Challenging the Boundaries of "Normal" in Steven Universe : Queering the Landscape of American Children’s Cartoons

Szűcs, Edit (2018) Challenging the Boundaries of "Normal" in Steven Universe : Queering the Landscape of American Children’s Cartoons. Masters, Szegedi Tudományegyetem.

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Abstract

Children’s media is regulated by adults, by the norms, values, and ideologies of a given society. The didactic stories we tell our children are meant to teach them our social norms in order to enable them later to be able to operate in the adult world. Conversely, by teaching them the same practices and norms of the adult society, the societal structure is reproduced unchanged. Consequently, it follows that children’s stories are focused on maintaining traditional gender roles and leaving heteronormativity unchallenged. For the same reason, providing children with representations of non-normative gender identities or expressions, or non-heterosexual relationships is a highly taboo topic. Nevertheless, such representations have always been lurking in the background or subtext of children’s visual media, albeit usually portrayed in a negative light. Recently, however, some cartoons have ventured to go beyond the boundaries of social conformity and featured queer characters and relationships. In this paper I am going to be analyzing these animated cartoons, all of which have been made in North America after 2010 and created with a young audience in mind. There is only a handful of such media products at the moment, and the representation of queer characters in them is very minimal, with some notable exceptions. These shows are still definitely bound by the whims of producers, companies, and parents and are just carefully making tentative attempts at challenging the constraints to see how far they are allowed to go. There is one show, however, that has by far surpassed said constraints: Steven Universe, a story about a young boy learning about his empathy-based superpowers from the three women who raise him. Relying on the methodological apparatus of queer narratology, animation studies, and intersectional feminism, I wish to prove that one of the main reasons of the show’s success in overcoming restrictions resides in its premise resting on the strategic blurring of the boundaries of self, of identity, and therefore of gender, sexuality, and relationships.

Institution

Szegedi Tudományegyetem

Faculty

Faculty of Arts

Department

Angol Tanszék

Discipline

Humanities

Institute

Angol-Amerikai Intézet

Specialization

anglisztika

Supervisor(s)

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Subjects:	06. Humanities
Depositing User:	szerkesztő BTK
Date Deposited:	2019. Apr. 29. 07:56
Last Modified:	2019. Apr. 30. 06:44
URI:	https://diploma.bibl.u-szeged.hu/id/eprint/74313

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