Queer As Folk: Gaycidad y experiencias del desborde en la cultura pop

Gaycidade e experiências do transbordamento na cultura pop

Abstract

A semiotic reading of Queer As Folk (1999) is woven here, a narrative especially relevant for reflecting on how pop culture has shaped a form of “gayness” that contemporary series now address as both theme and problem. Twenty-five years after its premiere, this article questions how we reinterpret the cultural legacy of a series that once operated as a sexual education device for an entire generation, exposing the tension between an identity expropriated by the market and the authentic forms of life it sought to represent. In dialogue with queer studies, this form of consumption will be examined as a space of identity production that articulates gay cultural imaginaries through two dominant traits characteristic of pop culture: a biographical impulse that places the protagonist at the margins of the bildungsroman, and a tendency toward an experience of excess, aligned with a postmodern subjectivity. Between stereotyping and the audacity of televising dissidence, and between the worn-out biographical testimony and the postmodern sexual outburst, Queer As Folk stands as evidence of the always conflicted ways in which gay experience has been portrayed within mass culture.