The Role of Popular Culture for Queer Teen Identities’ Formation in Netflix’s “Sex Education”

UCL Minds

About the Lecture: In this lecture, we will explore the ways in which popular culture constitutes a privileged site for LGBTIQ+ teenagers’ identity formation, analysing how the queer protagonists of Netflix’s hit TV show “Sex Education” turn to cinema, graphic novels, music and fashion to find inspiration for the development of their non-normative gender identities, “forbidden” desires and sexual orientations. We will uncover the undeniable parallels between these characters -Eric, Adam, Lily and Ola- and iconic films like "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Paris is Burning," or "Alien," along with the influence of queer legends such as David Bowie, Tina Turner, and Marlene Dietrich. In a way, this constitutes a metatextual exploration that reveals how transnational queer teen TV shows -like “Sex Education” itself- serve as beacons, offering role models for LGBTIQ+ youth worldwide. In a society steeped in cisheteronormativity, queer teens often seek affirmation and self-discovery through the kaleidoscope of popular culture. With the popularisation of platforms such as Netflix and HBO, which have recently become champions of diversity and inclusion, queer youth are finally able to see positive representations of queerness and find information about themselves that is not always available in their home and educational environments. Although queer popular culture and its influence on youth will be at the forefront of our discussion, we will also analyse the role of media for the dissemination of (queer) sex education; the promotion of feminist pedagogies throughout the show; and the potential of educational institutions to become sites of queer utopia, something exemplified in the fictional college portrayed in the last season of the show. About the speaker: Lucia Vazquez Rodriguez is a media scholar specialized in feminist and queer approaches to popular culture; in April this year, who joined UCL as a Lecturer in the MA Digital Media: Production, and became a member of the research group ReMAP. Lucia has an MA in Film and Philosophy from King's College London and a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid, where they worked in several projects and publications with a research group called GECA (Gender, Aesthetics and Audiovisual Culture), and wrote a thesis on queer Latin American cinema directed by women. Lucia's main areas of interest are Queer and Feminist Screen Studies, Digital Fandom Communities, and Media Literacy, particularly in relation to teenagers, streaming platforms, sexual scripts and gender roles. Lucia is currently working on a book on the uses of haptic (highly sensorial) images within queer contemporary films directed by women, although they have also published extensively (and will continue to do so) about LGBTIQ+ teen TV shows such as “Sex Education”.