Abstract
Popular culture poses the most direct route to understanding how everyday people grapple with identity and power. Popular culture simultaneously promotes inclusion and diversity, while constricting it into an easily consumable and profitable form. This project approaches the popular from three different forms—music, film, and literature—to understand how queerness disrupts nationalistic narratives. Traditional liberal depictions of nation have depicted progress moving upward linearly, with equality and living standards consistently improving. This line of liberal, “progressive” thinking uses neoliberal and advanced capitalism as a tool to achieve multiculturalism. My project argues that queerness holds the potential to undermine this linear and liberal approach to history by collapsing temporalities, allowing the legacy of colonial violence to connect with contemporary inequality. The popular, being the form most associated with everyday national subjects, offers complex and conflicting insight into queerness’s role in critiquing media’s complicity in conservative policy.