Rom-com without romonormativity, gays without homonormativity: examining the People Like Us web series

By Eve Ng

Excerpt: “Certainly, rom-coms featuring same-sex relationships may be narrativelyflawed, including retreading the ground of straight rom-coms. LGBTQ themed media have been critiqued for failing to offer more radical challenges to sociopolitical norms, instead homonormatively (Duggan 2002) reinscribing discourses about monogamous coupledom, sexual discretion, and consumerist aspirations in lieu of structural critiques of patriarchy and capitalism. With respect to the rom-com genre more specifically, I will discuss this as what I term romonormativity – a privileging of monogamous romance that, in the case of same-sex relationships, further marginalizes other, queerer modes of intimacy and being (e.g. see Kipnis 2003). While PLU follows the rom-com script regarding romance to a significant degree, it veers off the romonormative path in important ways different from the unstable or immature masculinity around sex and commitment identified by Alberti (2013) and Jeffers McDonald (2008). It also avoids both the desexualization and hypersexualization that characterized many earlier screen depictions of gay men.” Read the full article here