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Making E.T. Perfectly Queer: The Alien Other And The Science Fiction Of Sexual Difference, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than …