Death for Young Adult Audiences: Complexity, Complicity and Critique in Pretty Little Liars

This article explores how death is represented, negotiated, and framed in the seven season television series Pretty Little Liars. The series is positioned as an example of a hybridised television format aimed at young audiences and as Gothic television. Avoiding positioning any popular cultural text as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of its engagement with death, this article instead utilises one popular television series to examine a range of debates about the representation of death in contemporary popular culture. Television as a medium and television aimed at young female audiences are often considered trivial. Consequently, television’s representation of death is often seen to be trivialising. However, Pretty Little Liars, and television more broadly, can function to convey several complex and ambivalent meanings about death. The analysis here focuses on the series capacity to engage with ideas about loss in the context of young people’s lives, the ways in which the series is emblematic of debates about the gendered glamorisation of death in popular culture, and the identity politics of death in the series, which can be seen to discriminate in terms of who it ‘kills off’. The article argues that Pretty Little Liars can be read as both reiterating and challenging problematic perceptions of girlhood, womanhood, glamour, and death, straddling both complicity and critique in its representations. Please note this article has images that you can access via the PDF.

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Becoming The Monster: Queer Monstrosity and the Reclamation of the Werewolf in Slash Fandom

This article examines LGBTQ fans’ on-going frustration with the appropriation of queer narratives, or ‘queer-coding’, in contemporary depictions of werewolves in popular media and fans’ attempts to reclaim the werewolf as an explicitly queer figure through the medium of same-sex fanfiction. Focusing on two of the most popular fandoms featuring lycanthropic characters, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and MTV’s Teen Wolf, this article explores both fan reactions to canonical developments within these texts and statements from the texts’ author(s) pertaining to queerness, as well as pieces of slash fiction from both fandoms featuring werewolves. In hopes of better articulating and unveiling fans’ frustrated desire not only for better queer representation in fantasy texts, but also for more complex re-articulations of queer monstrosity, this article will interrogate the interplay between fan and author and look at the cultural work lycanthropic slash fiction performs.

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