Understanding Queer Normality: LGBT+ Representations in Millennial Flemish Television Fiction

Abstract

Queer television studies scholarship tends to construct “queerness” and “normality” as incommensurable concepts, defining queer “against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” In this article, we show how this construction is specifically intertwined with highly liberalized media contexts, and generates a fundamentally static understanding and operationalization of the concept of normality in queer television studies. Turning to Flemish television fiction of the late 1990s, we point to a dynamic and open-ended approach toward sexual and gender diversity, and illustrate how televised normality itself can be a queer phenomenon. In doing so, we offer a framework to understand the proliferation of LGBT+ characters and storylines in twenty-first-century Flemish television fiction, and contribute to a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of normalization and television fiction in a western European television industry.