November 2023
Introduction
Looking up towards Earth’s atmosphere on a clear night you might observe a large bright white point just above the horizon. This is Jupiter: the largest planet in the solar system and currently fifth in order from the Sun. Unlike the celestial bodies that precede it—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—Jupiter and its “Jovian” disciples—Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—do not have a solid rocky crust but are primarily gaseous (Sheehan and Hockey 15). Dominating this planetary line-up are the “gas giants” Jupiter and Saturn, with the former’s mass consisting of around 90% hydrogen and 10% helium (15). Jupiter, in particular, “is so gigantic that it has long seemed almost an embryonic star—a reputation it partly merits” (15). Forming just after the Sun 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter is the oldest planet in the solar system and shares an almost identical molecular composition to its forebear. If Jupiter’s “mass was large enough, the gas giant [would] collapse into a star—that is, it [would] successfully initiate thermonuclear reactions in its core” (40). In planetary science, the “giant planet” is widely “considered a kind of half-fledged or would-be-star”, a failure of sorts (15).
In its failure to become a star—a normative definition of success for a celestial body of its size and composition—and instead languishing in an ‘embryonic’ or ‘half-fledged’ state, Jupiter can be considered a queer planet. As theorists Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz have argued, failing is an inherent part of being queer. Muñoz, in particular, “has produced the most elaborate account of queer failure to date”, explaining “the connection between queers and failure in terms of a utopian ‘rejection of pragmatism’ on the one hand, and an equally utopian refusal of social norms on the other” (Halberstam 89). Queer failure, then, is not about literal failure or lack of achievement, but rather a critical stance that subverts, challenges and questions heteronormative capitalist definitions of success: self-actualisation, individuality, maturity, reproduction and wealth accumulation. Failing breaks down conventional notions of the “good life” (Berlant 166) and makes space for the “invent[ion] of new forms of life unavailable and unimaginable to the so-called successful” (Banash). For, as Halberstam maintains, “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3).
Conceptions of success and failure are intimately linked to temporality. As Halberstam writes, “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2). To be considered successful an individual must follow a “particular developmental path”, reaching certain milestones (Wescott): go to school, then to university, get a well-paid job so that you can settle down with a partner and “raise children within an economically stable environment that ensures hetero-familial longevity” (Wescott). Success is equated to the fulfilment of a developmental, linear timeline directed towards and culminating in the symbolic and actual “figure of the Child” (Edelman 11). By ‘failing’ to conform to this established trajectory, queers “step…out of the linearity of straight time” and fashion alternative temporalities (Munoz 25).
Following Muñoz’s assertion that a “posterior glance at different moments, objects and spaces might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness”, I turn to Jupiter, the oldest planet in the solar system to consider the ontological and temporal conditions of queer failure (22). Through a close material and eventually sonic analysis of the Jovian planet through the kaleidoscopic lens of queer studies, I argue that queer failure is characterised by a productive quivering of ontological certainty and an oscillation between states or temporal moments. First, I briefly explore how the planet’s cultural entanglements make it a surprisingly apt and playful site for theorising queerness. I then consider how the Sun, Jupiter’s successful molecular counterpart, has frequently appeared as a cultural symbol of what the anti-social queer theorist Lee Edelman calls the “politics of reproductive futurism” (2). Following Halberstam’s lead in entwining low culture with high theory in The Queer Art of Failure, I consider the representation of the Sun in the British children’s television series the Teletubbies; I do so only to elucidate the ontological and temporal trappings of the dominant cultural logic. Following this, I will explore how the ‘failed’ queer subject is in a state of (un)becoming. In turn, positing that queer (un)becoming opens up an alternative ontological and temporal logic that is characterised by oscillation or quivering, and which allows queer subjects to resist the essentialising teleologies of heteronormativity.
Jupiter: A Queer/Trans Icon
In 2018, NASA released an image of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showing the gas giant in near-ultraviolet light (“Jupiter in Ultraviolet from Hubble”). In the image, Jupiter’s distinctive coloured bands—which typically appear as a mix of dusky reds and beiges—look light blue, pink and white; hues which are incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, the colours of the transgender flag. Following the publication of the image, many people took to X/Twitter and Reddit to declare that Jupiter is either a trans supporter or identifies as trans. One Reddit post states with confidence that “this ultraviolet photo of Jupiter from the Hubble telescope is almost a trans flag. Jupiter the planet confirmed to be canonically trans”(Segoli). The thread descends into speculation about the gender identity or non-identity of the planet’s namesake, the Roman god Jupiter: “Does this mean the Roman god Jupiter is also trans??!??” (Press_R_To_Zeus). With one Reddit user responding, “ofc, it’s the king of all gods. What were we expecting them to be, cis?” (Clayleviathan).
In Roman mythology, Jupiter—the equivalent of the Greek god Zeus—is notorious not only for having a homosexual relationship with Ganymede, a young Trojan boy, but also for changing his physical form to accommodate his desires. As recounted by the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses:
The king of gods was once fired with love for Phrygian Ganymede, and when that happened Jupiter found another shape preferable to his own. Wishing to turn himself into a bird… without delay, beating the air on borrowed pinions, he snatched away the shepherd of Ilium,who even now mixes the winecups, and supplies Jove with nectar, to the annoyance of Juno.
(155-61)
Overcome by desire for the beautiful youth of Ganymede, Jupiter transforms into ‘another shape preferable to his own’, an eagle, to abduct the young boy from the mortal realm and make him his cupbearer in Olympus to the irritation of his wife.1 In artistic representations across the ages, perhaps most famously in Jacob de Wit’s Jupiter, Disguised as Diana, Seducing the Nymph Callisto (1727), the Roman god is depicted as a gender shape-shifter taking on various identities and forms to seduce both mortal men and women. Given these cultural entanglements, the Jovian planet is a surprisingly apt and playful site for exploring queerness.
The Sun, the Child and ‘Reproductive Futurism’
Jupiter’s failure to reach stellar maturity all those years ago made the solar system something of an anomaly compared to other star systems, which are typically binary, containing paired stars bound together by a mutual gravitational embrace. Unlike the Sun—Jupiter’s successful, self-actualised counterpart—the gas giant has remained in an immature state, unwilling or unable to acquire enough mass to trigger the thermonuclear reactions that would allow it to become a star: a glowing ball of energy. The Sun’s capacity to generate and sustain life, as well as its cyclical presence in our everyday lives, has meant that it has often been adopted as a beacon of heteronormative continuity in popular culture. For example, in the British children’s television show Teletubbies, the iconography of the sun and the child are brought together to “reaffirm a developmentalist ideology of the future” in line with heteronormative capitalism (Otsuki 1).
First broadcast in 1997, Teletubbies follows the daily activities of four colourful characters called Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La and Po (“About Teletubbies”). These astronaut-inspired protagonists are collectively known as the Teletubbies, so named because of the television screens in their abdomens and the distinctive antennas on their heads, which allow them to broadcast footage of real human children throughout the show.2 At the beginning and end of each episode, a glowing sun with the face of a giggling baby, known as the Sun Baby, rises and falls over Teletubbyland to signal the beginning and end of the day. The Sun Baby enforces a predictable or repetitive temporal cycle while idolising the ‘figure of the Child’. As the queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in his polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, ‘the Child...marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism’. Edelman coins the term ‘reproductive futurism’ to refer to how the dominant cultural and political logic invests in and structures itself around the idea of a reproductive future and the perpetuation of the social order through procreation.
- Emphasis on becoming a subject, citizen: How to become a successful subject, fixed, stabilised subject
- Unbecoming, considered ‘wasting energy’
Notes
1 Jupiter’s largest moon is named after Ganymede and is featured in the 2018 NASA image as a burning red dot hovering above the planet in the upper left corner.
2 I have a friend whose claim to fame is starring in an episode of Teletubbies, which I am very jealous of.