Since its premiere, Ocean’s 8 (2018) has garnered a significant lesbian following. Fans have taken to Tumblr and YouTube comment sections to celebrate this empowering story of eight women banding together to pull off one of the greatest heists in history. But fans have also used these sites to express their lesbian fantasies about co-stars Sandra Bullock (Debbie Ocean) and Cate Blanchett (Lou Miller), whose backstory alludes to but never confirms a past romantic relationship. The actresses have both denied and opened to the possibility of their characters’ romantic history, creating a contradictory discourse around their past that leaves ample room for queer fans to fantasize.
In my paper, I explore how the film’s queer subtext speaks to lesbian audiences without “outing” the film to straight viewers, and how lesbian fans engage in creative online labor to produce their own paratextual materials to extend their fanfiction fantasies. I argue that the film is exemplary of the contradictory pleasures queer audiences derive from texts that are not willing to acknowledge them outright, seeing themselves on screen while knowing that their representation has often been a ploy to get their attention—and money, too.
My paper further explores how queer audiences and producers negotiate dominant and subtextual readings at a contradictory time when queer representations are finally becoming more accepted and mainstream. Resistant to accept that film studios are queer allies, I express concern that queer stories will become co-opted, heteronormalized, and repackaged for mainstream audiences through rainbow capitalist schemes, and that queer audiences will be too eager to see themselves on screen to resist the industrial system that has exploited and held us hostage for so long.
About the presenterHugo Ljungbäck
Hugo Ljungbäck is a video artist, film curator, and media scholar. His videos regularly explore queer subjectivities, oversexed bodies, and sexual abuse, and have screened at national and international film festivals and galleries. His research focuses on the intersection of video art, surveillance, labor, and queer cinema, and his writing has been published in international journals. He is an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Chair of the UWM Moving Image Society.