‘Unsticking’ Kid Cosmic: Lifting the burden of gendered certainty in children’s TV

Abstract

In recent years, American children’s animated TV has slowly begun to depict queerness in explicit ways, with a handful of shows portraying gender non-conforming characters and same-gender relationships. Still others have provided pathways to reading queer alterity in an absence of apparent queerness by celebrating and embracing uncertainty, change and difference. This article focuses on the latter in relation to textual analysis, exploring ‘unsticking’ in Kid Cosmic, an animated show that turns over and complicates the neo-liberal, individualistic superhero tropes typical of many comic books and comic book movies. Following Kid and his three companions as they negotiate newfound powers, the show offers the opportunity to read queerness in children and children’s TV not as an additive quality or monolithic struggle but rather as a fluid, uncertain, unfixed and ever-changing process of motion. As Kid and his companions’ bodies are transcendently lifted from existing representational frameworks and thrown through space – unstuck from the ground and from their daily lives – they come to comprise something, I argue, quite radical.