FTDM professor Kylo-Patrick Hart’s chapter “Queerness and Bullying in Popular Culture” has been published in Bullying in Popular Culture: Essays on Film, Television and Novels, edited by Abigail Scheg.
It explores the topic of queerness in relation to the phenomenon of bullying as it is represented in the feature film The Mudge Boy and the FOX television series Glee. One of the common themes foregrounded in both of these narratives is that the bullies’ own latent homosexual tendencies are what motivate them to feel so threatened by the otherness of their surrounding young males and to lash out at them in such deleterious and disturbing ways. Another is that queerness (in the sexual orientation sense) does not always manifest itself in blatant or stereotypical ways. Relevant insights from the psychological literature on bullying are employed to critique the effectiveness of both of these intriguing media representations.