The Fall of Heteronormativity, Globally.
When I was a kid, 10 years ago, homosexuality didn’t exist around me. There wasn’t any gay couple in my village, and although my mom had told me about homosexuality, I couldn’t connect it with any visual reference. I felt that I was gay, and I felt alone.
But happily, I was born with the Internet. Soon, I read on forums online stories of kids like me and it comforted me. I also bumped into gay stuff here and there — or was I looking for it? I remember Maxxie in the brilliant series Skins, this gay character in a French telenovela and the ambiguous Haku in the Naruto anime.
All in all, for 12 years, I had seen maybe five LGB people on my screens. And zero trans. For the rest, it was always straight couples, straight romance, straight guys turning into vampires… This is heteronormativity, the “system of practices, norms, and institutions which privilege, assume, and require heterosexuality,” and invisibilizes other sexualities.
Statistics vary, but it is often estimated that about 95% of the world population is heterosexual. In that sense, it makes totally sense that most love stories, main characters on anime, big crushes on series, are heterosexual ones. But could LGBT still have 5% of the representation?
Heteronormativity is the “system of practices, norms, and…
