"Just Because I'm A Lesbian Doesn't Mean I'm Evolved": The "Bad Queer" Women's Comedic Web Series

ABSTRACT:The queer women's comedic web series that have flourished in the last decade, serving as launching pads for their creators, coincided with media-industry nichification's segmentation of a consumer population regarded by advertisers and content providers as one monolithic LGBTQ community. The series I examine—from The Slope, which premiered in 2010, to Strangers, released in 2017—voice their creators' and characters' marginalization from and even opposition to such an imagined community, through recourse to what I call a "bad queer" rhetorical practice, which uses ironic metacommentary to critique assimilationist values and tropes alongside queer identity policing. These series emerged, at least initially, as an alternative sphere of queer media production and a queer discursive mode that employs disidentification as a politicized strategy to challenge dominant LGBTQ scripts. Offering an irreverent alternative to mainstream and millennial LGBTQ cultural products, these "bad queer" web series express the plurality of the queer "community" and expose political contestations within its ranks, and in so doing serve as brand differentiation for a new generation of queer media producers.