Despite the increasing efforts of representing gay main characters, popular soap operas still hinge on the discourse of heteronormativity. Queer theorists have uttered the necessity for exposing the oppressiveness of heteronormative practices and offering viable alternatives to the heteronormative way of living. This article argues that fan-produced re-edited videos of soap operas may embed the potential to expose and challenge the way that heteronormativity functions. By a textual analysis of Christian & Oliver, a fan-produced YouTube series based on the German soap Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), the article enquires how subversive practices of rearticulating narrative conventions of soap operas may function as strategies of resistance. Since texts only become resistant through reading practices, this article discusses the fragility of resistance by elaborating on the negotiated position of resistance within popular culture, discussing the role of fans as producers of new texts and differentiating the role of audiences as readers of resistance.
ButlerJ (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
7.
BuxtonR (1996) Sexual orientation and television. In: NewcombH (ed.) Encyclopedia of Television. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp.1477–1481.
8.
ChambersSA (2009) The Queer Politics of Television. London: I.B. Tauris.
9.
DavisGNeedhamG (2009) Introduction: The pleasures of the tube. In: DavisGNeedhamG (eds) Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics. London: Routledge, pp.1–11.
10.
DhaenensFVan BauwelSBiltereystD (2008) Slashing the fiction of queer theory: Slash fiction, queer reading and transgressing the boundaries of screen studies, representations and audiences. Journal of Communication Inquiry32(4): 335–347.
11.
DotyA (1993) Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
12.
DotyA (2000) Flaming Classics. New York: Routledge.
13.
FuquaJV (1995) There’s a queer in my soap! The homophobia/AIDS story-line of One Life to Live. In: AllenRC (ed.) To Be Continued: Soap Operas around the World. London: Routledge, pp.199–212.
14.
GeraghtyC (1991) Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Cambridge: Polity Press.
15.
HalberstamJ (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
16.
HallS (2005) Notes on deconstructing the popular. In: GuinsRCruzOZ (eds) Popular Culture: A Reader. London: Sage, pp.64–71.
17.
HelleksonK (2009) Verbotene Liebe, soap operas, fansubbing and YouTube. Res Gestae – Documentary and Digital Evidence of the Trace, 8May. Available at: http://khellekson.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/verbotene-liebe/ (accessed 6 August 2009).
18.
JenkinsH (1992) Textual Poachers. New York: Routledge.
19.
JenkinsH (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
20.
NealeS (1995) Questions of genre. In: GrantBK (ed.) Film Genre Reader II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp.159–183.
21.
NeedhamG (2009) Scheduling normativity: Television, the family and queer temporality. In: DavisGNeedhamG (eds) Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics. London: Routledge, pp.143–158.
22.
O’DonnellH (1999) Good Times, Bad Times: Soap Operas and Society in Western Europe. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
23.
ProvencherDM (2005) Sealed with a kiss: Heteronormative narrative strategies in NBC’s Will & Grace. In: DaltonMMLinderLR (eds) The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp.177–190.
24.
RumboJD (2002) Consumer resistance in a world of advertising clutter: The case ofAdbusters. Psychology and Marketing19(2): 127–148.
25.
RussoV (1981) The Celluloid Closet. New York: Harper & Row.
26.
SandlinJAMilamJL (2008) Mixing pop (culture) and politics: Cultural resistance, cultural jamming and anti-consumption activism as critical public pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry38(3): 323–350.
SedgwickE (1985) Between Men. New York: Columbia University Press.
29.
SeidmanS (1995) Deconstructing queer theory, or the under-theorization of the social and the ethical. In: NicholsonLJSeidmanS (eds) Social Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.116–141.
30.
SinfieldA (1994) Cultural Politics: Queer Reading. London: Routledge.
31.
SpenceL (2005) Watching Daytime Soap Opera: The Power of Pleasure. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
32.
Stempel MumfordL (1995) Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women and Television Genre. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
33.
SullivanN (2003) A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press.
34.
WarnerM (1999) The Trouble with Normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
