Not Getting Better: Sex and Self-Harm in It Gets Better / Glee Fanfiction

Abstract

This chapter explores how fanfiction writers deploy characters from the television show Glee in the context of the It Gets Better anti-bullying YouTube project to imagine scenarios where the project’s teleological narrative fails to describe the lived experiences of queer youth. Glee reached peak popularity in 2010–2011, the year that It Gets Better was launched and queer YA began undergoing a publishing boom. In fanfiction that combines Glee with It Gets Better, fans repurpose It Gets Better to bring critical elements to the YouTube project that are missing from its official stories: sexual pleasure, and the possibility that it doesn’t always get better. These traces in material culture of young people writing back to It Gets Better, Mason concludes, illustrate problems with Jacqueline Rose’s argument about the untouched “middle space” between adult authors of children’s literature and the genre’s young audiences.