Introduction: Queerbaiting

Abstract

Abstract Fans employ ‘queerbaiting’ to call out media producers and performers who they believe have deliberately inserted homoerotic subtext in order to court a queer following and yet never actualize this subtext; it has attracted a level of cultural currency in the popular and scholarly field. In this introduction to the Journal of Fandom Studies special issue on the topic, the issue’s guest editor sets out how the term has developed in extant scholarship, including more recent expansion to account for manifest queerness deemed negative. Articles of the present collection, five in total, are then introduced in line with their connection with current debates and how they advance understandings of the term. Future research directions for scholars writing on the topic are also considered.