Chatman, DaynaCaprioglio, Teresa2024-08-072024-08-072024-08-07https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29758In 2016, the CW network series The 100 came under fire for the on-screen death of a lesbian series regular, immediately following a queer sexual encounter. In the aftermath, fans, trade press, and even network insiders themselves made statements seeking an alternate mode of engaging queerness on television, ever more distant from the “Bury Your Gays” trope of queer death. In this dissertation, the question is: what, if anything, has changed?This queer- and trauma-theory-focused critical analysis of three separate case studies, including five different superhero and speculative fiction CW series for whom all or the majority of their episodes aired post-spring 2016, investigates the ways in which queer identity and trauma are interwoven in the development of queer characters and queer storytelling. Often subject to similar modes of investigation and necessary confession as a facet of characterization as sexuality and the ever-present coming out narrative, trauma and recovery form key identity categories for TV characters—and, this dissertation asserts, queer characters especially. The act of claiming these identities is key to the character-focused style of primetime drama, connecting the confession of trauma with the confession of sexuality and the experience of trauma with the possibility of queer identity. Despite the otherworldly and occasionally universe-altering content of these speculative fiction series, existing tropes of queer representation, queer trauma, and queerphobic violence are utilized alongside more open, nuanced queer identity markers in a way that both reinforces and suggests routes of possibility outside longstanding industrial queercoding, queerphobia, and queer death for queer characters and queer storylines on television. However, even in constructing these new forms of meaning making, additional intersecting pressures of racial stereotyping, classism, and sexism enact restrictions on the possibilities of constructing new articulations of identity, self, and family. This dissertation posits that the spaces between these historical industrial norms and new horizons for queer storytelling are a result of integrative, nearly defiant representative strategies, which provide for the pushing of boundaries while largely retaining existing norms. The lack of profitability that the CW has apparently experienced, however, suggests that this integrative representation as an industrial strategy is not a sustainable one. Nevertheless, continuing to link queerness, trauma, and speculative fiction demonstrates an unfortunate baseline of queerphobic violence and queer trauma as “to be expected” or otherwise key to forming a queer identity. While the spaces for defiance have been opened, this dissertation contends that there is still considerable work to be done, largely in refiguring and reimagining what slow-changing, conservative industrial structures concede to producing.en-USAll Rights Reserved.media industriesqueer storytellingrepresentationtelevisiontraumaElectronic Thesis or Dissertation