Today we share the fifth of six pieces of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English” — and the second selection from Section A of ENGL 801, taught this fall by Cameron Leader-Picone: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.
Read more about the assignment and the first publication, “Mina Harker is More Than Just a Love Interest” by Destiny Munns (MA ’25), in the post from December 7, and enjoy the subsequent posts: “Resting in Peace: Why Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Keeps Sharon Tate Away from the Action” by Mike McCoy (MA ’25), “What Happens to Childless Mothers?” by Beth Jones (MA ’25), and “The ‘Pretty’ Trap” by Aimee Lamoureux (MA ’25). For now, on to “Maybe We’re All Bottoms!” by Margo Losier (MA ’25)!
— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 ZA (Fall 2023)
The teen film genre is a breeding ground for classic tropes. From Rebel Without a Cause and the James Dean-esque bad boys that followed to every hijinks-y high school romance, this set of films borders on formulaic—jock meets nerd, nerd takes off glasses, jock finds that she was beautiful all along!
Until recent years with mainstream films like Love, Simon and Booksmart, queer characters have never been a major part of the equation. The prom queen-based bets, basketball team dance numbers, and misfits turned besties in detention were always decidedly straight, middle class, and white. The few exceptions to this rule were for the plot: Cher (Alicia Silverstone) falls for a gay guy before dating her step-bro (Paul Rudd) in Clueless, and notoriously gay Damian (Daniel Franzese) tells Cady (Lindsay Lohan) the definitive American high school cliques in Mean Girls with the help of his best friend and speculated lesbian Janis (Lizzy Caplan). Gay characters appear in teen movies, sure, but they often stick out like sore thumbs, subverting what we would consider the typical teen archetype in these stories. Film scholarship surrounding teen movies also notes the genre’s “inherent” straightness, but there’s no way to definitively confirm that generic heterosexuality comes from within these texts. Our power as viewers lies in how we choose to read the media we consume—and there are queer possibilities to explore in even the earliest teen films.
In 2023, the movie Bottoms (directed and produced by Emma Seligman) was added to the growing list of queer teen films that have been making their mark on this genre. It follows PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edibiri), two lesbian virgins so desperate to get laid before they graduate that they make a girls’ fight club at their school and pretend they’ve fully murdered people in juvie (neither of them has ever been to juvie, obviously). Surprisingly enough, this plan sort of works, and the two girls both finish the movie having at least kissed one of their classmates. PJ and Josie are not the only queer characters in this movie, but they’re the only two characters that self-identify as such from the jump. Any other queer students are identified in dialogue by PJ and Josie, state their identity later, or their sexuality is never explicitly defined and only shown through active homosexual behavior.
This undisturbed assimilation of the queer characters into the general high school populace may seem insignificant at first, but many queer narratives are colored by “coming out”—whether it’s dramatic and devastating or a simple, painless “I’m gay,” a character’s queerness is often spelled out for us, just so we know that their sexuality is different from the norm, that their interest lies with their same-sex-co-eds (Padva). Bottoms, on the other hand, leaves us guessing: who are the bottoms that the title describes? Do we need advanced gaydar to clock queer characters in our new favorite teen comedies?
Many of the gay characters in Bottoms fill typically straight, “popular” roles, with queer cheerleaders and flamboyant football stars center stage. Finding them becomes a game of gay Where’s Waldo? that doesn’t necessarily stop with this movie. The appearance of queerness this high on the social ladder, especially in settings where classically straight characters meet and mate, calls into question our assumptions that all 80’s high school movie teens were straight as an arrow.
Director Emma Seligman draws inspiration from classic teen comedies, and the inclusion of songs like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler and “Complicated” by Avril Levigne in the film’s soundtrack harken back to teen films of the 80’s and the 00’s. Despite the absurd humor and wacky dialogue in this movie, it isn’t trying to parody the movies that it references: it’s trying to exist in the same genre space as them, to be a pastiche that stays true to the original conventions of the genre. As Seligman explains in an interview, “It’s a teen sex comedy, but there are queer girls” (Carey). Seligman does not define the film as a “queer teen sex comedy”: it’s just a “teen sex comedy” that has queer girls in it. If we as viewers keep this distinction in mind, our perception of not only this movie, but also classic teen films, can shift entirely.
It’s contested as to whether the teen film genre was born in the 50’s with classics like Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or in the 80’s with John Hughes’ high school hits, including but not limited to Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Breakfast Club (1985). However, an impressive amount of academic work has gone into defining the major characteristics of teen film, and the several genre studies that have taken place—though they may disagree on when teen film really became a genre—generally agree on several generic traits of the movies within. Catherine Driscoll attempts to name conventions of teen film in the introduction to her book on the subject, describing “the youthfulness of central characters; content usually centered on young heterosexuality, frequently with a romance plot,” and other traits generally included across the board in these films, regardless of the year released. The understanding of teen movies—especially those with romance plots—as straight often goes uncontested, though scholars like Timothy Shary acknowledge the 90’s as the period in which queer representation increased, and queer characters were shown “in a more positive light,” generally facing “the same tensions that heterosexual teens are shown dealing with in other films.”
Despite this representational shift, current understandings of the teen films’ norms are still heterosexual, with homosexual teen characters landing outside of the default, their movies built to prove that they are “like all young people” (aka straight young people).
Bottoms refuses to strictly define its queer characters, and as a result, there is very little separation between hetero and homo groups in the movie. Where queer characters before have often occupied “loser” or “outcast” status at school, there is a blend of gay and straight folks in the popular groups, often with blurred identity lines and characters whose sexualities evolve over the course of the movie. Bottoms does not just tell its audience that queer characters are like their straight counterparts; it shows them that there are no character differences that make queer (or straight) characters so easy to identify. The passionately dude-on-dude football team, even if a bit exaggerated in Bottoms, complicates the super straight readings of this trope in teen movies of the past and reveals that this hypermasculine brotherhood dynamic also has homoerotic possibilities. The main male character Jeff, “quarterback and the most good-looking, All-American, red-blooded, muscular man this town has ever seen,” ends up playing the role of damsel in the final sequence of the film (Seligman). The same goes for the hyperfeminine cheerleaders, as more than one of them are revealed to like girls by the end of the movie, and a few of them even protect Jeff from imminent doom in that same final sequence.
Before Bottoms, one could reasonably argue that the teen films of the 80’s were wholly hetero unless otherwise defined by an “out” gay character. Watching this movie and seeing the mix of queer and straight characters with all sorts of traditional teenage traits shows us that we have a choice when it comes to reviewing beloved, classic teen movies. Should we see them as pillars of a once painfully heterosexual world? Or could it be that these films prove that high school narratives have never been quite as straight as the prom scenes suggest?
Works Cited
Carey, Emma. “How Emma Seligman Pulled Off This Year’s Best—and Bloodiest—Comedy.” Esquire, 28 Aug. 2023, www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a44909350/emma-seligman-bottoms-interview/.
Driscoll, Catherine. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
Padva, Gilad. “Edge of Seventeen: Melodramatic Coming‐Out in New Queer Adolescence Films.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 4, 2004, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1479142042000244961.
Seligman, Emma, director. Bottoms. Orion Pictures, 2023.
Shary, Timothy. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. Wallflower P / Columbia UP, 2005.
— Margo Losier (MA ’25)
K-State English 
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