Research & Projects

My dissertation supervised by Denise Mann, “Sometimes We Screw Things Up for the Better: The Shifting Discourses of Gender and Sexuality in the Arrowverse,” situates the tensions felt by content producers at Berlanti Productions who through a lucrative licensing deal must make content that first aired on the CW before eventually being distributed globally by Netflix at the end of the season. These productive agents had to retheorize how they understood audiences' taste and expectations based on two contradictory business models (broadcast vs SVOD). These tensions and contradictions were mediated through the production of boundary pushing and inclusive visions of gender and sexuality. However, after COVID-19 and a series of consolidations and divestitures the queer forward content of Arrowverse properties was effectively erased curtailed by 2024 and the end of the Arrowverse. 

Animating my argument is the constant iteration that my case studies put into motion to manage shifting distribution and audiences. This iterative process is central to televisions seriality and the process that rendered certain discourses of gender and sexuality hegemonic. The male body and masculinity is iterated and reiterated in Arrow (2012-2020) as the CW networks key instrument to develop a male linear audience through the modification of the white male action hero into one that was still palatable to the existing female audience, and eventually rendered as multiple masculinities, demonstrating hegemonic positions require constant iteration as DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (2016-2022) continued renewal, both creatively and seasonally, demonstrates how industry standards of success changed over time alongside the show's seasonal rebooting of its narrative and aesthetics producing an expansive view of queerness and camp aesthetics as the time traveling heroes fix and queerly fail history in order to make a better world at the margins. Batwoman (2019-2022) was trumpeted as a triumph of progress with the first lesbian superhero lead show, actually produced three different queer women calling themselves Batwoman and in that iterative process highlight how slowly culture is acclimatized to new lesbian and queer visibilities.