A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part IV): Encountering the Queer Aesthetic

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When I was a child, my list of favorite cartoons would have included some of the following titles: G-Force: Battle of the Planets, The Smurfs, Dungeons and Dragons, and, when I couldn’t get anything better, The Mighty Hercules. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of these shows, but as a kid they filled my head with epic tales of fantasy, adventure, and heroism.

What I never considered at the time, though see quite clearly in retrospect, is that they also reinforced a certain aesthetic in my imagination. The term “aesthetic” as I’m using it here refers to the principles we draw on, or the characteristics we look for, to make value judgement about what is and what is not beautiful. By “beautiful,” however, I mean something more than simply “lovely to look at.” The “beautiful” in this sense is that which awakens our longing, excites our imagination, gives us pleasure, and elicits our joy. Aesthetic values can vary quite widely from culture to culture, which is why the carefully-balanced proportions of the Athenian Parthenon, and the kaleidoscopic spectacle of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Russia are both beautiful in their own way, though each is so unlike the other.

When I hold the cartoons that I enjoyed as a child up together, what stands out to me is that they are all working with a similar aesthetic. They tend to be centred around the male experience, and the women in them tend to be peripheral characters, usually disproportionately represented, and often serving as objects of male interest and affection. The heroes, too, tend to have qualities that were traditionally associated with a narrowly-defined masculinity: physical strength, confident resourcefulness, a rugged independence held in tension with service to the community. At the same time, there is a subtle romantic intrigue underlying them all: was Princess the love interest of Mark or Jason in Battle of the Planets? Which of the ninety-nine male Smurfs would win the affections of the one (and only) Smurfette in the village? When would Hercules finally settle down with the lovely Helena and make a bunch of baby Hercs?

These are all children’s cartoons, of course, but I think it is easy to underestimate how formative the aesthetic experiences of our childhood can be on our grown-up sensibilities, subconsciously influencing the value judgement we make as grownups about what is lovely, compelling, and desirable.

I say this, because when I first started watching the show Steven Universe with my kids, I was struck by how foreign the aesthetic of the show seemed to me, and how few aesthetic categories I had that I could use to make sense of it. Rebecca Sugar, the maker of Steven Universe has said that she had set out to make a show that was “definitely not heteronormative.” This is clear in the show's broad themes and philosophical underpinnings, but it is also subtly woven through out the show’s aesthetic, from its character design to its artistic choices. It is, as my queer child once put it, the “gayest show ever,” and in this, the whole thing is working with an aesthetic unlike any cartoon I’ve ever come across.

Both the show’s heroes and villains all are gems, which means that, aside from Steven himself, they are all exclusively female-coded characters. Steven is male-coded, of course, though the show explains that he is somehow an incarnation of his own mother, Rose Quartz, making his gender much more ambiguous as the show progresses. He is able to fuse with his best friend, a female named Connie, to form a non-binary character named Stevonnie.

At the same time, very few of the protagonists have any qualities associated with traditional masculinity. Indeed, an episode in the first season, called “Coach Steven” subtly deconstructs the entire trope of traditional masculinity. In this episode, Steven sets out to get himself and his friends in physical shape, adopting a “toxically masculine” drill-sergeant persona and running them through a rigorous workout regime. Through the course of the episode, however, he learns that there is a “real way” to be strong that does not require ripped abs and swole pecs, and indeed, that “muscular strength” is not the kind of “strength” he really needs.

I have to admit that when I first started watching Steven Universe, the “queer aesthetic” of the show took a long time for me to get used to. I’m a 46-year-old straight male, and hardly the target audience, I admit; but even so, I watched it with a traditional aesthetic in mind, one shaped by years of consuming narratives that presented traditional hetero-romantic, male-centric themes. As a result, I found the whole thing somewhat (in the original sense of this word) queer. All the pastel colors and glittering lights (which I would have associated, as a kid, with a “girl’s show”) coupled with all those intergalactic space adventures (which could rival even the best of G-Force for sci-fi thrills), made it hard for me to find my bearings.

If you’ve never seen the show, all this may sound somewhat bizarre, but the reason I’m talking about it  at such length is because experiencing the queer aesthetic of Steven Universe helped me see my own aesthetic sensibilities in a new light. When I experience a “text,” be it a story, an image, a work of art, or a philosophical idea, I do with it what all human beings instinctively do: I try to fit it into a pre-conceived aesthetic framework that helps me to determine if it is good, true, lovely, or admirable. This aesthetic framework is largely subconscious, built from a whole network of formative experiences and aesthetic messages that I absorbed from the culture I was raised in. I was enculturated, for instance, to look for male strength as a sign that something heroic is happening, and I was enculturated, too, to pick up on intimations of heterosexual romance as a sign that the story is moving towards something desirable.

Encountering a show that deconstructed this aesthetic, like Steven Universe does, and presented an alternative in its place, helped me to see both how subjective my traditional aesthetic is, and (more importantly) how strongly I identify with it. I think it is hard to really grasp how subtly our deeply-held aesthetic values shape the way we interact with and respond to the world, determining what we think is worth striving for in life, and how we ought to go about striving for it. A music lover who has encountered the musical forms of an entirely different culture, one that does not use traditional Western intervals or rhythms, perhaps, might get what I am trying to describe here: the cognitive dissonance of encountering a form of beauty for which they have no clear aesthetic categories, but they can still clearly tell is something joyful, emotive, and good.

One of the reasons I’m exploring all this, is because my experience with the show Steven Universe has prompted me to wonder how much the church’s response to LGBTQ people in general, is less about our theology than it is about our aesthetic values. This idea is hard to put into words, but if we have been spiritually raised in a culture that consistently presents heterosexual romance as the highest ideal, and only showed one kind of masculinity as good and one kind of femininity as lovely, then coming to understand and make space for the queer people in our community may actually challenge our aesthetic convictions just as much, possibly even more so than it does, our theological convictions, such as they are.

Like a 46-year-old heterosexual male encountering Steven Universe and having to learn how to read a queer aesthetic on the fly, I think that the church will have to re-examine those things it’s always held up as ideals of beauty, if it is genuinely going to embrace LGBTQ people with the gospel. This does not mean relinquishing our responsibility to make biblical value judgement on what is a godly and what is not a godly expression of human sexuality, or accepting an entirely relative morality when it comes to sex.

At least it doesn’t have to mean that. It could simply mean acknowledging that many of the narratives we assume to be good, and true, and lovely, are really values we’ve inherited from our culture, not absolutes we’ve derived from the Bible. The presupposition, for instance, that God intends everyone to experience heterosexual romance in order to be spiritually fulfilled (when Jesus himself never married)—the assumption, perhaps, that a certain set of superficial characteristics define “biblical manhood and biblical womanhood” (when Jesus himself often crossed gender boundaries in his day, speaking to women and admitting them into his company in ways that scandalized his 1st Century culture)—these are examples of aesthetic values that the church has often taken to be theological givens.

There are probably others. As the church makes authentic space for the LGBTQ people among us, I expect we will discover more; and as we do, I expect we will find, too, that there are all kinds of beautiful things to be celebrated in our midst, things we never would have noticed as lovely, except that we let our aesthetic values be challenged in this way.

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