Pushing Normalcy with Queer Representation in Sex Education
Sex Education is a British high school coming of age series produced by Jamie Campbell, Ben Taylor, Laurie Nunn that tackles sex and drama within an English secondary school setting. The show at first seems like the typical high school drama populated with stereotypical quite nerdy protagonist, black gay best friend, angsty outcast girl, popular jock, and mean girls, but the show takes these troupes and extends them into reality. What I mean by this is that Sex Education intentially destroys these troupes, by making the characters actual characters with nuanced personalities and motivations erasing their character molds that many teen coming of age media holds. But what truly sets Sex Education apart is it’s representation.
Sex Education challenges the represenation of minorities in art by essentially normalizing diversity. The show has gay characters without having to make being gay the defining trait or having characters stop to discuss the gayness as if to wink at the audience about the subsequent representation. This show reminded me very much of Jose Esteban Munoz’s Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.
Munoz explains how the representation of queerness in popular media is often reduced to a checklist of minority and limited to being an evidence of inclusion rather than a nuanced or “ephemeral” representation of people. Munoz describes the nuances of queerness that should be presented as ephemera. He defines ephemera as including feelings and lived experiences rather than the simple label of queer (which is what he considers evidence). Sex Eduction very much represents with nuance not simply for the sake of a checklist, but because it is natural to reality. In this way the show works to challenge social perceptions of normalcy through the ephemera of film.
Munoz touches on the forces that act against queer representation with cultural and intellentiual work. People see cis as the standard and therefore push represenation that way. There is a need to conform to some preconceived notion of normalcy. In my opinion it is ultimately governed by a person’s perceived reality. Sex education works to push that reality by representing without patting itself on the back for doing so. In a sense, it shows the audience that representation is not a big deal, but rather natural. This on it’s own pushes the envelope of representation in the right direction. I think in the context of queerness, despite the pushback in media, the act of queer representation, true queer representation, will ulitmately get the ball rolling in the right direction. The heteronormativity of society projects queerness as an archetype or a singularity, evidence rather than epherma. In this way Sex Educations works to reverse that process and brings the ephemera to the screen.
