Indifference and queer television studies: distinguishing norms of existence and coexistence

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper deploys a case study of the first transgender lead character in Flemish television fiction—Kaat Bomans in the soap opera Thuis [Home] (één, 1995–)—to engage an underexplored distinction between the televisual dissemination of identity norms that regulate the embodied difference of sexual and gender minorities and ethical norms that prescribe moral modes of interacting with social difference. Conceived of as a representation normative to transgender existence, Kaat reifies identity norms that dictate how transpeople may legitimately embody difference. These reduce the diversity of transgender subjectivities into a singular and stable identity premised on binary gender conformity. Approached as a narrative that produces normative frames for cisgender people too, however, the case study shows that Kaat’s storyline propagates ethical norms on moral modes of coexistence and the negotiation of difference. Prescribing ethical indifference as a moral framework to negotiate difference in interpersonal interactions, Thuis invites viewers to acknowledge others’ difference without centralizing it as the central modality to social interaction. Supplementing identity-based television critique with reflection on ethical frameworks, the essay argues in conclusion, allows scholarship to not only critique what television is doing wrong, but to formulate what television should be doing to make things better.