Rae's Reflections

By Rachel Badham

Queerbaiting: straight-up bad or a complex expression of identity?

I’m a few years late to the party, but I’ve recently started listening to Billie Eilish. While trawling through her music videos on YouTube, one in particular stood out to me, as it did to a lot of LGBTQ+ people. In the video for one of her more recent songs, Lost Cause, Billie can be seen at what can only be described as a sleepover with a group of women, and there’s certainly a strong queer subtext.

Most celebrities are involved in some kind of controversy at some point, and this video definitely sparked some backlash for Billie, who is presumed to be heterosexual and cisgender. While some believe that Billie is queer, many LGBTQ+ people accused her of queerbaiting.

Queerbaiting is a phenomenon seen in the media where LGBTQ+ themes and identities are alluded to but not actually made explicit. It tends to cause so much outrage as its widely believed to be a marketing technique, used to attract consumers without actually supporting the LGBTQ+ community or providing authentic representation.

Queerbaiting is widely considered to minimise the validity of queer identities and relationships, while also profiting off of this. As a queer sapphic person, I’ve certainly experienced the anger that many felt when seeing Billie’s music video, particularly when I was younger and was struggling with internalised biphobia and homophobia.

I remember being particularly put out when Shakira and Rihanna released the video for I Can’t Remember To Forget You, which featured the pair getting very close despite both of them being straight.

“Something I have begun to consider more recently is to what extent are we policing queerness and what it means to be queer in the 21st century. What if Billie Eilish’s self-directed music video was her way of exploring her identity”

Like many LGBTQ+ people, I believe that queerbaiting is a harmful and inaccurate representation of LGBTQ+ identities. The eroticism seen in content such as Billie’s video is not an issue, or rather it isn’t for me personally. However, a lot of queerbait content (particularly that which features sexual tension between women) is often presented to appeal to a male audience, and it is this that reinforces the notion that bisexuality and queer identities are not valid.

What needs to be considered is the intention of the creator rather than just the content itself. However, something I have begun to consider more recently is to what extent are we policing queerness and what it means to be queer in the 21st century. What if Billie Eilish’s self-directed music video was her way of exploring her identity?

Another example of queerbaiting (or rather what some refer to as queerbaiting) I see frequently is Harry Styles’ fashion choices. The musician is known for his gender-neutral outfits that blend masculine and feminine pieces to create a look that is generally considered to be inspired by queer culture.

Although it is unclear how Harry identifies, he is currently in a relationship with a woman and has not been in any public relationships with people of the same gender as himself. When asked about his sexuality, he often says he would prefer not to label it. As a result, some have accused him of wearing queerness as a kind of costume.

The problem here is that while queerbaiting is definitely real and harmful, dismissing somebody’s exploration of their sexuality or gender as queerbaiting is also damaging, and reinforces a system of rigidity that many LGBTQ+ people have felt pigeonholed into. And there are certainly undertones of biphobia in much of the criticism Harry faces.

Perhaps if we stopped judging people’s expression of their identity so harshly, everybody would feel less constrained to heterosexual and cisgender norms, and we would see a greater understanding of the fluidity of sexuality and gender.

In Meg John-Barker’s illustrated guide to queer history and culture (Queer: A Graphic History), they describe queerness as an action rather than a fixed state of being, and explained that queer thinking involves moving away from black and white perception. It avoids polarising and binary statements, with Meg saying we should all “aim to queer things through revealing the strangeness of normativity”.

Reading this truly changed my perception of not only what it means to identify as queer, but what it means to think in a way that rejects the tools heteronormative and cisnormative culture has used to oppress everybody for so long. As a pansexual person, I can’t deny that the representation that makes me happiest to see is explicitly queer and LGBTQ+ created, but queerness is complex and everybody is fluid.

Queerbaiting is real, but queerness is also real and comes in so many shapes and sizes that we are only just beginning to see represented in the media. So, let’s embrace being queer in all its diversity, and maybe think twice before dismissing something as queerbaiting.