Keith Clavin and Lauren J. Kuryloski
Abstract: This article argues for a queer historicizing of the gender constructions of the characters of Will Byers, Eleven, and Steve Harrington in Stranger Things. We propose that these characters embody complementary gender and temporal thresholds. In the instance of Will, his sexuality is interrogated from the show’s beginning, which opens an interpretive space for a critique of the location of queer bodies that are often lost in discussions of 1980s popular culture. Whereas in the cases of Eleven and Steve, each navigates not only transitions between the sides of a male/female binary but between different constructions of the concept of gender itself, eventually performing self-aware camp versions of common gendered heroes from popular films of the 80s. The science fictional elements of the show allow audiences to accept a disruption of standard notions of temporal realism while layering those discrepancies into a metacritical stance towards the seemingly revered source material of earlier popular culture. The result is a set of queered narrative motifs that perpetuate themselves through these central characters.
Introduction
Thresholds haunt Stranger Things (Netflix 2016-present). As many commentators have noted, the show’s nostalgia for the 1980s has proven to be the series’ signature feature and generated immediate fan response. While the show is clearly intertextual, functioning as an assemblage of popular culture references, it might also be labeled interdiscursive, which Vijay Bhatia defines as a “more innovative attempt to create various forms of hybrid and relatively novel genres by appropriating or exploiting established conventions or discoursal resources associated with other genres and social practices” (28). In the following pages, we will explain how the interdiscursive nature of the series builds a narrative structure around a collection of gendered thresholds. The show promotes a flexible understanding of gender, which corresponds with the representations of time as neither static nor confined to a single cultural era. Taken together, this collection of borders allows Stranger Things to shape a narrative structure that proves distinct in its approach to blending science fiction undertones of sexuality, gender, and nostalgia. We will discuss the thematic queer elements found within the representational field, before linking that queering to the meta-components of the show as it grapples with the exhibition of a seemingly faithful rendering of suburban American life in the mid-1980s.
As the show’s title suggests, the intersections between space and time are, if not strange, then certainly stranger than one might anticipate. And stranger, fittingly, proves the operative term for our analysis. Likewise, as queer originally functioned in English as a denotative adjective for a noun considered to be strange, weird, or unusual and morphed into a shorthand for homosexuality, Stranger Things develops a distinct queerness in its temporal and sexual implications. The show aims to be neither normal nor strange—both fairly stable, absolute terms—but rather the comparative case (stranger) promotes a dedication to liminality and the in-between-ness that permits its distinct ambiance. The show accentuates what Mark Fisher classifies as the eerie: “a reflexive gap in the dominant structure” (101). Take, for example, a scene at the beginning of the second episode in season one, “The Weirdo on Maple Street.” The three central adolescent male characters, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) offer their female counterpart, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a change of clothes after finding her wandering the woods on a stormy night. As she begins to remove her wet clothes, the three boys shriek and turn away in embarrassment. She is then directed into a bathroom to change, but requests that the door be left ajar. This manipulation of the door seemingly defeats the purpose of privacy and continues a voyeuristic, sexual fantasy theme for the entire scene. However, it also depicts the unusual use of gender and sexuality that permeates the series. Viewers encounter standard tropes of adolescence on film as well as complications that challenge the unquestioned consumption of those tropes. The result is a representation incapable of closure, literally or theoretically. The show’s gendered unconscious has produced a site of inconclusiveness that defies standard logic yet coheres with the broader premises of the show’s intentions to perplex standard realisms.
The Virus from Nowhere
We argue the characters of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), Eleven, and Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), simultaneously embody complementary gender and temporal thresholds wherein the cultural, artistic, and historical constructions of gender and sexuality correlate to a set of liminal spatial patterns. In the instance of Will, his sexuality is interrogated from the beginning, which creates interpretive opening for a critique of the location of queer bodies that are often lost in discussions of 1980s popular culture. Whereas in the cases of Eleven and Steve, each not only transitions between the sides of a male/female binary but between different constructions of the concept of gender itself, eventually performing self-aware camp versions of common gendered heroes from popular films of the 1980s. The science fictional elements of the show allow audiences to accept a disruption of standard notions of temporal realism while layering those discrepancies into a metacritical stance towards the seemingly revered source material of 1980s popular culture. The result is an androgynous model that befits the queered structuring narrative motifs as well as the contemporary streaming format upon which it was initially released.
With instances such as the door ajar scene, the audience encounters a “stranger” aesthetic that introduces a queerness, which dovetails with the storyworld’s patterns of bifurcation. Nowhere is this more manifest than in relation to the disappearance and subsequent search for Will Byers. One of the first descriptions of Will that surfaces after his disappearance is related to the questioning of his sexuality. This theme was acknowledged in online writing almost immediately (Reynolds; McCann). Specifically, he is labeled as “queer,” “gay,” and “with the other little fairies” at various points in season one (1.01, 1.04). One of the first bits on information audiences receive about his disappearance is from his mother, Joyce, explaining that he is a “sensitive kid” towards whom the other children are “mean” and of whom his estranged father, Lonnie, “used to say he was ‘queer’” (1.01). Hopper replies, “Is he?” to which Joyce counters, “He’s missing is what he is” (1.01). These introductory sentiments about Will establish him as an ostracized, sympathetic character who has endured suffering. They also build a fundamental link between the plot’s central mystery and queer considerations, all looped through the temporal lens of a 1980s American town.
Will is inscribed as a legibly queer character and that queerness is amplified by a generally-accepted conception of the 1980s as being oppressive of homosexual behavior. The back-and-forth blending of 1980s mores with contemporary values prompts deep questions about the relationship of the show to a recovery of the past and how legitimate that recovery may or may not be. In particular, how does Will’s ties to homophobia permit a genuine engagement with 1980s culture beyond satiating the needs of a narrative trope of ostracization? The paradox of homosexuality simultaneously serving as a “stigmatizing mark as well as a form of romantic exceptionalism” haunts the intertemporal and intertextual levels of the show (Love 3). Much of the intertextuality with movies like E.T. (Spielberg 1982), Firestarter (Lester 1984), and Ghostbusters (Reitman 1984), along with a series of other Stephen King-inspired and Steven Spielberg productions operate on the level of homage to a decade’s recognizable tropes. Stranger Things creates a self-conscious, time-out-of-joint sensation that brings an uncanny simulation of 1980s pop (which are simulations themselves) into contact with twenty-first century ideals and digital viewing practices. The many associative symbols of 1980s consumerism such as Star Wars toys, elaborate hairstyles, timely clothing, television shows, and political allusions to the Cold War era appear with impressive consistency and lend the show an air of authenticity thanks to a distinctive mise en scène based upon the huge archive of televisual materials from the 1980s. However, the exhibition of the decade’s cultural effects also develops another, less frivolous component of 1980s reminiscences, when considered alongside Will and queerness.
WhileStranger Things retells many nostalgic, commercial narratives, it also supplies a contemporary voice to those that have been more muted. As mentioned above, Will’s sexuality provokes a series of initial comments from the townsfolk as well as his own family. It is of note that he is the victim of the Upside Down in addition to being the victim of the social norms found in Hawkins. This layering of victimization and violence over the character of Will, which transcends the temporal bounds of the show’s episodes (in theory, Will has been bullied for years prior to his disappearance), also echoes a seminal moment in queer history. The mysterious cause of his initial disappearance in season one, coupled with the disease narrative that structures season two, echo conversations about the AIDS crisis, an essential component of 1980s culture that is not represented with the same enthusiasm or frequency as the ubiquitous façade of middle-class consumer goods.
This lack is, in large part, due to queer narratives not matching with “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction” (Coates 276). Capital must procreate more capital. The 1980s are doubly complicit in this project. It was an era of intense commercial expansion and has become a period viewed with nostalgia for its many mass-produced goods that can now be resurrected and resold. Through a historicist’s comparison with the intersections of queer culture and disease in the 1980s, Will’s trauma can be understood as offering an extended engagement with and recuperating of the AIDS narratives that the American 1980s (in)famously silenced. Commercialism has helped to erase traumas and rewrite the 1980s into a contented moment in late-stage capitalism, but Stranger Things pushes back against that reading through a coded political allegory.
Two scenes especially capture the ideological stakes of the AIDS crisis embedded in Stranger Things. The first appears in episode four of season one, titled “The Body.” It is the school assembly held in remembrance of Will and demonstrates the show’s willingness to engage with 1980s Republicanism as well as the middle-class media treatment of the HIV/AIDS crisis. It proves to be one of the most political scenes of the series and illustrates its ability to exploit the 1980s for a dark satiric effect that helps demystify the era as one of tranquil adolescence. The memorial held for Will is uncanny for the other characters who believe Will to still be alive, and the viewing audience who knows he is alive in the Upside Down. The scene coincides with questions common to discussions of AIDS and queerness and the conceptual function of the future. Lee Edelman famously decries the obsession with children as anti-queer, and a dynamic through which queer people should embrace a “negativity” that leads to “shattering narrative temporality with irony’s always explosive force” (Edelman 31). Stranger Things captures this spirit with Will’s mock memorial. Essentially, the school—the primary institution associated with children and building a social future—organizes a memorial for the living. The event’s queer temporal lens invites a recall of the strange paradox of the common description of gay men as especially vulnerable to a “death sentence” disease (See M.O.D.’s 1987 single “Anally-Inflicted Death Sentence” for one of the cruder choruses of this very mainstream conception). The show combines Will’s fairly overt personal associations with homosexuality with an uncanny representation of memory, time, and mourning.
The memorial also corresponds with the show’s response to 1980s conservatism. Nearly all of the primary narratives in Stranger Things can be linked to Cold War politics as evidenced by a constant fear of “Russians” invading, spying, stealing, or infiltrating normative, middle-class America. This phobia allegorizes the contemporary queer stakes of the War on Terror wherein “normative patriot bodies” are set against those of the “viruslike, explosive mass of the terrorist network, tentacles ever regenerating” (Puar 121, 127). The descriptions coincide with the Upside Down’s nefarious character as well as a paranoia that sweeps through the town after Will’s disappearance and, by extension, the spread of the microscopic organisms that create a pandemic. The Wheelers (overtly Republican and followers of Reagan/Thatcher ideology) are expressly prone to the hysteria of Will’s disappearance and concerned with “Russians” disrupting the town’s quietude. As Ted Wheeler remarks during a flashback to the conclusion of Season One, “We’re all patriots in this house” (2.02). The desire to stamp out difference, obey the government-military complex, and protect the nuclear family, under the cloak of patriotism, defines the agenda for the majority of the town’s populace and, by extension, the populace of the American 1980s. Stranger Things exploits that fanaticism through the reaction to a young boy’s (presumed) death, which sets the foundation for the entire series and becomes a theme to build upon more openly in Season Two.
The second scene we would like to highlight occurs in episode six of Season Two, titled, “The Spy.” Here, Will’s condition, described as a “virus,” reaches a crescendo and the regular appointments with Dr. Owens at the lab are supplanted with an emergency rush to stabilize him. In Season One, Will’s death is incorrectly mourned and in season two his life becomes haunted by its own memory. Referred to as “Zombie Boy,” it is less the disease that haunts him than the traumatic memories, which bend the temporal qualities of his life into a shape of permanent reflection. Presented as a type of PTSD (a term far more familiar to contemporary audiences than those of the 1980s), the season employs a disease narrative complete with regular trips to a medical facility and an overt concern on the part of the other characters about Will’s fragility. In the chronic nature of his illness, coupled with the discrimination he faces from fellow students, the iconic figure of Ryan White drifts nearer the conscious surface of the text.
For those unfamiliar with case of Ryan White, he was a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac from Indiana diagnosed with HIV after a blood transfusion in 1984. The ensuing years greatly publicized his battle with the local school district and community at-large. By the time of his death, in April 1990, White had become one of the most recognized advocates for the fair treatment of people with HIV/AIDS, a journey that culminated in August 1990 with the passing of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act by the United States Congress. The imagistic similarities between Ryan White and Will Byers include a definite pallor, sandy-colored hair, and engaging smile that seems to reveal a sincerity of character. Likewise, Will becomes a figure for controversy in the town as some rally to remember him, while others write him off as either deserving of his fate or an unimportant loss.
Whether the Duffers had White consciously in mind is impossible to know, but the similarities between the two boys transfer to the conceptual level as well. During a later scene at the middle school, Will stands on the football field while he is also somehow present in The Upside Down. He breathes in the shadow monster’s shade in The Upside Down at the same time that his friends witness him in a trance state in Hawkins. In these moments, he embodies the threshold between the normative and queer realities of the show and transcends any standard understanding of time. The colloquial phrase used to describe the temporal trauma he experiences from these attacks is “now-memories” (2.06). Audiences learn that the “virus” is colonizing his mind and effectively erasing his personal memories. Soon he will be completely submerged into the shadow monster’s consciousness and his own recollections will no longer exist. The portrayals of memory, time, remembrance, and narrative complement the metanarrative threads about the 1980s, particularly the site of the AIDS crisis in the popular American imagination of the 1980s and popular memory today.
As the disease progresses and the shadow monster claims more of Will’s identity, its misunderstood etiology becomes more significant, eventually allowing the shadow monster to use Will as a Trojan horse to lure the government soldiers into a trap. Will becomes “a spy” (as the episode’s title states) or a traitor to his own cause. The infiltrator or double agent structure is similar to the metaphors employed in medical descriptions of the biology of HIV. As a retrovirus, HIV replicates the DNA of its host and essentially “tricks” the host’s DNA to accepting its presence. Part of what makes the disease so insidious is this element of cellular disguise. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health describes the process as one wherein “HIV integrates itself into the genome of the cell and can hide there indefinitely until it is activated again” (Puniewska). The show’s disease narrative thematizes the social discrimination mass media of the 1980s produced for HIV patients as well dramatizing what would become perhaps the most discursively important pathology in the world.
Are “the Eighties” with all their kitsch and commercialism, the true horror of the show? Is television really “a medium of horrors” (Tanner 1)? One could argue that Will’s narrative and confrontation with a diseased youth forces a revaluation of contemporary society’s relationship with the decade. Leo Bersani describes the media discourse of much AIDS coverage during the 1980s as “nauseating” and this may be an operative word in several senses (7). The show can be interpreted as an encounter with a time period that concealed its horrors with suburban children’s fantasies and an intense dedication to consumer goods and distracting televisual productions. In both seasons, the show presents an ironized version of standard AIDS narrative tropes. During the school memorial scene, audiences witness an ineffectual commemoration for a living person. In Season Two, Will becomes associated with the undead explicitly, through the taunt of “Zombie Boy,” but again, becomes the embodiment of a temporal rift. His “now-memories” capture the queer metaphoric time-lapse of living with a disease that will kill you but not today. American culture confronts its own history and self-identification through the horror genre tropes that substitute for a set of actual horrors in an effort to produce political critique (Vander Lugt 170). Celebration, mourning, and memorial coalesce into an eerie reminder of a class of people who lived a fantastic suffering without the hope of a Hollywood ending.
Uncomfortable Romances
Whether read as an allegory for Cold War anxiety or the AIDS crisis, the Upside Down and the shadow monster that rules it signal a threat to 1980s middle-class American (hetero)normativity as it simultaneously alters the space-time order of the show’s storyworld and audience’s viewing experiences that overlay contemporary gender conceptions onto a 1980s social template. As a complement to the historicization of Will’s storyline as a subversive AIDS narrative, we would like to examine another narrative archetype from the 1980s that was far more common in popular representations but through which Stranger Things , again, joins with gender considerations in transhistorical ways. The figure of the “teen hero,” so prevalent in children’s literature but finding a new energy on the commercial landscape of the 1980s, unsurprisingly forms the basis of the Netflix series. However, whereas Will’s character unearths a buried narrative form via a latent sexual unconscious from the 1980s that resurfaces in the new streaming format, the teen hero occupies a highly visible, male zone within the entertainment products from the 1980s. One need only recall films like E.T., Red Dawn (Milius 1984), Explorers (Dante 1985), The Goonies (Donner 1985), Stand By Me (Reiner 1986), The Gate (1987 Takács), or The Wizard (Holland 1989) to appreciate the breadth of the ensemble cast of adolescent heroes to whom the Duffers remain indebted. Stranger Things exploits this well-known figure in both seasons, but to special effect in season two wherein Eleven’s and Steve Harrington’s characters come into direct contact with traditional romance narratives and disrupt the subsequent chronological transfer between periods (the 1980s and 2016-17) through a sequence of camp performances, which, in turn, queers the arrangement of relations between heroism and gender.
In Susan Lanser’s work on queer and feminist narratology, she asserts that “questions of representation, and especially of queer representation, are as much questions of form as of content” (24). Stranger Things challenges and revises ideologies of gender and sexuality not only through the depiction of characters that challenge normative gender conventions, but also through the very form of the series’ narrative influences. Like so many prior productions, the show employs young protagonists as its narrative engine but also forces viewers into a confrontation with a self-conscious camp aesthetic. This model both reproduces and critiques earlier mass culture narratives’ uses of gender. It is only by adopting the familiar forms of 1980s televisual products and maintaining certain familiar structures (like the romance) that characters can sabotage and ironize those forms or turn them “upside down” into a self-aware commentary.
Eleven’s initial transgender appearance corresponds thematically with her special abilities to bilocate between normative reality and the Upside Down. Her cross-gender presentation reflects her cross-dimensional powers. She proves to be the character that saves the town in both seasons and her powers are unmatched by any character thus far introduced. She is a strong hero, reminiscent of a girlhood Ellen Ripley of the Alien films. Her shorn head and lack of verbal communication cause her to be mistaken for a boy (1.01). Pointedly, her time spent growing up in the Hawkins lab means that she has essentially been raised beyond the influence of normative gender conventions. Recurring flashbacks to her time spent in the lab show her wearing either a hospital gown or a gender-neutral, flesh-colored body suit (designed specifically for her trips into the border between standard reality and the Upside Down), and the fact that she is numbered (with “011” tattooed on her arm) instead of named, suggests that her governmental handlers have gone to great lengths to ensure she remains a genderless test subject.
While Eleven’s outward appearance and demeanor suggest the possibility of troubling binary constructions of gender, in other ways her character adheres to a conservative narrative gendering, one that reinforces normative, if not overtly misogynistic, standards. It does not take long for her to be thrown into an early-stage romance subplot. In the show’s second episode, “The Weirdo on Maple Street”, she is taken in by The Party (introduced to them via the “door ajar” scene described above). In one of their first private interactions, Mike gives Eleven the nickname “El.” On one hand, this is an act of kindness intended to humanize Eleven and demonstrate the fact that Mike sees her as a person and not a number. On the other, it is also the first step in a larger, convoluted gendering process. She is named by a male with a traditionally feminine name: “El” aurally indistinguishable from the feminine “Elle” (and shares this designation with a magazine dedicated to women’s fashion and lifestyle, no less). But the more significant aspect to this appellation is that it activates her entrance into a romance narrative with Mike.
During the next two seasons, El and Mike enact a variety of generic tropes that befit—if not star-crossed lovers—then dimensionally-crossed lovers in romantic comedies like Splash (Howard 1984) and Mannequin (Gottlieb 1987) as well as more serious fare such as Ghost (Zucker 1990). The relationship induces one of the primary cliffhangers of season one’s finale: will the two young lovers ever see each other again? Mike’s heartbreak at the loss of El’s companionship and potential future relationship, as depicted through his fantasies of taking her to The Snow Ball dance, bring this originally androgynous, minimally gendered figure into the middle of a traditional romantic entanglement. In her landmark study of soap operas and mass entertainment romances, Tania Modleski explains that the Harlequin allows a woman to watch a character “undergo a transformation from fear into love” (52). This is a very fitting description of Eleven’s romantic journey, but her transformation from androgyne into “girl” takes a complicating turn when the boys dress her for the purposes of sneaking her into Hawkins Middle School.
Raiding Nancy Wheeler’s wardrobe, they dress her in a long-sleeved pink dress with Peter Pan collar, cover her head with a blonde wig, and apply makeup. Arguably, the look that the boys create for Eleven is so overtly feminine as to border on a kind of drag. In her reading of drag, Judith Butler has argued that such exaggerated gender performances do not aim to capture any essential femininity or masculinity, but rather reveal that all gender display is a carefully curated and continually imitated performance. As demonstrated thus far, Stranger Things rests on gender, narrative, and temporal thresholds. Eleven embraces her new look and the approving male gaze it inspires. Although her limited grasp of the English language means she is unfamiliar with words such as “friend” or “promise,” she nevertheless reveals an understanding of “pretty,” at several points. Viewing her new feminine presentation for the first time, Mike remarks that she looks, “pretty…good, pretty good,” attempting to temper his compliment with a commentary on the quality of her disguise. For Eleven, this moment is supremely validating, and she repeats the word “pretty,” not only seemingly aware of what it means to be found attractive, but also immediately desirous of this designation.
Eleven’s entry into a conventional romance narrative (assisted by a group of boys dressing her) can be interpreted as troubling, but it also provokes deeper, self-conscious engagement with the cultural performances we associate with girlhood, heroism, and the popular culture’s uncanny knack for commenting upon itself. The scene triggers memories of one from E.T. in which Gertie (the family’s young daughter) dresses E.T. in a dress, blonde wig, and hat. Upon seeing E.T. in the new garb, Elliot and his brother react with both shock and disgust at the comically dressed alien. The Spielberg version of the dress-up scene is played for laughs in the mode of a sit-com where audiences laugh at a given character, but Stranger Things doubles back on this cultural past and adds a layer of satire to the scenario wherein audience laughs with the boys. Concurrently included within that laughter is a laughing at themselves and the bygone gender constructions of the 1980s. Audiences are forced to confront their own pasts, which like the Ryan White/Will Byers overlap, may be histories they do not wish to recall. This psychic position coincides with Eleven’s revaluation of her queer heroism. As she remarks, “The gate. I opened it. I’m the monster” (1.06). This acknowledgement, explicitly spoken, signals that her former, government-owned body has been brought into a queer parallax with her genderfluid, evolving self and any hope for a normative stability is unavailable.
While Eleven’s outward appearance begins at a stage of gender nonconformity and navigates progressively more standard romantic narrative trajectories, the character of Steve Harrington, popular jock turned inadvertent babysitter, undoes his links to hetero-romance narratives. A cursory internet search yields many think pieces and memes dedicated to Steve’s role as, by turns, “babysitter,” “dad,” and “mom,” the slippage between identity categories suggesting the gender-bending nature of his character. In her book, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era , Susan Jeffords situates President Reagan himself as “the premiere masculine archetype for the 1980s,” setting the standard for “real” men as ruggedly individual, aggressive, and authoritative (11). Steve’s character development over the course of two seasons actively challenges this dominant construction of masculinity and attests to the way in which Stranger Things brings a contemporary sensibility to 1980s conventions, allowing for greater complexity and potential subversion of Steve’s original gender presentation.
Throughout most of the first season, Steve is a minor character who faithfully adheres to the trope of the popular high school jock and fulfills the narrative function of romantic lead and heartthrob for Nancy’s subplot. He is athletic, comes from a wealthy family, and associates with a clique of cruel and generally unlikable friends. He sets his sights on Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), a girl who is charming and smart but obviously not of the same social ilk at school, and refers to the girls he has dated before Nancy as “sluts.” He acts as though Nancy’s concern over her missing friend Barbara (Shannon Purser) is an inconvenience that he would rather ignore, preferring they just “pretend to be stupid teenagers” rather than deal with the gravity of the situation or with Nancy’s emotional response to the traumatic event (2.01). However, Steve undergoes a dramatic transformation that both revises standard narrative conventions and complicates the notion of clear gender binaries. In discussing the figure of the “androgyne,” Joseph Vogel notes that “in embodying a liminal space ‘in the middle,’ in ambiguity, the androgyne becomes problematic for those invested in protecting established borders of identity” (467). While Eleven might look the part of the androgyne, Steve’s character navigates similar liminal narrative space between masculine and feminine, male and female. In so doing, he upends the heteronormative love plot and revises stereotypical codes of masculinity. As the show progresses, Steve demonstrates a higher tendency toward what Robyn Warhol calls gender effeminacy, which she identifies as an alternative spectrum for evaluating the gendered construction of identity that can avoid binaries, opposites, and static descriptors (9). His language, behavior, and the imagery associated with him move his identity towards a location nearer the effeminacy side of the scale.
Steve’s character defies narrative convention in Season Two by forfeiting a romantic plotline with Nancy, instead stepping into the traditionally feminine role of “babysitter” and temporary guardian of the children. As he eventually admits to Nancy, “I may be a pretty shitty boyfriend, but it turns out I’m actually a pretty damn good babysitter” (2.09). In his turn away from a heteronormative coupling and accepting of a cuckold situation with Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Steve simultaneously challenges narrative and sexual conventions. In fact, Steve is stopped from attempting to rekindle his relationship with Nancy when he is intercepted by Dustin and conscripted into a plan to recapture the increasingly dangerous “Dart,” the young Demogorgon Dustin has been hiding from his friends (2.06).
In this capacity, Steve takes it upon himself to act as Dustin’s protector and advisor. Part of this role, as Steve constructs it, is keeping the group out of harm’s way, something that he attempts to reinforce using a sports metaphor. When the Party launches a plan to create a diversion, drawing the roving Demodogs away from the Hawkins Lab and thus facilitating Eleven and Hopper’s (David Harbour) mission to close the inter-dimensional gate, Steve attempts to curtail the plan. With his hands on his hips, a dishrag thrown over one shoulder, Steve strikes a parental, one could say middle-class homemaker, or “motherly” pose, to lecture the kids: “We’re staying here on the bench, and we’re waiting for the starting team to do their job. Does everyone understand that?” (2.09). A far cry from the Reagan-era idealized, individual man of action, here Steve adopts the (stereotypically masculine) sports metaphor not as a rallying cry for heroic deeds, but rather to advocate for inaction and staying out of harm’s way. Instead of positioning himself as a member of “the starting team,” he proves himself capable of “sitting on the bench,” and acknowledging the larger team effort required to accomplish the mission. His willingness to cede responsibility also echoes the type of negative action often associated with wives: an eager sacrifice in the name of the communal as opposed to the pursuit of individual recognition. As with Eleven, Steve code-switches between gendered signals to bend and perplex the narrative structure of a seemingly benign genre tradition.
Steve’s development regarding gender conventions is re-emphasized when compared to the character of Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), who arrives in Season Two and functions as a caricature of toxic masculinity but also a reminder of Steve’s former alpha male status. Billy is overtly misogynistic and aggressive and the show’s decision to position the two as rivals, vying for the role of “King” of Hawkins High School, underscores the way in which Steve’s character diverges from this form of hyper-masculinity. However, by Season Two Steve is no longer interested in competition. He essentially allows Billy to instigate his imperial project of becoming “King” of the high school, while Steve is content to be an anonymous vassal. One scene of note involves Billy defeating Steve in basketball and then offering him advice about dating while they both shower (2.04). The homosocial tones are not hard to detect here, but how queer the exchange is can be debated. Like with Eleven’s romance, the show does not permit us a settled or definite conclusion as to an ideological perspective, choosing instead to remain upon the threshold between homoerotic and heterosexual desire. This creates a formal queering as much as a substantive one enacted by the characters’ behaviors and dialogue.
Perhaps the most overt point of metonymic comparison between the two is their hair, with each character fashioning a signature look. Steve’s voluminous hair, which he perfects with “four puffs of Farah Fawcett Spray” (2.06), is depicted as an endearing trait admired by the other characters, while Billy’s mane is what contemporary audiences would recognize as a “mullet,” an often ironized, if not denigrated, style that further casts his character into associations with contemporary rural America and a set of values that run counter to progressive conceptions of gender or sexuality. Billy fills a “bad boy” role that could be appealing in a romance, but in Stranger Things carries a latent appraisal of the roles women and girl characters were (and still are) frequently assigned. While Steve comes to embrace an effeminacy, Billy is living anti-effeminacy, the embodiment of a binaristic boundary. He prides himself on not feeling and not caring for his younger sister. To participate in those actions would impede his self-image as well as his sexual energy, which drives several encounters with women characters (such as girls at the high school and Mrs. Wheeler) as well as the pseudo rivalry with Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) that cloaks a blatant, contemporary racism.
Billy’s construction offers a mirror image to Steve’s development as it relates to the gendered constructions of the teen hero. Despite the many times Steve announces his intentions to protect the children and keep them safe, he is repeatedly depicted as being out of his physical and heroic depths. Max (Sadie Sink) saves Steve during a fight with Billy before he is essentially kidnapped by the children and drafted into their plan to help distract the roving Demodogs. Steve’s effectiveness as a babysitter or guardian comes not from his ability to perform the role of patriarchal protector or warrior (as in Season One), but from his willingness to govern a mobile, ragtag household, proving collaboration more effective than control, matriarchal collective care superior to a patriarchal hierarchy. In his turn away from normative codes of masculinity and towards a more androgynous gender performance, one that channels maternal images of nurturance, Steve personifies the liminal spectrum between what typically serve as poles of gender constructions, instead sliding along a gamut of increasing effeminacy. He still distributes advice on dating to Dustin and participates in a tradition of handing privileged experiential information about the opposite sex down to the next generation but does so in a far less aggressive and misogynistic manner than Billy who reassures Steve in the shower of there being “plenty of bitches in the sea” (2.04).
As with Will and the recovered AIDS narrative that appears through his character’s storyline, Eleven and Steve embody departures from 1980s narrative patterns and create spaces for play within those pre-established models. The result is a subversive translation of the 1980s teen hero that fulfills many of the superficial visual cues that signal a specific time and social status, while also infusing gendered adaptations that would have been impossible in the historical 1980s. Eleven and Steve harmonize with some conventional gender rituals, but the inclusion of a camp aesthetic to their presentations generates a queering effect on the formal level of narrative that in turn amplifies the strangeness of the storyworld.
Conclusion: Halfway Happy
One of the final scenes of Season Two speaks to the difficulty in reconciling the competing interpretations of time and narrative and gender. After the interdimensional gate has been sealed shut by Eleven, the town of Hawkins seemingly returns to a normative set of gender relations as emphasized through the depiction of the annual school dance known as “The Snow Ball.” Each of the main characters attends in appropriately gendered formal wear and pairs off with a member of the opposite sex at the dance. Mike and Eleven serve as the featured couple. As Eleven makes a striking entrance into the gymnasium, as if she were a female lead from a John Hughes film like Pretty in Pink (Deutch 1986), the audience sees that she has been dressed in a flattering floral dress and her hair is far more styled and long than it ever has been onscreen. Mike greets her by proclaiming that she “looks beautiful” as diegetic sound produces The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (2.09).
In this scene, the Duffers appear to supply a straightforward, heteronormative conclusion to the second season. Eleven has completed the transition from a gender-fluid character to a traditional gender-binary character. It is especially significant because she is also the character who has now stopped the intrusion of the space-time disruption, known as The Upside Down, on two separate occasions. Despite the fear of the government employing Eleven as an international super weapon, her abilities have been utilized in the ironic recovery of a Midwestern, small-town ethos. However, as discussed throughout this article, the show does not permit such a neat closure. As the camera pans out of the Hawkins Middle School gymnasium and the world appears to have been returned to its proper calibrations, the screen begins to rotate, and the gymnasium is suddenly pictured on its side, before vanishing into a black wipe that reveals The Upside Down’s version of the gymnasium. Fiery explosions and the shadow monster that has haunted the show since Season One’s finale looms directly above the formerly idyllic gym. Foreshadowed by The Police song from a few minutes earlier (Renfro), the creature seems to be stalking the inhabitants of the gym, unbeknownst to them. Based upon the general dynamics of these two dimensions, audiences can presume that Eleven is the target of the shadow creature and her ability to not only traverse between dimensions but to exist on (or within) the border will prove to be the driving conflict of Season Three. However, the ambivalence towards a definite conclusion does more than merely establish a teaser for the next season.
As witnessed in examples such as the door left ajar, the disease with neither certain etiology nor cure, the heartthrob babysitter, the hero who is also a monster, or the ongoing fear of “Russians,” the concluding moments of season two may leave viewers who are hoping for a transformative model of gender or sexuality feeling somewhat lukewarm or “halfway happy” (2.02) (Hopper’s definition of the word compromise to Eleven in “Trick or Treat, Freak”). But this perpetual confrontation with the indeterminate is the show’s most consistent aesthetic category. Whether Stranger Things is especially satisfying in terms of queering the characters’ sexual or gender identities may remain debatable. However, taken in the aggregate, the show’s larger aims of producing a storyworld that challenges the conventions of established narratives via the transmission of queer markers have introduced a potentially subversive reimagining of our current era’s relations to cultural products and norms of the time we call “the Eighties.”
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Biographical Notes:
Keith Clavin received his doctoral degree in Victorian Studies from Auburn University in 2015. His primary research examines the contact zones between Victorian literature and nineteenth-century economic thinking. He maintains secondary interests in narrative theory and contemporary cinema, and has published on these topics in Textual Practice and Oxford Literary Review. He currently lectures at MIT.
Lauren Kuryloski received her doctoral degree in English from Northeastern University in 2016. Situated at the juncture of literary, gender, and visual culture studies, her research analyzes representations of women, madness, and deviance in American literature and photography from the 1960s to the 1990s. Her work has appeared in Journal of Narrative Theory. She currently teaches at The University at Buffalo.