Magic Swords: The Queer Erotics of Muscled Warriors in 1980s Kids Programming
Magic Swords: The Queer Erotics of Muscled Warriors in 1980s Kids Programming
Abstract: The 1980s featured a niche slate of syndicated shows prizing nostalgia, sex, consumerism, and camp–and often in children’s programming! First-run syndication in this era was rife with the queer erotics of characters, featuring rippling muscled toons like He-Man and Masters of the Universe, The Transformers, and ThunderCats alongside the spandex-clad American Gladiators and the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. These shows and characters, with their glittery, provocative, and sexualized aesthetics blended, subverted, or were openly hostile to long-entrenched genre conventions of most of television and certainly children’s TV. They are remembered fondly today as contributing to and derived from the zeitgeist of a pop culture and televisual era enamored of excess. Using historical analysis from a media policy perspective, this presentation traces the collision of syndication with cultural, regulatory, political, and industrial circumstances that created a culture of queer kids programming in the 1980s.
Related Research
-
Mental Health and Social Capital: How Influencers Use Mental Health Topics to Promote Products and Drive EngagementItai Himelboim, Golan, G., Kogan, S. & Oshri, A. “Mental Health and Social Capital: How Influencers Use Mental Health Topics to Promote Products and Drive Engagement,” accepted for presentation at the […]
-
Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and the Latin American ImaginaryBenjamin M. Han. Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and the Latin American Imaginary (Temple University Press, 2026). https://tupress.temple.edu/books/reckoning-with-the-world. Overview: For many Koreans, Latin America is foreign and unfamiliar, but popular television shows […]