Queer coding  

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"My taste includes both snails and oysters"--Laurence Olivier (Marcus Licinius Crassus to his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) in Spartacus as an example of queer coding.

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Queer coding is the subtextual coding of a character in media as Queer. Though such a character's sexual identity may not be explicitly confirmed within their respective work, a character might be coded as queer through the use of traits and stereotypes recognisable to the audience. Such traits are greatly varied, but traits of exaggerated masculinity and femininity, vanity, and hypersexuality are frequent. Queer coding is a pertinent concept both in the discussion of media portrayal of LGBT people and academic research involving queer theory or gender studies.

Impact

Queer coding is similar to queerbaiting, but the queer coding of a character is neutral and intrinsic to the work, unlike queerbaiting, which often invokes queerness in order to draw viewership. However, queer coding may have a negative impact on perceptions of queerness in media; villains are often queer-coded, leading to the pejorative perception of queer traits. Critics have noted the Walt Disney Company's attribution of queer characteristics and behaviors to villainous or antagonistic characters.

Many believe Andreas Deja, a gay man and supporting animator for the Disney villains Scar and Jafar, based them on himself. However, Andreas actually based Scar on his English language voice actor Jeremy Irons, and Jafar's appearance by Conrad Veidt, an actor famous for his villainous roles who was heterosexual.

Culture critics have claimed that this attribution can lead to a negative association between queerness and immoral, licentious behavior. Even if the villains were not portrayed as being evil as a result of their queerness, the association between queer characteristics and unethical figures remains.

History

The idea of non-explicit queer coding likely stems from the strict regulations of how queer characters were able to be portrayed in the early days of film-making. In 1930, The Hays Code was established as a standard for what was allowed to be shown on the big screen. According to the code, films were not allowed to portray "perverse" subjects such as homosexuality, which inevitably led to the portrayal of non-explicit queer characters. The trend of the inclusivity of queer characters in a subtextual way likely bled into modern portrayals of queer characters. Commentary on the treatment of LGBT+ characters in film is made in the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, and is one of the first instances in which the idea of queer coding is presented to the public.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Queer coding" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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