“Heaven is a Place on Earth” (2024)

1In March 2016, Lexa died from a stray bullet in the middle of the third season on the post-apocalyptic TV series The 100. This sparked outrage from fans who bemoaned what they perceived as one of the most important figures on the show being gratuitously killed off. It did not help that Lexa was a queer woman, who, just prior to her death, had struck up a relationship with Clarke, the bisexual female protagonist. The same month, in a significant departure from the original comics, lesbian character Denise was also killed by a stray bullet on The Walking Dead. In both cases, the fans were vocal enough about their displeasure that they sparked a national debate and various news outlets like Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, and The Hollywood Reporter picked up the story, pointing out how both deaths fit the “Bury Your Gays” or “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” tropes (Dibdin; Robinson; Snarker).

2These deaths are not outliers when it comes to the story arcs of queer women [1] in films or on TV in the past decades. While mainstream acceptance and visibility of queer communities overall seem on the rise, queer female characters keep dying or suffering, which has not gone unnoticed. In March 2016, Autostraddle, the leading community and pop culture site for queer women, devoted several articles to the issue, with notably an infographic detailing the fate of queer female characters in TV series that aired in the United States from 1976 to 2016. They found that 11% of shows had lesbian or bisexual female characters, and in those shows, only 16% had happy endings for these characters. [2] Autostraddle’s staff also compiled a list of all queer women who died in series from all over the world: the current estimation, taking into account recent shows, is close to 200 (Hogan; Riese). Recent yearly reports from GLAAD that analyze the state of LGBTQ+ representations in U.S. media (primetime scripted series regulars on broadcast networks, cable networks, and streaming services) concur. In the opening letter to the 2016-2017 report, Sarah Kellis, President and CEO of GLAAD, wrote,

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Since the beginning of 2016, more than 25 queer female characters have died on scripted television and streaming series. Most of these deaths served no other purpose than to further the narrative of a more central (and often straight, cisgender) character. When there are so few lesbian and bisexual women on television, the decision to kill these characters in droves sends a toxic message about the worth of queer female stories. […] When the most repeated ending for a queer woman is violent death, producers must do better to question the reason for a character’s demise and what they are really communicating to the audience.

4GLAAD’s 2017-2018 report further reveals that while LGBTQ+ representations are somewhat on the rise, they remain largely minor, with only 6.4% of regular characters being queer, and other factors of representation being an area of concern, with a blatant lack of queer characters of color, for example. Overall, the results of these reports foreground the apparent impossibility of queerness in the media, usually either through the death of the queer female character (at the hands of others or through suicide) or the return to normative heterosexuality. How is happiness possible for queer women when all narratives available foreclose queer potential? In a 2014 Medium article, Peyton Thomas articulated this question clearly in the title, “The Girls are Never Supposed to End Up Together: Growing up without the promise of ‘happily ever after.’” (Thomas)

5And yet, contemporary queer female characters are usually received positively by fans and critics, if the consecration of queer actresses and shows centered on queer women at the 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony is any indication. This can leave us wondering why the “Bury Your Gays” or “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” tropes are still so prevalent. Queer storylines in three shows stand out in the way they disrupt the discourse around queer death and expand the possibilities of queer female representations: the first season of One Day at a Time, the single, self-contained episodes from the second season of Master of None (“Thanksgiving”), and the third season of Black Mirror (“San Junipero”). What kind of happiness is available to these queer female characters? It seems that the shows normalize female queerness as something banal, “just like” heterosexuality, and/or reassert its radical emancipatory potential in the face of normative discourses and structures. They strive to frame representations of female queerness within more positive terms, and offer new images of what female queerness can be. In this perspective, their implications are twofold. First, they deviate from a normative and monolithic idea of “happiness,” showing that it is not a stable and permanent state. Rather, “happiness” in this context is a dynamic process that takes on various forms depending on the embodied experience of the character. This points to the importance of situated, intersectional analyses and expands portrayals of queer womanhood. Secondly, the ways in which the producers, writers, and actors of these shows interact with their audiences clearly highlight the stakes of visibility and positive representations insofar as the queer female characters, inspired by the lived experiences of queer women, become fictional role models who, in turn, reassert the possibility of happiness for other queer female viewers (Lawler; Tierney).

6I will thus argue that, aside from generating positive representation and visibility, these shows also strive to subvert expectations about representations of queer women. By refusing to rely on conventional tropes of pain and exclusion, these shows all seek to normalize queer narratives without depoliticizing them. They notably address the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in order to craft a complex narrative about women’s experiences of queerness in the twenty-first century. However, the strategies implemented to this end vary: while One Day at a Time and “Thanksgiving” foreground the here and now, particularly articulating for queer women the need for recognition and stability within both blood and chosen families, “San Junipero” is imbued with futurity and queers the fabric of time itself as it meditates on the forms a queer utopia—Muñoz’s “then and there”—would take.

7In Undoing Gender Judith Butler writes that, “for those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity” (Butler 31). In a world that still does not guarantee full rights for LGBTQ+ people, what is at stake within representation is nothing less than the very possibility to imagine oneself in the world. Popular media is a powerful vehicle to showcase and normalize that possibility, in order to engender visibility, legitimacy, and identification. Throughout her work on queer girlhood, Susan Driver has established the importance of popular culture, and television in particular, “as a process through which queer girls creatively imagine possibilities, forge connections, make meanings, and articulate relations” (14). Regardless of the platform, TV shows thus provide a space where queer audiences may create and redefine possibilities for selfhood and community, but also challenge and counter hegemonic discourses (Driver 242). Netflix [3] especially, has proven particularly popular and effective in disseminating video content online. Owing to the platform’s specific format (encouraging binge-watching and increasing access), the shows can reach a large audience and impact broader representations of LGBTQ+ identities and issues. The platform itself has an important role in normalizing certain storylines, which becomes apparent in all three shows discussed here. In 2008, Rebecca Beirne had noted the problematic history of representations of queer women in popular culture.

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Simultaneously fetishized and ignored, desired and disparaged, they have frequently been represented in popular culture as either oversexed sirens or sexless creatures whose lesbian life warrants nary a moment of screentime. As the move into ‘positive’ representations increased in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so did the problematic tendency to desexualize lesbian characters, coyly ignoring their relationships and intimate lives.

9Here, however, there is no mystery that all queer women in these shows are actually queer. Their portrayals resolutely counter stereotypes, and their storylines clearly center intimacy and desire: they are queer because they overtly love other women. Normalization here means legitimizing this love and giving space for the characters to express it in their own way, taking into account their specific experiences.

10Master of None, a comedy/drama series, centers on Dev, a thirty-year-old actor and the son of Muslim Indian immigrant parents, living in New York. An important recurring character is Denise, one of his best friends and a black butch lesbian. In the second season, released in May 2017, the eighth episode stages a series of Thanksgiving dinners throughout Denise’s childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood as she progressively comes out to those around her: Dev, her mother Catherine, her aunt Joyce, and her grandmother. At first, Catherine struggles to accept her daughter’s identity, notably explaining that she does not want life to be hard for her daughter, since “it is hard enough being a black woman in this world,” while Denise insists on the fact that “nothing’s changed”: “I’m still your daughter.”

11As Denise starts bringing different girlfriends to Thanksgiving dinners, Catherine eventually accepts wholeheartedly her daughter for who she is. Even though the episode closely focuses on Denise’s family dynamics, the rest of the series highlights her broader social interactions: her queerness is never tokenized, fetishized, censored or ridiculed. Furthermore, Denise is also butch, but her masculinity is never derided. In her study of lesbians in media from the 1990s, Ciasullo had pointed out the lack of butch representation, concluding that “the butch is too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented” (Ciasullo 605). Even though she is figured as the stereotypical lesbian, the butch remains too subversive to be represented in popular media. Denise’s portrayal, as well as the unapologetically queer and butch presence of Lena Waithe in media, counter this observation and show that normalizing butchness here does not signify subsuming it into palatable codes of heteronormativity (Villarreal; Weidenfeld).

12One Day at a Time is an original sitcom based on the Norman Lear series from the 1970s and 1980s of the same name, but this time featuring a Cuban-American family led by Penelope, a single working mother, her two teenage children, Elena and Alex, and her mother Lydia. It premiered in January 2017 and, thanks to high ratings, it was subsequently renewed for a second and third seasons. The first season’s storyline is loosely structured around Elena’s upcoming quinceañera, but halfway into the season, Elena realizes she likes girls more than boys and comes out to her familyfirst accidentally to her brother, who overhears her monologue to figure out her feelings, and then to her mother. Her grandmother, her mother, and her younger brother all display unconditional support in their own respective ways, with Lydia turning Elena’s quinceañera dress into a suit. Elena’s estranged father, Victor, is the one who ultimately rejects his daughter, leaving her alone on the dance floor during the traditional father-daughter dance of the quinceañera. Like its predecessor, the series is shot with a multiple-camera set-up, in front of a live, studio audience, in the style of earlier family sitcoms from the 1970s and 1980s, contrasting with more recent single-camera comedies. The shooting style itself already contributes to a normalizing dynamic, by integrating contemporary conversations to older, familiar narrative structures.

13In both cases then, Denise’s and Elena’s stories follow more or less the classic coming-out arc, and allow to normalize queer coming-of-age narratives: teenagehood and puberty confront them with their own inner desires and attractions; the inadequacy they feel within the heterosexual framework has them realize that they function outside this framework; this leads to their self-acceptance and to their coming-out to those closest around them. By contrast, the queer narrative in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” first appears less concerned with normalization. Initially set in 1987, it introduces a young white woman named Yorkie, who visits a nightclub in a beach town called San Junipero, where she meets Kelly, who is black and bisexual; the attraction is mutual. We do not get to see Yorkie’s or Kelly’s coming-out moments; the episode focuses on what happens much farther on in their lives, as we discover that San Junipero is actually a simulated reality where the deceased can live and the elderly can visit, with their younger appearances. In the physical world, the elderly Kelly learns that Yorkie was paralyzed after crashing her car because of her parents’ negative reaction to her coming out. Yorkie wants to be euthanized and live in San Junipero permanently, which Kelly facilitates by marrying her. Kelly reveals however that she does not plan to be uploaded to San Junipero after her own death, honoring the promise she made to her late husband because of the untimely death of their daughter. Ultimately, Kelly does decide to be euthanized and join Yorkie in San Junipero, while being buried alongside her daughter and husband.

14The two women seem to have contrasting experiences of queerness: Yorkie’s family was hostile to the point that Yorkie tried to commit suicide after coming out, and her inexperience and discomfort with sexuality is underscored multiple times. When Kelly drags her on the dance floor the first night they meet, Yorkie soon becomes overwhelmed with the awareness of people looking at her; she feels judged for dancing with another woman and runs away, later rejecting Kelly’s advances. Kelly, by contrast, is much more assertive and confident in her queerness, without judging Yorkie’s lack of experience. Her storyline does not pigeonhole her as a stereotype of bisexuality: her being previously married to a man, and in love with him, does not diminish her attraction to other women. Nor is she flighty or unreliable: her “party girl” demeanor derives from specific experiences unconnected to her sexuality. Thus, “San Junipero” normalizes female queerness, not by staging a coming-out narrative but by moving forward in time and interrogating how queerness may or may not connect with other issues, such as euthanasia or technology. Furthermore, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Kelly, said about her role that she “just needed to express some joy” and indeed, it is that rare episode in the Black Mirror series to actually have a happy, hopeful ending: one of the last shots we get of Kelly and Yorkie are the two of them driving Yorkie’s red convertible on a road that disappears into the sunset. The simulated reality does not destroy humanity, but provides a refuge and heaven for the main characters. Even if the episode clearly connects its discussion of queerness with that of death, it does not give in to the conventional death-bound narrative of queerness [4] (Yorkie can finally be her queer self once she dies) because it strives to redefine the terms of death and life themselves: Yorkie’s and Kelly’s bodies may be buried, but their consciousness is still active within the electrical currents—the pulse—of the servers. Furthermore, the portrayal of Kelly and Yorkie’s relationship is clearly intentional, as explained by Charlie Brooker on how the idea developed to EW:

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It was a heterosexual couple when I first put the story down. And then I thought, “Well, what if it wasn’t?” And I think it gives it an extra resonance because they couldn’t have legally got married in 1987, so we’re gifting them that in this world, in this story of second chances. And that added an extra layer to the whole subtext about reliving your life and exploring things you didn’t have a chance to do.

16This decision highlights their awareness of not only the need for specific visibility, but also the possibilities media—and TV, in particular—offer for expanding narrative horizons in relation to identity formations. The intentionality of the narrative contributes to the politicized normalization of representations of female queerness because it also forces us to reevaluate what effectively changes when switching from a heterosexual framework to a queer framework.

17Ann Ciasullo’s observation from 2001 still rings mostly true: “most recent mainstream representations of lesbianism are normalized—heterosexualized—or ‘straightened out’—via the femme body. […] on mainstream cultural landscapes, the femme body is nearly always a white, upper-middle class body” (Ciasullo 578). However, recent shows featuring queer female characters are countering this dominant mode of representation. In particular, the narrative of each show studied here emphasizes how normalizing queerness should not mean stripping it of its broader social, political, and historical context. Queerness is never presented in a vacuum, which is crucial insofar as all shows notably foreground queer characters of color, from different social backgrounds, and thus point to the necessity of thinking and representing queerness through a perspective that takes into account the complexities of multi-valenced identities. In short, even though they are characters on mainstream shows that normalize queer identities, Elena, Denise, and Kelly are not made “palatable for mainstream consumers to consume” (Ciasullo 579): instead their portrayals account for the complexity and depth of their characters, who must reckon with and navigate the broader social and political context. Visibility is not enough: in fact, as Kara Keeling puts it, “regimes of visibility are sites of historical struggles over dominant meanings and over what socio-political formations will garner legitimacy via representation” (Keeling 218). In this context, the shows’ queer characters dismantle these dominant meanings by bringing to the forefront discussions about their class, race, and subjectivities.

18In Master of None, Denise is black, and her race is never glossed over: blackness is discussed throughout the episode, which allows for deeper insights into the formation of black female subjectivities. When mention is made of the O.J. Simpson trial or of Sandra Bland’s death in a prison cell, this does not just ground the moment within a particular timeframe and a specific set of political circ*mstances: it opens up a broader conversation among the characters about race relations and police brutality in the United States. As a child, Denise pays particular attention to the language used around her, asking her mother what words like “minority” or “disenfranchised” mean. Under the cover of humor, Catherine encourages this awareness, and later on, in adulthood, Denise is shown to be highly sensitive to the ways in which blackness, queerness, and womanhood are represented in society, as evidenced by her reaction to Sandra Bland’s death: “It’s like, she reminded me so much of myself. She was woke. She was confident. She didn’t take no sh*t. The scary thing is, that’s what got her killed.”

19Elena’s portrayal is much more fixed in time, since the first season only shows her in the months leading up to her quinceañera, but it clearly depicts her as an intelligent and sensitive Latina teenager who makes no mystery about her feminist ideals. Her passion for social justice—which involves such schemes as implementing a new composting system at her school’s cafeteria—is often a source of humor because of her unbridled enthusiasm and her own flaws: the show pokes gentle fun at her when it is revealed for example that she does not take the bus as she boasted about, because her desire to reduce her carbon footprint was overshadowed by her realization that she hates public transportation. But ultimately her passion is never ridiculed; instead, it is shown as something intrinsic to Elena’s strong character, inherited from her mother and grandmother. Questions of cultural heritage, history, gender, social class, and systemic racism are repeatedly addressed in the show: one episode is entirely devoted to the situation of Carmen, Elena’s best friend, who was born in the United States of Mexican parents who end up being deported. This spurs a discussion on the implications of racist immigration policies and on the representations of working-class Latino immigrants in the US. Elena also confronts the delicate situation of being tokenized when she learns she was accepted as the “diversity” candidate at a prestigious writing competition. She ultimately steps up, asserting: “I’m going to make sure that they don’t forget that I’m Cuban”—she is simultaneously navigating issues of race and queerness, and learning how she can maintain her agency.

20Because both shows are so clearly set within communities of color, they manage to avoid colorblindness, along with stereotypes that would paint communities of color as inherently more hom*ophobic than white ones. In One Day at a Time, Victor’s lack of understanding and rejection of his daughter are portrayed as a generational issue, and not a cultural one, as he claims that Elena is only gay because it is a thing teenagers do to get attention. In Master of None, if Catherine is unsettled at first by her daughter’s affirmation of her lesbian identity, her reaction stems less from hom*ophobia or conservative ideology than from a place of fear: fear that Denise has her odds stacked up against her in a world that is fundamentally hostile to all she is—Black, woman, lesbian. Catherine’s reaction is then a viscerally protective one: she views her daughter’s hom*osexuality as one more source of difficulty and struggle. As the episode progresses and she must come face to face with her daughter’s unabashed identity, she realizes that queerness also implies joy and happiness—here in the form of Denise and Michelle’s relationship. It does not hurt that Michelle is black: Catherine seems to be more understanding of her daughter’s queerness if it keeps on centering Blackness, as she gripes to Joyce about her dismay at the idea of Denise bringing home a white girl, like “Jennifer Aniston,” one of Denise’s earliest crushes. Beyond the humor of the scene—Joyce further teases Catherine by warning her that “Becky is coming. And Megan. And Katie!”—queerness is accepted as long as it does not involve the dominant framework of whiteness, further highlighting the ways that race and sexuality intersect, and can never be wholly separated.

21In “San Junipero,” Kelly’s blackness is never truly mentioned. While this can be partly interpreted as a form of depoliticized colorblindness, which declines to account for the consequences of racial dynamics, both in the 1987 setting and in the contemporary era, it may also be, simultaneously, another normalizing strategy. The episode foregrounds an interracial relationship between two women, and emphasizes the natural chemistry that pulls them toward each other, with Kelly explaining that she avoided Yorkie because she had instantly developed feelings for her, something that had not happened with anyone else in the town. San Junipero—both the city and the episode—is deployed as a haven, where one’s identity is not the source of judgment or ostracization: Yorkie can finally know what it is like to live as a queer woman without the weight of shame. In the same way, we could construe San Junipero as the place where Kelly’s blackness will not be synonymous with the violence wrought upon black people, and black queer women in particular, in contemporary society. In this perspective, San Junipero could function as a respite, a window that lets its viewers glimpse the world as it could be, unfettered by racial oppression, and Kelly could be said to embody the spirit of the “carefree black girl,” a concept that first emerged as a hashtag on Twitter, invented by writer Zeba Blay. Diamond Sharp explained its importance and relevance for black women, who “have used it to anchor expressions of individuality and whimsy in the face of the heavy stereotypes and painful realities that too often color discussions of their demographic” (Sharp)—Kelly’s blackness thus remains politicized, albeit in more subtle ways.

22As one of the structures articulating the private realm of the self with the public, social realm, family appears as a decisive space where the understanding of and negotiations around sexuality can take place. In One Day at a Time and Master of None, family acceptance is portrayed as crucial to the coming-out process: security in one’s sexuality includes being accepted by the people one grew up with. This acceptance is not mere indifference to the daughter’s sexuality: it is active understanding of the daughter’s experience and unconditional inclusion of the daughter into the shared space of the home, which is characterized as a haven, both in its physical form (the house or the apartment) and its non-physical form (the community created within the house). The ending shots of the “Thanksgiving” episode and of the One Day at a Time finale display obvious similarities: the family is shown united, together, not just in harmony, but also in solidarity. In One Day At a Time, Elena has just been rejected by her father who showed up at the quinceañera but left just before the traditional father-daughter dance. Her mother then takes the initiative of dancing with her, telling her “I got you,” the same way her own mother, Lydia, told her “I got you” and hugged her when Penelope was going through a hard time. Lydia and Alex then come in to complete the family tableau, as do Schneider and Dr. Berkowitz, two other characters who have become part of the extended, chosen family. This final scene implies that because of his previous actions—lying to Penelope about his drinking, openly rejecting Elena—Victor is ultimately excluded from the familial circle: family is based on unconditional support.

23In the closing moments of Master Of None, everyone is reunited at the Thanksgiving table: three generations of women, along with Dev, who has been present every single year since he was young, and Michelle, Denise’s girlfriend who has been embraced by the whole family. They are holding hands to say grace and communing together, as they share food, conversation, and the unspoken knowledge that they all respect and love one another. The final shot is a callback to the very first Thanksgiving scene shown, when Dev and Denise were young children: in both scenes, the camera hovers over the table, as we see mainly the heads and the outstretched hands of the characters. The shape of the table reasserts the importance of the circle as a visual motif and symbol of harmony, which becomes what cannot be broken: paired with the cyclical nature of the Thanksgiving ritual, it highlights how the relationships formed around the table are embedded within a logic of community and solidarity. Michelle’s presence also furthers the symbolism of the circle: this is the second time she is present for Thanksgiving, but this time she is accepted, whereas her first appearance, coinciding with Denise’s first Thanksgiving dinner while out to her family, highlighted Catherine’s rejection. The last scene then comes full circle, and positions the Thanksgiving meal as the completion of the family’s journey to acceptance.

24Maintaining the importance of the blood family in the coming-out process and of the parent-child reproductive framework can be interpreted as a normative element, but only insofar as we consider that the parent-child relation is located within a purely heteronormative framework. Here, however, the daughter’s attachment to maintaining strong affective ties with her family, and most particularly her mother, while navigating her queerness, is not positioned as an attachment to normative structures. The characters are depicted either as teenagers, for Elena, or as growing from childhood to young adulthood, for Denise: in both cases, throughout this period, family serves as a cornerstone of their lives, bringing stability and harmony. The mother especially is the central figure of this family unit, and acts as a role model to the daughter’s construction of her subjectivity: securing the love and support of the mother (rather than her mere approval) appears as necessary to both Elena and Denise, to ensure that their identity rests on strong, stable foundations. It is not enough for them to know they are queer and have reached self-acceptance; maintaining the link with the mother and the family ensures they maintain a stable identity framework. This is evidenced for example by Denise telling Catherine, “I’m still your daughter” when she comes out to her, or Elena repeatedly praising her mother’s inspirational strength. The coming-out process thus acts as a moment of reaffirmation of female lineage: by coming out to her mother, the daughter is inscribing herself in the heritage of the mother’s strength and stability.

25In “San Junipero,” however, blood family proves a much more ambivalent site, and queerness is framed rather in terms of chosen family. Kelly has lost both her chosen family (her husband) and her blood family (her daughter); and her final decision, to have her consciousness uploaded permanently to San Junipero, becomes a choice between two chosen families, two different types of allegiance: her husband or Yorkie. Yorkie’s family rejects her on the basis of her sexuality, which leads to Yorkie purposefully crashing her car in order to find some form of escape in death. When that fails, and she remains in a coma, she places her trust in others around her to help her achieve her goal, asking Greg, her nurse, to marry her so that he can consent to her euthanasia, which her blood family refuses to do. Especially within the framework of the possibility of life after death, family becomes in “San Junipero” a site where the characters can navigate and reshape the line between who they are and who they want to be.

26I would also go one step further and argue that the families of One Day at a Time and Master of None are profoundly queered in their own way. The first striking feature of both these families in both shows is that the traditional male father figure is always absent, and there is no mystery that his presence is either not desired or judged unhealthy for the rest of the family. Catherine mentions that she “couldn’t keep a man” and that she hates “shacking up,” implying that her desire for independence, even while running a household, is a deterrent to a stable heterosexual relationship and absolutely non-negotiable. Penelope has separated from her husband Victor and is planning on divorcing him because he continually refuses to get treatment for his PTSD and alcoholism, which led him, in the past, to endanger his wife and children. At first, Penelope’s decision puts her at odds with her mother, whose Catholic religious beliefs have her morally condemn the divorce (“We are Cuban. We don’t get divorced, we die!”). Penelope does mention her wish to find a man with whom she could build a romantic relationship, and takes active steps to date at certain points in the show, going as far as almost resuming her relationship with Victor when he seems to have gotten his life back in order. However, when it is revealed Victor has not truly changed, Penelope stands by her family and her decision to go through with the divorce: she decides to foster a safe and healthy environment for her family, and her daughter in particular, rather than upholding heteronormative values of what a nuclear family should look like. Lydia supports her in this decision, having come to realize the harm Victor is causing.

27While Catherine first invokes the absence of the father as a potential reason for her daughter’s lesbianism, that reason is quickly and firmly dismissed by her sister Aunt Joyce. In One Day at a Time, the only time the father’s absence comes up as a potential reason for the daughter’s queerness is when Victor implicitly mentions it. In the final episode, he places the blame on Penelope for not raising Elena “right,” but here again Penelope squarely dismisses this as chauvinistic nonsense. More generally, the complementariness of womanhood and manhood is interrogated, and the female characters get to define themselves on their own terms. When Lydia tries at various points to get Elena to wear makeup and be more enthusiastic about her quinceañera, so that, by abiding by traditional codes of femininity, she may fulfill the goal of attracting male attention, Elena rejects such a view of femininity that remains dependent on the male gaze. Penelope’s encounters with sexism in the workplace result in her learning to stand up for herself and negotiating a higher salary. These depictions of the family are thus embedded in a feminist and female-centered world where the queer female characters derive their strength from the other women around them, who are shown as polyvalent role models taking on both conventional “feminine” caregiver and “masculine” breadwinner attributes. Following David Halperin’s definition of queer as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin 62), these families are thus inherently queered insofar as they are positioned against dominant discourses about gender roles and familial structures.

28In the process of disrupting conventional narratives about gender and sexuality, these shows introduce queered temporalities that appear as the necessary frame for representations of happy endings for queer characters. Against dominant and conventional narratives that situate queerness as part of a death-driven and death-bound dynamic, they inscribe queerness within a productive, life-affirming dynamic that disrupts the usual teleology of heteronormativity. As such, these shows produce queer utopias, by having the queer fantasy irrupt into material reality. In Undoing Gender, Butler remarked that “the struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy—through censorship, degradation, or other means—is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons” (Butler 28). Here, the fantasy of asserting and living out one’s queerness becomes possible; it is not censored or stigmatized but celebrated and viewed as something enriching reality.

29In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz already situated queerness within a utopian drive: “An antiutopian might understand himself as being critical in rejecting hope, but in the rush to denounce it, he would be missing the point that hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia, which is nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (Muñoz 12). The shows provide us with at least glimpses into what this “utopia” could look like by disrupting and resisting the temporal logic of heteronormativity. Because it is linear and teleological, the latter ultimately appears as the death-driven dynamic, contrasting with representations of circular queer temporalities that allow for incessant renewal, or at the very least, for broader access to possibilities.

30Queered temporality is perhaps least apparent in One Day at a Time, but nonetheless traces can be found, notably in the format itself: whereas “San Junipero” and “Thanksgiving” are filmed in a way that mostly erases reminders that these are staged performances, the set-up of One Day at a Time—where the live, studio audience audibly reacts, characters occasionally break the fourth wall, and references to literature and media function as inside jokes [5]—prevents us from completely suspending disbelief. Maintaining the evidence of this constructed relationship between the actors and actresses on the one hand, and the audience on the other, and integrating the different temporalities into the fabric of the show itself, effect queer temporalities that go against the grain of linearity. The limited number of sets (the apartment with different rooms, Penelope’s office, and Schneider’s apartment are the main recurring sets; others appear occasionally, depending on narrative needs) also tends to create the effect of a bubble: within those spaces, time flows differently, and since this is a family sitcom, time carries the promise of mostly positive resolution. Similarly, through its repetitive structure, combining both linear and cyclical elements, “Thanksgiving” offers a hybrid approach to temporality that eludes straightforward storytelling and emphasizes what changes and what remains, with the value placed more visibly on the latter. Denise’s family dynamics evolve with time and with her coming-out; Catherine’s attitude and views also evolve; but what remains is the love uniting the family. The choice to stage this at Thanksgiving, a holiday that has been mythologized into American culture, is not insignificant. The show largely eschews a conversation on the historical sources of Thanksgiving, and the violence it carries, but focuses instead on the cyclical and regenerative potential of the holiday: with each new Thanksgiving, Denise gets not exactly a fresh start, but another chance at reinventing her relationship with her family and her mother especially. Adhering to the family customs does not mean remaining stuck in the “stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (Muñoz 12). Instead, it affirms the multiple possibilities in the present.

31The utopian drive and the possibilities for new opportunities are most apparent in “San Junipero,” precisely because the setting of ‘simulated’ reality imposes a different approach to temporality and to the construction of utopias. Whether at the level of the body or of reality itself, temporality is constantly disrupted and no longer linear. In order to find Kelly, Yorkie must jump to different years within the reality of San Junipero, thus following the advice someone gives her: “Try a different time.” She tries various dates in the 1980s and 1990s and we learn that San Junipero was created as a tool for Alzheimer’s patients: immersive nostalgia therapy could help resist, if not counter, the loss of memory. In parallel is the temporality of the physical world, which does not coincide with that of San Junipero. Kelly and Yorkie are both elderly women; the former has a generalized cancer, the latter is quadriplegic and comatose, and they experienced lived time differently. Their avatars are the ones allowed to retain their youthful appearance. Only after their death do they have the possibility to live continually in the simulated reality, and experience both daytime and nighttime there. The juxtaposition of different years, which one can access within the same virtual space, contrasts with the linearity of time in the physical world. Kelly mentions several times that because of her cancer, she does not have much time left, and the ending is inevitably death. By contrast, even though living patients are limited to five hours a week in San Junipero—waking back into physical reality when clocks display midnight in the beach town—the concept of time running out plays out differently, since there is always the possibility of coming back and staying forever.

32The simulated reality then becomes the alternate end-reality for the mind, giving a way out of the physical termination to which the body is inevitably assigned: temporalities and possibilities proliferate in San Junipero, which becomes the ultimate utopia because it fractures and resists the death-bound linearity of the present in the physical world. Can dying still be called dying, then, asks Greg? The omnipresence of the sea as setting and symbol is significant here, associating identity and change—the sea is the same, but the water constantly flows. After she “passes over,” the first shot we see of Yorkie is her sitting on the beach, taking in her new condition and surroundings: the proximity of water and waves symbolically reinforces the complexity of her location, at the nexus of liminality and eternity (San Junipero being both a place of transition and permanence). Yorkie clearly sees San Junipero’s world as the better reality, because she can regain the agency she lost in the non-virtual world and fulfill the potential of a life spent comatose: she can walk, but most importantly she can desire and be desired. This is not the case at first for Kelly, who does not believe in an afterlife. The two women’s different conceptions of what ‘forever’ means collide when Kelly reveals the promise she made to her husband and the significance it carries. Her wry response to Greg’s question about dying—“Uploaded to the cloud, sounds like heaven”—highlights her ambivalence regarding the nature and the purpose of San Junipero: what kind of existence is it if we are reduced to data uploaded into virtual space? However, even she ultimately decides to commit to San Junipero after her death. She reconciles the promise she made with her desire to be with Yorkie by having her body be interred with her husband and her daughter, while having her consciousness permanently transferred to San Junipero. The juxtaposition of different types of eternities—for the body and for the mind—remains unstable, since San Junipero’s servers could be shut down, begging the question of what would happen to the uploaded consciousness. However, as Yorkie reiterates, San Junipero is “not a trap” but just a different kind of reality that anyone can leave at any moment. Ultimately, this disruption of temporality forces us to reassess whether this ‘simulated’ reality is any less real than the physical world we conventionally deem reality. After dying and “passing over” to San Junipero, Yorkie is ecstatic: she keeps touching things around her—the car, the sand—and exclaiming joyfully how all of this is “real.”

33Is Denise happy? Is Elena? Are we certain that Yorkie and Kelly have gotten a “happy ending” together? By the time their storyline comes to a close, all characters seem to be living in an environment that has embraced them, and where they can thrive, even when their status as “alive” can be questioned. These shows have been hailed by fans as examples of positive representations, since they foreground queer love and joy. By showcasing three-dimensional characters that face complex issues, they help us reimagine what happiness looks like: not a static, perennial state, but a dynamic one, which we must eternally renew in various ways—particularly through community and relationality. As such, they stand out in the current landscape of popular culture in the United States, and highlight the changes regarding queer representation that have occurred in the last two decades.

34Concluding her analysis of lesbian representation throughout the nineties, Ann Ciasullo states that “although the 1990s may be perceived as a decade in love with lesbianism, we would do well to consider the ways that this love, channeled through commodification and consumerism, through identification and desire, helps to determine not only who gets seen but what it means to be seen after all” (605). While we cannot separate the shows discussed here from the consumerist framework in which they exist and function, and which may limit their power of subversion, since they are cultural products manufactured and tailored for the consumption of a certain millennial audience, we cannot deny that they grant queer female audiences something that remains rare to this day: beyond visibility and role models, the possibility to imagine new worlds and the affirmation of happy endings. Identification and desire are heavily deployed in all three shows, but center queer women, something which ensures that queer characters are not repackaged for (male) heterosexual consumption. Furthermore, the creation itself of these episodes never sidelined queer voices and reflect a particular intentionality when it comes to crafting queer narratives that do not play into stereotypes or revive the same tired tropes; and audiences reacted well to all three stories, hailing them as fresh, timely, important, and realistic, with the idea that these are stories that were long overdue (Deggans; Villarreal; Weidenfeld). These shows have provided us with something relatively unique for contemporary mainstream TV series: complex queer female characters who do not die and whose queerness is expressed on their own terms. I suggest that these three shows offer a space where the difference marked by queerness can be reclaimed into a positive affirmation of identity that is not hom*ogenized into dominant and normative conceptions of identity.

35The last song to be played in “San Junipero,” as we see Kelly and Yorkie reuniting and enjoying their new life together, is Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” It is a fitting echo of the issues at stake for both women in the episode; it also points to the ways in which “San Junipero” reimagines queerness as a space of unfettered possibilities. In the Black Mirror episode, queer life must rewrite the very fabric of time and reality to realize its full potential; “Thanksgiving” and One Day at a Time effectively try to bring “heaven”—the then and there—to “earth”—the here and now—by showcasing narratives recognized as “authentic” and based on the lives of their contemporary audiences. In short, these three shows offer us queer utopias, locating happiness in the possibility to imagine an existence for oneself.