Reading Time: 1 Min.
From novels to TV shows to music videos, queer women are meeting a very dramatic, very wet end Screenshot from music video for “Casual” by Chappell Roan Share article When I first read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening , I was straight. Or, at least I thought I was. It was 2014, and I was a sixteen-year-old closeted bisexual in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with nothing to my name but a mildly successful hipster-themed Tumblr blog. The novel’s ending, in which Edna walks confidently into the sea and presumably drowns, left its mark on me. I couldn’t shake the image it conjured: a grown woman, defeated and determined, descending into the waves until there is none of her left. At the time, I chalked up my obsession with this ending to its overall melodrama and second-wave feminist messaging. It took a decade and a queer awakening of my own to understand the real reason I couldn’t seem to let it go. In the past year or two, I’ve seen parts of this ending reflected in piece after piece of queer media. From novels to TV shows to music videos, there it is: this very dramatic, very wet end. A descent into the water, an ambiguous death, a life or lover left behind—it’s all there. In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, destined for life underwater. And the lover left behind is almost always queer. It’s quite a specific trope to encounter upwards of five times in the span of a few years. While there’s certainly more queer representation in media than there used to be, it’s still undeniably a much smaller genre—an island of queer stories amongst oceans of hetero romance. Smaller still is the percentage of these stories that spotlight sapphic love between queer women and non-binary people. So it feels significant, and more than just an odd coincidence, that multiple fairly popular sapphic stories released in the last five years hinge on this strange plot point. In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, […]
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Reading Time: 1 Min. Cover illustration for “The Frindle Files.”Credit…Brian Selznick There’s a moment in early childhood when pure, wide-eyed
Reading Time: 1 Min. Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes
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