Netflix Categories and Genre-izing LGBTQ+ Identities: Queer Media’s Tricky Classification History
It’s mid-morning on Sunday, and my laptop and I are Netflixing. I’m considering rewatching Season 2 of Feel Good (yes, already — it became available on Friday) but first, I take a glance through the search categories.
The categories are familiar, and similar on every other streaming service I have open in other tabs: Action, Comedies, Independent, Sci-Fi, Thriller… and LGBTQ. Of all these “genres,” an intrinsic identity category like “LGBTQ” seems a strange bedfellow with “Classics” and “Fantasy.” What exactly qualifies media as LGBTQ? And how does seeing LGBTQ as a classifier, as a distinct category of media, affect viewers?
In “A Shelf of One’s Own: A Queer Production Studies Approach to LGBT Film Distribution and Categorization,” Bryan Wuest makes a queer critique of such classification. Drawing on Rick Altman and Michel Foucault, Wuest notes that “a single object is classified not according to a core, essential identity, but rather in response to the criteria and rubrics… No classification can precede a classifying logic.”
A movie itself isn’t inherently queer or classifiable in the LGBTQ category; the movie will either fall into Netflix’s (or Netflix’s algorithm’s) understanding of “LGBTQ” as a genre, or it won’t. The “classifying logic” doesn’t belong to the movie, or to its creators; the “logic” and the power of categorization belong to the streaming service.
So, one answer to the first question I posed might be that media can be classified as LGBTQ+ if it aligns with how queerness is discursively conceived, rather than based on any core “queerness” we might identify within the media itself. But how does finding LGBTQ+ media within a unified category impact the viewer?
Wuest discusses the move on streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix to include specific LGBTQ+ categories alongside others like “Action” or “Horror” as primarily positive, in that having the category makes it searchable and discoverable, which can be especially important to queer folks who might not otherwise have access to queer representation.
“Defining ‘LGBT’ as a legible media category or genre helps encourage the inclusion of LGBT content in media because of the existence of a distribution and exhibition circuit.”
Seminal queer theorists Charles Morris and J.K. Rawson call the queer archive “a powerful reversal of ‘state’s evidence’,” i.e. a counter to what we might call a “master” or “mainstream narrative.” With this in mind, we might view the widespread LGBTQ+ genre-izing as stating “we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re searchable on your favorite platforms.”
While that’s all to the good, I have to wonder about how seeing LGBTQ+ media as a distinct category, whether film on Netflix or texts in a library, could also potentially be damaging to the queer person seeking out those texts. The queer researcher or queer Netflixer undoubtedly wants to see themself and their community represented, but what’s at stake when that representation is available only in a specific category, when heteronormativity permeates all others?
The categorization presents a constant reminder to the member of the community who has been “genre-ized” — we are separate, separable, and have to seek ourselves out.
Whether we’re sold on the spotlighting categorization provides or not, a key point here is that there is no innocent, impartial method of categorization of cataloguing — the power to divide is in many ways the power to conquer.
Emily Drabinski brought my attention to “the critical cataloging movement,” which has worked against the bias of Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). In “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction” Drabinski notes that LCC and LCSH “fail to accurately and respectfully organize library materials about social groups and identities that lack social and political power.”
“Our dearly beloved Library of Congress until this year classed what straights call ‘homosexuality’ in the HQ 70’s under the general heading ‘Sexual deviations.’ This was unbiased? Objective?? Non-judgmental???” — Steve Wolf, 1972
While Drabinski sees the value of the work to “correct” categorization, the problem lies in the assumption that “correctness” can ever really be achieved when our labels shift in meaning and usage both over time and in different contexts. Because there is no simple solution to the categorization “problem,” Drabinski turns to queer theory.
Queer theory is, at its most SparkNotes-y, all about the disruption of the stable categories maintained by systems of power, like heteronormativity and gender roles. Drabinski explains that,
“In defining the problem of classification and cataloging queerly, the solutions themselves must be queer: built to highlight and exploit the ruptures in our classification structures and subject vocabularies, inviting resistance to rather than extension of the coherent library systems that a critical cataloging movement for correctness upholds.”
I’m definitely not saying that we shouldn’t be excited that we can search for and find hundreds of our own stories on Netflix and elsewhere, and I’m also not arguing that a distinct LGBTQ category is always inherently exclusionary. What I am claiming here is that we need to constantly question this kind of genre-izing, and ask ourselves when it works to our benefit, and when it seeks to potentially exploit or marginalize our community.
Now that I’ve had time to think on it, I am going to restart Feel Good, season 2. I’m cataloguing this Sunday Netflixing in the name of queer resistance (certainly not just obsession with Mae Martin and Charlotte Richie).
