “control the field of social meaning and
thus produce, promote and ‘implant’ representations of gender.”58 The surveying and policing
capacities of entrenched white homonoramtive discourses are an integral facet in both the
production of unequal power relations and the lived experiences of minority groups. Dyer’s
work explicitly addresses the relevance of visibility when he argues that: “how an image of a
member of a group is taken as representative of that group… [has] to do with how members
of a group see themselves and others like themselves [and] how they see their place in
society.” 59 The obscuring and erasure of representations of racialized sexual minorities
highlights how the naturalization of white homonormative discourses depends on its
relational meaning to the racialized ‘Other.’ The production of such silences signifies the
deadliness of mainstream U.S. television that legitimizes particular gay representations, such
as Connor, who dilute “any queer sensibility that might challenge the centrality of neoliberal,
middle-class values that also [subordinate] racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender
diversity.”60

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Conclusion
The purpose of this paper has been to employ the theoretical and critical work of
Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault to illustrate how Connor Walsh’s representation as a sexual
gay man simultaneously challenges and reproduces discourses of homonormativity. As the
work of bell hooks has demonstrated, it is crucial to deconstruct the representations
embedded in seemingly progressive texts to determine whether such texts genuinely promote
counterhegemonic narratives that challenge white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 61 The
case of Connor Walsh and How To Get Away With Murder illustrates how narratives of
progression can be complexly entangled with the hegemonic relations of power that obscures
recognizing the diversity of LGBT community and culture. In other words, white
homonormative discourses reproduce the symbolic annihilation of diverse queer bodies by
rendering them invisible as a representable group.62 Although no television show would ever
be able to capture the plurality and diversity of any community, it is imperative to remain
vigilant about interrogating ‘progressive’ representations that do exist on mainstream
television. The questions that must continue to be asked are in whose interests are particular
social identities constructed and consequently, what social groups and issues remain
subordinated and silenced. Underpinning the importance of such cultural projects is the
recognition that representations produce knowledge and thus, have the potential to structure
and affect one’s identity, lived experience and sense of belonging.

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Notes
1 Richard Lawson, “Is How to Get Away With Murder the Most Progressive Show on Television?” Vanity Fair,
last modified October 16, 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/10/how-to-get-away-with-
murder-gay-sex.
2 Bill Carter. “Diversity in Action, as Well as in Words,” The New York Times, last modified September 3, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/arts/television/abc-aims-for-diversity-with-shows-like-black-ish-and-fresh-
off-the-boat.html.
3 Lawson, “The Most Progressive Show on Television?”
4 Fred Fejes, “Making A Gay Masculinity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 1 (2000): 116,
accessed December 17, 2014, doi: 10.1080/15295030009388382.
5 ABC, “Connor Walsh,” ABC, last modified September 25, 2014, http://abc.go.com/shows/how-to-get-away-
with-murder/cast/connor-walsh.
6 Kristin Dos Santos,“Why There Will Be Plenty of Gay Sex on How To Get Away With Murder,” E! Online,
last modified September 25, 2014, http://uk.eonline.com/news/582921/why-there-will-be-lots-of-gay-sex-on-
how-to-get-away-with-murder.
7 Giovanni Porfido, “Queer as Folk and the Spectacularization of Gay Identity,” in Queer Popular Culture:
Literature, Media, Film, and Television,ed. Thomas Peele (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59.
8 Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing
Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics,ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002), 179.
9 Gayle Rubin. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger:
The Politicsof Sexuality,ed. Carol S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1982), 308.
10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:Vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 25.
11 Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and
the Situation Comedy Genre,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 1 (2010): 92, accessed
December 20, 2014, doi: 10.1080/07393180216553.
12 Ana Cristina Santos, “Are We There Yet? Queer Sexual Encounters, Legal Recognition and
Homonormativity,” Journal of Gender Studies 22, no. 1 (2013): 59, accessed December 27, 2014, doi:
10.1080/09589236.2012.745682.
13 Frederik Dhaenens,“Gay Male Domesticity on the Small Screen: Queer Representations of Gay
Homemaking in Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters,” Popular Communication 10 (2012): 221, accessed
December 19, 2014, doi: 10.1080/15405702.2012.682936.
14 Porfido, “Queer as Folk,” 65.
15 Barbara Klinger, “The Art Film, Affect and the Female Viewer: The Piano Revisited,” Screen 47, no. 1
(2006): 25, accessed November 11, 2014, doi: 10.1093/screen/hjl002.
16 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2011), 10.
17 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’,” in Popular Culture:A Reader, ed. Raiford Guines and
Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: SAGE, 2005), 71.
18 Stuart Hall, Representation:Cultural Representation and Signifying Practice (London: SAGE, 1997), 24.
19 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 132-3.
20 Brígida M. Pastor, “Queering Gender: The New Femme Fatale in Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación (2004),”
Culture & Historical Digital Journal 2, no. 1 (2013): 2, accessed January 4, 2015. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2013.011.
21 Frederik Dhaenens,“Teenage Queerness:Negotiating Heteronormativity in the Representation of Gay
Teenagers in Glee,” Journal of Youth Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 305, accessed January 1, 2015, doi:
10.1080/13676261.2012.718435.
22 “It’s All Her Fault,” How to Get Away With Murder, first broadcast October2, 2014 by ABC, Directed by
Michael Offer and Written by Peter Nowalk.
23 Frederik Dhaenens,“The Fantastic Queer: Reading Gay Representations in Torchwood and True Blood as
Articulations of Queer Resistance,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 2 (2013): 103, accessed
January 1, 2015, doi: 10.1080/15295036.2012.755055.
24 Dhaenens, “Teenage Queerness,” 311.
25 “Pilot,” How to Get Away With Murder, first broadcast September 25, 2014 by ABC, Directed by Michael
Offer and written by Peter Nowalk.
26 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Sexual Cultures)
(New York: New York University Press, 2005), 5.
27 Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 100-1.

16. INGOLD 15
28 Bridiga M. Pastor, “Queering Gender,” 3.
29 Martin Roberts, “The Fashion Police: Governing the Self in What Not To Wear,” in Interrogating
Postfeminism: Gender and the Politicsof Popular Culture,ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007), 230.
30 “He Deserved To Die,” How to Get Away With Murder, first broadcast November 6, 2014 by ABC, Directed
by Eric Stoltz and written by Warren Hsu Leonard.
31 Alfred L. Martin Jr, “It’s (Not) in His Kiss: Gay Kisses and Camera Angles in Contemporary US Network
Television Comedy,” Popular Communication:The International Journal ofMedia and Culture 12, no. 3
(2014): 161, accessed January 1, 2015, doi: 10.1080/15405702.2014.921921.
32 “Let’s Get to Scooping,” How to Get Away With Murder, first broadcast October 16, 2014 by ABC, Directed
by Laura Innes and written by Erika Green Swafford.
33 Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood:American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge,
2001), 180.
34 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 125.
35 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications:Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
36 Ibid., 199.
37 “Let’s Get to Scooping,” October 16, 2014.
38 Muñoz, Disidentification,11.
39 Richard Dyer, Gays and Film (London: British Film Institute,1984), 31.
40 “Let’s Get to Scooping,” October 16, 2014.
41 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 133.
42 John Fiske, “Television: Polysemy and Popularity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 4 (1986):
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43 Zeynep Alat, “News Coverage of Violence Against Women: The Turkish Case,” Feminist Media Studies 6,
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44 Teresa De Lauretis, “The Technology of Gender,” in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and
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45 Jay Clarkson, “The Limitations of the Discourse of Norms: Gay Visibility and Degrees of Transgression,”
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46 Guillermo Avila-Saavedra, “Nothing Queer About Queer Television: Televized Construction of Gay
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48 Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996), 8-9.
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50 Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 101.
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Randy Zisk and Written by Rob Fresco.
52 bell hooks,Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996), 216.
53 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 238.
54 Muñoz, Disidentification,9.
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56 Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005), 55.
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61 hooks, Reel to Real, 3.
62 Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner, Critical Readings: Media and Gender Reader (Maidenhead: Open
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17. INGOLD 16
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