Angry White Boys. Rebellion, Queer Vulnerability, and Resistance in Heathers (1988) and Heathers (2018)

Mateusz Swietlicki , University of Wroclaw (Institute of English Studies)

The tense relationship between the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was directly connected to the appearance of the rebellious teenager in American popular culture (Medovoi 1). This figure of a young (and white) positive rebel, whose attributes are awareness and a strong sense of identity, was introduced by Robert M. Lindner in the 1944 book Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Criminal Psychopath,where he contrasted it with the Soviet “Mass Man ideal”, which he called “antibiological and unprogressive in the widest sense” (Lindner 222). This concept of a teenage rebel became widespread in popular culture after the release of Rebel Without A Cause, the 1955 movie starring James Dean, and has appeared in American literature and cinema ever since. Heathers, a highly successful black humor comedy released in the late 1980s, features a character who is a satirical version of the positive rebel figure. Heathers, the 2018 series and a reboot of the 1989 movie, features a similar character, yet it was quickly taken off the air after the Santa Fe High School shooting. As of September 2018, it is available only in selected, non-American territories, including Poland. In my presentation, I would like to focus on the representations of rebel and queer masculinities in the series and the original film and argue that the series’ negative backlash demonstrates the hypocrisy of American mass media.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 8. From Role Models to Representation to Struggles for Rights: Translating Understandings of Gender and Sexuality