She echoes the limiting doctrine of heteronormativity: there is only one way for your body to be right and countless ways for it to be ‘wrong’. Though the Code is officially gone, viewers have by now learned to read queerness in the body where it may not be spoken verbally.Ī woman in a 1940s instructional video tells a group of girls, ‘There are so many wrong ways of sitting down that I couldn’t begin to show you all of them.’ She lists a few: ‘The girl who throws herself at the chair as though she were playing living statues’ ‘The shoulder-blade sprawler’ ‘The knees-apart, pigeon-toed thinker’. This is particularly true on-screen where, as the Production Code worked to silence queer voices, filmmakers developed sophisticated ways of coding queerness through body language. But if we examine queer sitting in film and television, new and exciting meanings emerge.įor a whole host of reasons, the body has long been a primary site of queer expression. At first glance, it’s a simple meme-observational humour based on a generalisation. Improper sitting is one of many seemingly arbitrary traits (like walking fast and being unable to drive) that the online queer community has claimed as part of queer culture. Universally acknowledged, at least, by queer people on the internet.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that queer people can’t sit properly.
