One method of understanding how media audiences interpret messages is through deconstructing the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real— as Althusser (1965) does when using the work of Lacan. For Althusser, ideology is rooted in the symbolic and in individual ways of seeing. Beginning from this poststructural notion of ideology, this paper applies Lacan’s original ideas to an analysis of the television series Schitt’s Creek. Further, it suggests that contemporary queer theorists such as Lothian (2018) and Muñoz (2019) offer additional concepts that, when combined with psychoanalytic underpinnings, can offer a fuller framework for understanding narratives of queer possibility and audiences relationships to such texts.
Schitt’s Creek creator Daniel J. Levy has explicitly stated that he did not want to make a world in which the show’s queer protagonists would face homophobia or other tragic storylines as are often written around gay characters. In this way, the show is paradoxically radical and normalizing in its portrayal of queer relationships; that the show is set in an extremely rural town further confounds the expected stereotypes and narratives of acceptance. The current work also considers this space and place in the setting of Schitt’s Creek and the narrative interplay in the show’s queer world-building.
References
Althusser, L. (1965/2005). For Marx. Verso.
Lothian, A. (2018). Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. NYU Press.
Muñoz, J. E., Chambers-Letson, J., Nyong’o, T., & Pellegrini, A. (2019). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press.
About the presenterCandice D. Roberts
Candice is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St. John’s University.
They hold a PhD in Communication, Culture & Media from Drexel University and designed a transnational network ethnography of the CouchSurfing community and its function as a hybrid collective. More broadly their work examines cultural narrative and identity in popular media, and they are particularly interested in archetypes, consumer behavior, and sociality around themes of class, sexuality and space/place.