“Lesbians? Where?”: Queer and cis heterosexual audiences’ interpretations of queer coding in Fried Green Tomatoes and Thelma & Louise

Abstract

This study investigated queer and cis heterosexual viewers' interpretations of queer coding in the 1991 films Fried green tomatoes and Thelma & Louise using a theoretical framework incorporating tenets from semiotics, Stuart Hall's (1973) encoding-decoding communication model, and Judith Butler's (1988) theory of gender performativity. Queer coding is a process through which fictional characters are subtextually portrayed as queer. Some audiences might interpret these characters as LGBTQ+, while others may view them as cis heterosexual. This study aimed to determine and compare how queer and cis heterosexual audiences interpret the queer coding in the selected movies. To the researcher's knowledge, no existing studies have investigated different viewers' interpretations of Fried green tomatoes and Thelma & Louise using the above-described framework. All three lenses comprising the study's theoretical framework hold that meaning creation is subjective and culturally restricted. These optics also consider the influence that an individual's sociocultural circumstances and subjectivity have on their creation and interpretation of meaning. This study used qualitative semi-structured interviews and focus groups to gather data from eight queer-identifying and eight cis heterosexual-identifying participants, which was then interpreted via a thematic analysis. This analysis yielded rich insights regarding the similarities and differences between the various participants' understandings of and desires for queerness in the two films, the personal and contextual considerations that influenced their interpretations, and the filmic signs the participants used to construct their understandings. Future studies could replicate this research using a larger, more demographically diverse sample to explore how different audiences with varying influences interpret queer-coded movies.