Animated Queerness

This book brings together scholars from different fields to examine the ways and mechanisms animated films represented, suppressed, encoded, and celebrated queer narratives.

In Animated Queerness: LGBTQIA+ Representation in Animated Media, scholars from different fields come together to examine the ways and mechanisms animated films represent, suppress, encode, and celebrate queer narratives.

This edited volume traces LGBTQIA+ animated audiovisual works across multiple decades, genres, and media platforms, while it explores implicit and explicit representation, fan creativity and intervention, corporate and social censorship, and global circulation.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part I includes historical and transnational approaches that highlight the queer legacies of creators such as Tove Jansson and Kunihiko Ikuhara. Part II examines how audiences use fan-made content and interpretative techniques to change canonical narratives. Part III analyzes global politics of representation, including censorship and intersectionality. Finally, Part IV studies the ways contemporary animated audiovisual works experiment with queer futurities, posthumanism, and alternative temporalities.

In bringing these essays together, this book argues that animation provides a fruitful space for creating queer worlds in which characters, storylines, and audiences perform fluid identities and imagine new modes of connection and empathy.