Kate McNicholas Smith

Thesis Title

In/Visible Lesbians: Figurations of the TV Femme and the Queer Possibilities of Fandom

Thesis Outline

My research takes a queer/feminist approach to the representation of lesbian figures on TV. In particular I am interested in the contemporary mainstreaming of the femme, or the femme/femme couple. In considering these discursive figures I am interested in them as gendered, raced, classed, aged embodiments and constitutive subjects. I am interested in the possibilities they bring into being, the production of boundaries, norms and abjections, and mobilisation of various politics. More centrally, this thesis posits that an analysis of representation alone can only go so far in what it tells us of such figures; or rather, what such figures mean, do, become and mobilise. Considering new technologies of spectatorship and fandom, I am thus interested in what becomes of these figures in the hands of fans: how fan spaces create forums for negotiating, reproducing and appropriating the processes of figuration, and the possibilities this holds for the mobilisation of lesbian subjectivity. In this way I am interested in exploring queer fandom in relation to queer counterpublics and processes of intelligibility.

Qualifications

BA Hons Drama and Theatre Studies. Royal Holloway, University of London 2006

MA Women's Studies and English, Lancaster Univeristy 2008

MA Sociological Research, Lancaster Univeristy 2010

Supervised By

Imogen Tyler and Celia Roberts