#word things

As a term, queerbaiting has absolutely soared in popularity within the past several years (check Ngrams, and you can see it start to rise in mid-2014, but really gain traction in 2016). In part, that’s because it’s actually a fairly recent coinage, and terms take a little while to catch on, especially when they first have to migrate out of scholarship or niche circles. 

But more than that, the term “queerbaiting” gave us a nice, pithy way to encapsulate the feelings a lot of us as viewers were having when consuming popular media. It was a single word to capture all the nuance of watching some show or movie, seeing (typically) a m/m or f/f pair that had great chemistry who the producers and writers and marketers hyped up in part through that romantic and/or sexual chemistry (those Rizzoli & Isles handcuffed together billboard ads, anyone?), and then having the idea of that ship’s ever being acknowledged as romantic/sexual or made canon dismissed, its very possibility laughed at by the exact same people who profited off of dangling it in front of us week after week. (AKA: the term’s original usage!) But wow, look at how much got packed into a single term! No wonder it got popular!

Only guess what? Within the same time period that this term caught on and took platforms like Tumblr and Twitter by storm, we started to see (comparatively) a lot more LGBTQ representation! (Of course, we can’t say that without acknowledging that this representation was incredibly unequal across identity categories--most often we got a wealthy white gay couple or single side character.) Did this shift to representation include every couple we thought had chemistry? Every character we read as gay or bi or trans or ace, etc.? Absolutely not! But suddenly showrunners could “honestly” (insofar as any marketing is honest) say that they weren’t laughing off the possibility of inclusion or representation--after all, they had an LGBTQ character, they gave us a same-sex ship, even though they almost always didn’t get the same long arcs or nuanced portrayals we craved. 

With the upsurge in the quantity of representation, though, the focus shifted to the quality of this representation. And that’s where we started getting stuck. Because we don’t actually have a robust conceptual vocabulary for talking about our disappointment, especially nothing as easily portable as a single, catchy term. 

By that point, queerbaiting had become part of our vocabulary. And like all conceptual terms that “make it big” on the Internet, its meaning became diluted from its original usage; it expanded out to fill in these gaps. It became the word for representation that disappointed us, for lazy writing that fell back on tired tropes, for hasty break-ups and deaths that made no sense. It broadened its horizons to include our frustration at shows that insisted again and again that we should be grateful for the smallest crumbs of representation. 

And these shifts don’t have to be a bad thing! At least not on their own.

Problems arise when we allow a catch-all term to muddle important nuance, when we get as lazy as those show writers we complain about and let a single word bear the brunt of the analysis we don’t want to do about why exactly a show has disappointed us yet again. After all, there are important differences between a show that kills off an LGBTQ character and one that decides to write another “cheats on her wife/gf with a man” arc, or between a show that genuinely refuses to give any representation and one that thinks having more than one or two out characters is “unrealistic.” And sure, yeah, maybe my personal need for precision and exactitude in analysis is a product of my job and my professional training, but it matters in a larger sense if we’re still trying to use a term as part of our advocacy for better representation. That doesn’t mean a word’s meanings can’t or don’t or won’t shift over time--the elasticity of language is one of my very favorite things!--but maybe this long ass post helps to give a bit of context on why people are so invested on both sides of the debate. After all, the word has been so successful because it does resonate, and the desire to claim that feeling about some new show and tag it with a terms others might recognize and commiserate with is real and deep! But for those wanting to keep it “clean” with a really clear purpose for media advocacy, the diluted meaning and unclear trajectories of its uptake are startling and even worrisome!