mother / me is a visual exploration and analysis of the biological and constructed maternal realms of artist Gray Swartzel’s life. Orienting and navigating childhood influences, Swartzel explains his desire to use Craigslist to seek out surrogates, or mother figures. Interrogating his queer body within the psychological space between himself and his biological and surrogate mothers, he challenges and interrogates conceptions of the nuclear family, critiquing heteronormative assumptions of family. Swartzel tasks himself as an agent to inspect family as a social construct within a larger Lacanian orientation, while seeking out the objet petit a, or cause of desire in such relationships. He details the influences of early twentieth century glamour photography and maternal theory and outlines how they manifest in performances of the self. mother / me is an experiment to investigate the queer relationship between camp and the twenty-first century dandy through the collaboration of a mother and a child to construct visual images.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to examine queer aspects of the animated television show Steven Universe (2013-present), created by Rebecca Sugar and produced by Cartoon Network. Situating Steven Universe in the context of Cartoon Network and children’s animation in general, and drawing on queer theory, as well as feminist cultural studies and kinship studies, the thesis aims to contribute to understanding of non-normative family representation in children’s entertainment. Through a close reading of the material, the thesis explores how Steven Universe queers the notion of family. It focuses on the show’s depiction of kinship, temporality and reproduction, and examines how each of these aspects subverts reproduces different modes of normativity. In Steven Universe, the family of the main character, Steven, is depicted as socially unintelligible, and as a mixture of biological and chosen kinship, highlighting the importance of both. It places great emphasis on being accepted by one’s family and community, and I discuss how this message can be both empowering and undermining. Steven’s family mostly inhabits queer time and does not give in to chrononormative structures. However, I also explore and critically evaluate parts of the series in which queer temporality is provisionally replaced by chrononormativity and striving for maturity. Finally, Steven Universe queers reproduction, by defamiliarizing the notion of (hetero)sexual reproduction and providing other alternatives for reproduction and motherhood. In general, the depiction of family on Steven Universe is characterized by transgressing multiple dichotomies and by having a complex relationship to different modes of normativity, by both resisting them and engaging in them.