Queer Representation in Stranger Things
This is the text of a presentation I gave at the 2021 Popular Culture Association’s Annual Conference. It was part of the panel “Queer Representation in Horror, and was delivered on 4 June 2021.
“I feel like my whole life has been one big error”: Queer Representation in Stranger Things
The third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things—the streaming platform’s breakaway horror hit created and produced by the Duffer Brothers—was released amidst much media fervor in July of 2019. Set (thus far) in 1983-1985, the show focuses on the presence of a monstrous force in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, and the motley crew of preteens, teens, and adults who team up to fight it. Just as it was a departure from the seasonal setting of Season 1 and 2—taking place instead over the summer of 1985 rather than the late October/ early November of previous seasons—season three was also a slight departure from the tone and pacing of the previous two seasons. Additionally, season three also marked the introduction of the narrative’s first canonically queer character, Scoops Ahoy employee Robin Buckley (played by Maya Hawke). Although it has not been made explicit yet, viewers are left with the sense that Will Byers (played by Noah Schnapp)—on whom the first two seasons largely center—may also be queer, and he and other characters have certainly been coded as such throughout the narrative.
TO BE A MONSTER IS TO BE AN OMEN
Yet, if we look at where the monstrous is located in Stranger Things, we can see the crucial factor in how the show represents queerness. From the inception of the horror genre's depiction in moving images, queerness—or, more accurately, queer coding and subtext—was bound up in the figure of the monster. SLIDE Consider early horror works such as Nosferatu, Bride of Frankenstein, Rebecca, and Cat People—Count Orlock, Dr. Praetorius, Mrs. Danvers, and Irena are all early queer cinema figures who were either literal monsters or metaphorically monstrous. "To be a monster is to be an omen," Stephen T. Asma argues in his seminal On Monsters (13). He goes on to state that, "Sometimes the monster is a display of God's Wrath, a portent of the future, a symbol of moral vice or virtue, or an accident of nature" (13). Harry Benshoff's landmark 1995 Monsters in the Closet exhaustively catalogues how queer coding and monstrousness were inextricably entwined, and the defeat or removal of the monster represented the metaphoric defeat of homosexuality and the triumphant return to heteronorms. Yet in Stranger Things, like in much of post-2012 horror TV, there's a critical difference—there's an important dislocation of that which is monstrous from that which is queer.
Over the course of its extant three seasons, the monstrous in Stranger Things is both literal—the Demogorgon, Demodogs, and the Mind Flayer—as well as metaphoric. But the referent of those metaphors isn't queerness. Instead, the metaphorical monsters are the secretive government organizations torturing children in the name of research, the mechanisms that protect such secrets, and, in season three, in a very real way, Reaganomics and the insidious neoliberal forces undergirding the consumptive capitalism boom of the 1980s. Although the show features several queer-coded characters and one who is explicitly a lesbian, queerness isn't conjoined with monstrousness; instead, the show centers protagonists who are marginalized in a variety of ways, and queerness becomes an incidental difference rather than a constitutive marker of difference around which their entire character arc revolves. This refusal to totalize its queer characters coupled with the overarching queer allegory of the show's narrative reconfigures that older traditional rhetorical construction of queerness within horror, and it models the kind of queer representation that feels truly revolutionary—one in which our queerness is normalized in such a way that it isn't the cornerstone of our character.
A Queerness that Complicates Nostalgia
The most immediately evident stylistic marker in Stranger Things is its 1980s setting. The entire mise en scene is informed by this choice—from costumes to set design to lighting to the synthwave score, the mid-80s aesthetic permeates the show. It’s a show steeped in nostalgia, a word from the greek nostos, meaning “homecoming” and algos, meaning “pain or ache.” This is key to understanding the world of Stranger Things—this isn’t documentary, it’s a mediated reproduction of the past that is often shown in such a way as to highlight how cultural norms have shifted. Will Byers is described as different, sensitive; Joyce describes him as “not like most” and says Will’s father used to call him a queer. Other kids at school repeat these (and other) pejoratives. As his friends begin to show interest in girls, Will shows none, and he resents Mike and Lucas’s distraction over El and Max. (Emily E. Roach does an in-depth reading of the ways Will is coded as queer in the text, so rather than rehash it, I’ll just suggest you read her essay, “AIDS, Homophobia, and the Monstrous Upside Down: The Queer Subtext of Stranger Things.”) Barb—a fan favorite—is also coded queer through her wardrobe, disdain for Steve’s “charming” antics, and the intensity of her friendship with Nancy. Then we have Steve Harrington and Billy Hargrove, and what Roach calls the “curious undercurrent of homoeroticism” that colors their interactions (142).
A completely hetero encounter.
It’s certainly a tension that audiences picked up on, as evidenced by the surfeit of Tumblr fanart and the thousands of slashfics on AO3. But Billy’s over-performance of hypermasculinity is undercut when we see the abuse he’s subjected to at the hands of his father; considering Billy through a queer lens subverts the one-dimensional bully stereotype he leans so heavily into, which, when coupled with the show’s nostalgic affect, jars viewers into reliving the pain caused by trying to obscure or compensate for one’s identity to fit into cultural norms.
That pain is also evoked in the season 3 episode “The Bite,” when Scoops Ahoy employee Robin Buckley comes out to Steve on the tail end of a hard trip. SLIDE She tells Steve how obsessed she was with him because, she explains, “even though all us losers pretend to be above it all, we still just wanna be popular, accepted, normal.” She tells him, “I feel like my whole life has been one big error,” because she’s in love with a woman.
“The Bite” (S3E7)
But defying 80s-era expectations, Steve accepts this with only a momentary pause of confusion. And because this reveal comes so late in the season arc, in episode 7 of 10, we already know far more important things about Robin—her multilingual intelligence, her sardonic sense of humor, her bravery and loyalty. Being queer is just another piece of her, and the way Steve takes it in stride is the kind of anachronism I can get behind. What’s most important about these characters and all their queer potentialities is that they’re protagonists—not monsters—and they’re not queer protagonists—their queerness is just another quality, not the linchpin of their character arc.
ALLEGORICALLY QUEER
In addition to all these queer possibilities amongst the central protagonists, the overall narrative of Stranger Things acts as a deeply queer allegory. The season arcs all feature members of different identity categories working jointly to resist the culturally dominant paradigms of government authority, policing, and inhumane treatment in order to defeat the monsters brought forth as a result of those dominant structures. The central conflict of each season can't be resolved until the disparate groups come together—it takes the cooperative efforts of the preteens, older teens, and adults all working together to defeat the Upside Down and subvert the corrupt government systems perpetuating the rupture.
If that's not a metaphor for different identity groups working together under the umbrella of queer rights, I'm not sure what is.
In addition to the queer traits of the characters I mentioned earlier, consider the outsider status that marks everyone in the central group of protagonists. Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are all nerds, denoted by their dedication to Dungeons & Dragons and the AV Club. They don't reproduce 1980s ideals of masculinity like enthusiasm for sports or physical violence. Instead, they display what Kayla McCarthy describes as “nonhegemeonic, or ‘uncool’ white masculinity” who are mostly set apart by their “ability to attract bullies” (663, 669). Even when Max joins the group, her tomboyishness marks her as Other, and her skateboarding and video game dominance falls more in line with the masculinity that her male friends lack. Lucas and his sister Erica are Othered by their race—their Blackness stands out in this majority white suburban setting. Although Nancy fits the 80s cultural ideals of beauty and popularity, we see her grow increasingly frustrated with the systems that control or ignore her—when Barb's disappearance is largely disregarded, Nancy begins to confront the indifference and outright hostility of the patriarchy around her, and she becomes an increasingly feminist figure. Joyce is marked as Other by her relationship status and class—she is a poor, divorced single mother who works a retail job. And Hopper is Othered despite his position as Sheriff—the traumas of the Vietnam war and of losing his family set him apart, and in spite of his position of authority, he has little interest in upholding most cultural norms.
What’s important about this collective Otherness is that Stranger Things is not what we might think of as a typical underdog story—these marginalized figures are the protagonists, and their successes only reinforce their Otherness and keep them set apart from the world around them. This privileging of the narratives of those Othered within dominant cultural paradigms rhetorically reconfigures the 80s narrative structures that mostly emphasized assimilation into normative culture. This means that even as Stranger Things draws from classic 80s referents like Poltergeist, E.T., Nightmare on Elm Street, and Stand By Me (among others), it is instead a critical refiguring of the past, one that acknowledges there is no real return to normalcy, no comfortable place for these characters within those strictly defined cultural norms. For these protagonists, there is no re-assimilation into the hegemonic structures of neoliberal heteropatriarchal capitalism. And that’s the crucial difference from the the show’s many referents—in Stranger Things, being Othered isn’t something to be solved. It’s not a position to abandon. Because the show’s real villains are the military-industrial complex and unethical scientific research, the rhetorical argument is that remaining Othered is inevitable but also preferred.
What this gives us as viewers, especially as queer viewers, is the chance to reconfigure our own relationship to the past. Although the show is deeply rooted in a nostalgic reproduction of the 1980s, it’s a story told now, one meant to be watched with contemporary sensibilities about gender, sexuality, race, and global politics. Stranger Things is addressing the work done to further equality every time we see Nancy belittled by a room full of male journalists, or every time Joyce laments how other kids and even his father refer to Will as “a queer.” We are expected to dislike Billy for his racist reaction to Lucas. We watch the show with our modern mores, but the show is also created within those same mores. And so the world of Stranger Things is a world with far more queer potentiality than the actual 80s was. It’s a fantasy revision of the temporal setting. But this creative revision offers us a kind of time-dislocated queer futurity—we can imagine ourselves in the past so as to exist more fully in the present and future. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity—my personal favorite answer to Lee Edelman’s No Future—Jóse Esteban Muñoz suggests that he thinks “of queerness as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity” (16). Writing in 2009, he argues that:
“The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.”
Stranger Things, then, gives us a creative re-contextualizing that undergirds the, if you’ll forgive the phenomenologism, the always-already-there-ness of queerness despite how invisible the dominant cultural paradigms of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right wished to render it.
Ultimately, by creating queer space in a re-envisioned past and dislocating queerness and monstrousness, Stranger Things offers us metamodern possibility: an earnest rehearsal of a past whose aesthetic we have fetishized, but a critical acknowledgement and subsequent redrafting of exclusionary cultural structures that maintained heteronormative, patriarchal white supremacy. It creates space for Otherness, for queerness, and then it normalizes such differences by giving us characters and plots that don’t hinge on these identity categories. It lets characters be queer and be heroes, but one doesn’t follow from the other. Queerness is incidental, one of many marginalization the show explores, and in the world of Stranger Things, the margin is the best place to be.
Works Cited
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford UP, 2009.
McCarthy, Kayla. “Remember Things: Consumerism, Nostalgia, and Geek Culture in Stranger Things.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 52, no. 3, 2019, pp. 663-677.
Muñoz, Jóse Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
Roach, Emily E. “AIDS, Homophobia, and the Monstrous Upside Down: The Queer Subtext of Stranger Things.” Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism, and Innocence in the Series, ed. By Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., McFarland, 2018, pp. 135-45.
Stranger Things, created by Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2016 - present.
