Excerpt:
When I put on Netflix’s Teenage Bounty Hunters for the first time, I wasn’t expecting much. I had spent the last hour laying on my couch, continuously revolving between crying over the woman that had just ghosted me on tinder and the rejection email I received on top of that while listening to songs professionally engineered to make me even sadder…I was having, in short, a bad day. So, the show seemed like a perfect, mind-numbing distraction. What I found was much, much more.
In the pilot, you’re introduced to stereotypical mean girl, April Stevens. She is a holier than thou teen at an elite Christian private school. You have seen her before. Her venom is familiar — like Regina George (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls), Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), or Rose McGowan’s Courtney Shayne in Jawbreaker, you assume she is unfailingly apathetic. (Or, maybe, just a teenager.)
However, in 1×08 From Basic To Telenovela, April Stevens becomes an outlier. She boldly claims both her lesbianism and her God in a busy arcade in Atlanta, Georgia.
This piece was initially published on Medium on October 5, 2020. For the complete article, please visit: https://vlsrvn.medium.com/on-southern-queerness-and-representation-1bb19a971f0e
