Drawing Queerness Forward: Fusion, Futurity, and Steven Universe

Cooley argues that Steven Universe reimagines the cartoon trope of “fusion” as a generative, queer mode of being that blueprints configurations of sexuality that are not possible (or not yet possible) outside of the relaxed physics of animation. He reads fusion as an imaginative outside to compulsory heterosexuality and reproductive futurity, connoted here by Homeworld’s Imperial reproduction. Challenging cartooning scholarship that overemphasizes presence, Cooley proposes that Steven Universe performs a certain “tracing by effacing” (a potentiality within cartooning to make meaning from units of absence) to materialize queernesses resistant to limiting discourses. The essay concludes with a meditation on the default academic pessimism toward radical visual media produced in corporate circumstances, like Steven Universe, and evaluates the show’s methods to bypass that pessimism.