But Roman’s disinterest in conventional heterosexuality is complemented by his unconventional sitting-both suggest a ‘wrong’ and deviant body that resists assimilation into normality. He seems to dread the idea, bemoaning having to ‘grow up and become a real little boy’ and ‘do phone sex with my girlfriend like a normo’. The two women we’ve seen him date both complain of a total absence of sex in the relationship. Of course, Roman’s love life also codes him as queer. A symbol of queer sexuality and defiant genderfuckery, Hepburn is the perfect poster boy for the resistant power of queer sitting. You only need to Google ‘Katharine Hepburn sitting’ to encounter a bevy of such rebellions. There is a politics to posture, and it can be an act of gender rebellion for a woman to sit improperly. When sitting etiquette is enforced upon women, it often employs the term ‘ladylike’, revealing the conservatism at the heart of so much conversation about posture (in the 1300s, women were ‘ coached to keep their knees pressed together to signal virginity’). 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’.
BY THE WAY YOUR GAY MEME CODE
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. “The limp wrist feels like a throwback in some ways I remember it felt like a ubiquitous homophobic mocking gesture from my time as a closeted kid in the late 90s and early 00s,” said Philip Ellis, a journalist who wrote a piece for GQ magazine in 2019 about gay men adopting the word “faggot” as a term of pride.Įllis pointed out that the LGBTQ community has for several years used images of limp wrists as memes.Robert Sheehan in The Umbrella Academy. Most recently, this has involved many people choosing to identify as “queer” or using that word as a shorthand to describe the broader community - although some still find this offensive. The LGBTQ community has a long history of reclaiming things that were once used as derogatory slurs against them. (According to a 2012 Slate piece, limp wrists have been deemed “unmanly” since ancient Rome). The 18-year-old said he thought the action would be instantly “relatable” to others in the LGBTQ community, even though he also recognized it had offensive roots. BuzzFeed News can’t 100% confirm if Hallows came up with the limp wrist meme, but he was the earliest we could find and recalled devising it as something different from what he had seen trending. By this time, “Kiss Me More” had been a viral hit on TikTok for months, but that point of the song was mainly used for clips featuring sudden transitions.