105 Yellowjackets (2021- )
Girlhood, Gore, and Gay Panic: Homoerotic Tensions and Societal Rebellion in Yellowjackets
By Rayna Grant
The television show Yellowjackets is the perfect combination of all my niche interests; queer teen love, survivalist reality tv, mysterious plane crashes, cult true crime, and cannibalism. The show follows the Yellowjackets, a high school girls’ soccer team, and the events before, during, and after their plane crashed in the wilderness on the way to nationals. The pilot episode sets the stakes for the show because the viewer sees from the beginning how animalistic and inhuman these girls will become during their time in the wilderness. This strikingly contrasts the girls living teenage life pre-crash, but even pre-crash, their lives weren’t perfect. They all had their own issues, but I’m here to dissect the homoerotic friendship between Jackie Taylor and Shauna Shipman, who were more than just platonic best friends. Throughout the pilot episode, a deeper relationship between the two is hinted at. From the longing stares to the secrets kept from each other, the evidence is glaring. Yet Jackie and Shauna do not end up together, and I believe that’s because of the societal pressure felt by the two. The show Yellowjackets reveals how a homophobic patriarchal society can put so much pressure on young girls that when they become distanced from this society, they are entirely free from its restraints and find the power within themselves.
The pilot episode of Yellowjackets aired on November 14, 2021, but it wasn’t until 3 weeks ago [in late February 2024] that I discovered this incredible show. Everywhere I turned online, from Hulu to TikTok, I couldn’t escape the promo for season 3 of Yellowjackets, so I decided why not check it out? Next thing I knew 3 days passed and I had binged the entirety of seasons 1 and 2. I absolutely fell in love with the complex characters and the unique premise. Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of hate directed toward strong and complicated female characters in the media. If a female character expresses anger or makes a questionable decision people on the internet shame them and talk about how bad of a person they are. The characters in Yellowjackets are multi-dimensional characters who do awful horrible things while also being caring, compassionate, and supportive friends. They are teenage girls living through a horrific tragedy, so of course they make decisions that the general public wouldn’t, the general public didn’t crash land in the middle of the wilderness and starve to death. I love the complexity of all of the girls, but the complicated relationship between Jackie and Shauna is one of the driving forces of the show.
Being a homosexual in the 1990s was not an easy thing. The decades before homosexuality was a hot-button topic. White Christian conservatives were scared of these people they saw as sinful and evil. They hated homosexuals so much and believed that they were destroying the nuclear family. This hatred was only fueled by the AIDS crisis which many of those religious groups claimed was “‘proof’ of God’s vengeance against homosexuals” (Benshoff and Griffin). But this fight for the nuclear family was also harming women of all ages. By this time women gained all the same rights as men, yet many were still treated like they were less important than men.
Third-wave feminism grew during this time and they believed, “The issues that third wave feminism and/or post-feminism raise are provocative, patriarchal conceptions of gender are still reinforced by celebrating a woman for her beauty or her emotionality” (Benshoff and Griffin). Women were so often placed in a box by societal expectations and it came to be very difficult to escape them. The girls on the Yellowjackets soccer team were facing all of this pressure. The cast and crew of Yellowjackets were very aware of the importance of telling queer and female stories. Although the characters of Jackie and Shauna aren’t explicitly stated as lesbian, Vanessa Palmer and Taissa Turner are. Aside from their on-screen characters, the actors are queer themselves. Liv Henson, who plays teen Van, is non-binary and Jasmin Savoy Brown, who plays teen Tai, is queer. Tawnee Cypress, who plays adult Tai, also considers herself part of the LBGTQ+ community. She says in an interview, “Oh, as somebody who stands under the LGBTQ plus umbrella, being a kid in the nineties, it’s everything. I wish I had representation like this. I wish I saw characters that looked like me that made loving women”. This quote from Cypress emphasizes how important this type of representation is for young girls. If Jackie and Shauna had that kind of representation in the media when they were younger things may have turned out differently for them.
There are many reasons to believe that Jackie Taylor was in fact a lesbian. One of the most damning pieces of evidence is the fact that Jackie is clearly not into her boyfriend Jeff. The first time the couple appears on screen Jeff and Jackie are messing around, as teenagers do, in Jackie’s room. While Jeff is touching her, she appears visibly uncomfortable, and she tells him to “be careful”. Ignoring these clear signs, Jeff continues to touch her, and Jackie fakes climaxing to get him to stop. After this, Jackie sits up alone. When Jeff sits up to kiss her, the two are both centered in frame, but after he says, “Ok, my turn,” he lays down, leaving Jackie uncentered. By leaving Jackie alone in the shot, she is shown to be uncomfortable with this request because of her hesitation. The song “Today” by The Smashing Pumpkins can be heard playing on the radio in Jackie’s room. The song choice is also interesting as, on the surface, it’s upbeat, but the lyrics reveal the song is about depression and suicidal thoughts. It goes to show that on the surface of Jeff and Jackie’s relationship, they’re the perfect couple, but in reality, things aren’t as they seem. The scene immediately cuts to Jackie furiously brushing her teeth in the bathroom. It’s implied that Jackie has given Jeff oral sex, and she is now so grossed out that she has to scrub her mouth clean. It’s apparent from this interaction that Jackie does not enjoy performing sexual acts with her boyfriend. Outside her house, Shauna is waiting to pick her up for school. As the two drive, Jackie claims she’s finally ready for her and Jeff to lose their virginities, even though they’ve been together since freshman year. Shauna is shocked that Jeff is a virgin and remarks “… you guys have broken up like, 10,000 times”. This further proves that Jackie isn’t really into her relationship and is just in it for the appearance. Sarah Vamvounis writes in her thesis, “Jackie is the embodiment of perfect girlhood: she is dating the school’s popular football player, is incredibly conventionally attractive, and is set to go to Rutgers and rush sororities” (Vamvounis). Jackie thinks this is the relationship she’s supposed to be in because society says it is, so she stays.
One of the most interesting things about Yellojackets (2021) is that it doesn’t portray discrimination in the traditional way. There is never blatant homophobia from any character and none of the girls get bullied for their sexuality. However, they are still discriminated against by the societal pressure to act straight. Throughout the pilot episode, the close bond between Shauna and Jackie is shown. The two are best friends, but there are many clues that Shauna wanted to be more than just friends. One of the biggest clues to this comes near the end of the episode when the Yellowjackets went to a party the night before their flight. At the party, Shauna watched from afar as Jackie flirted with Jeff. Jeff spun Jackie into a hug and she rested her head on his left shoulder, and after this Shauna looked away, too uncomfortable to watch. After the party Jeff drove the girls home and Jackie insisted she was dropped off first. When Jackie got out of the car Shauna said “..love you”, which she did not reciprocate. As Jackie walked toward the front door she turned back to look at Shauna and the two shared an intimate gaze. Due to the discriminatory society in which the girls were raised Shauna felt as though she could not express her true feelings to Jackie. That resentment built up in Shauna until she couldn’t handle it anymore and she took it out on Jackie and Jeff’s relationship. As Jeff drove Shauna home she told him to pull over, when they parked Shauna kissed him and the two began to make out. Things escalated and when Shauna and Jeff began to have sex Shauna asked very interesting. She asked Jeff to say he loved her, the very thing Jackie hadn’t said back. As Jeff said “I love you, Shauna” she clung tightly to him, nuzzling her face into his left shoulder. The same shoulder Jackie had been snuggled against mere hours ago. Vamvounis believes that “The love that Shauna cannot receive from Jackie, she explicitly seeks from Jeff, viewing Jeff as an extension of Jackie” (Vamvounis). Shauna was raised in a society where she wasn’t allowed to be in love with anyone except for a man. She could never be with Jackie, so she took the closest thing to her that society would accept, her boyfriend.
Power is shown in Yellojackets in a fascinating way. Pre-flight the girls were living in a society where girls, especially queer girls, had to live up to a certain standard in order to be accepted. Society had power over them, but in the wilderness, society had no hold on them. The opening scene of the entire show is of a girl running through the snowy woods being hunted by the others before falling into a pit of spikes and dying. The next time we see “pit girl”, as the fandom calls her, she is being strung in a tree to be butchered. In the third wilderness scene, we see the girls sitting around a campfire dressed in animal costumes they’ve created from furs and watching their fresh meat cook over the fire. The final two scenes show pit girl’s flesh being served to the girls and them subsequently consuming the feast. These girls are clearly no longer subscribing to societal ideals or morals. The wilderness freed them from the power of society and gave that power back to them. These girls didn’t just go mad and kill each other senselessly, they built their own society and rituals. Karyn Kusama, who directed the pilot episode, said, “I think there’s something wonderful about a show that imagines this female clan left alone to figure it out on their own as both ecstatic and triumphant and one of many ongoing traumas. I often romanticize this idea that we just are left to fend for ourselves as women, but what this show is positing is something about, well, what would that really look like?” This was the creator’s intent, this is just a group of teenage girls trying to survive. Although the girls did something society would call atrocious it was for their own survival. What society believed no longer mattered to them. They had spent their whole lives living under society’s control and they were done letting their environment have power over them. They didn’t just wait for the wilderness to kill them, they took its power away by sacrificing their peers. They no longer needed the wilderness to provide food, they could do that for themselves. Their acts of cannibalism were how the girls took power back from their environment.
The showrunners of Yellojackets , married couple Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, took a lot of inspiration from pop culture and media in the creation of the show. Their original pitch was a gender-bent version of The Lord of the Flies. In an interview, Lyle recounts a famous quote about how The Lord of the Flies never would have happened if it was a group of girls. She disagrees, saying, “But I take some issue with that … It just occurred to us that it’s a really fascinating question, insomuch as women are socialized, arguably, even more so than men in a very specific way. And having grown up as a teenage girl in the ’90s, you know, from my point of view, I was like, that will get very dark, but in a very different way, I think. And so it felt like a new story to be told.” Men seem to have this idea that all girls are quiet obedient rule followers who don’t express anger or rage, but as a woman, Lyle knows this isn’t true. Because she grew up in the same time period as the characters she created she helped bring an authenticity to them and their problems. The girls have flaws and they have hardships even before the wilderness. It goes to show that girls are just as capable of cruelty as men, they’ve just been taught their whole lives to suppress it.
Yellojackets is an incredibly unique and fascinating show that uses extreme circumstances to portray the harmful effects homophobic patriarchal societies can have on young queer girls. The complicated homoerotic friendship between Jackie and Shauna shows how society in the 90s and today pressures young girls to fit certain standards in order to belong. When the girls became stranded in the wilderness they became free from the constraints of society. These girls finally gained power over their lives and they took that power to the extreme. The Yellowjackets performed cruel and violent acts, but they did so through order and ritual. They created their own system of powers in order to survive the horrific circumstances they were placed in. Yellojackets shows how much power young girls have within, but it’s not until they’re free from societal pressures that they discover that power.
References:
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2021.
Ford, Rebecca. “Karyn Kusama Says ‘Yellowjackets’ Is a War Story about Women.” Vanity Fair, 27 July 2022, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/07/awards-insider-karyn-kusama-yellowjackets-interview? srsltid=AfmBOoqmnTxeyN7M0JzfeIeZADiz_bZF7zn-taG4R11DArcw86guqREc.
McDaniel, Caitlynn. “Did You Know These ‘yellowjackets’ Stars Are Queer?” Gayety, 13 Mar. 2025, gayety.co/did-you-know-these-yellowjackets-stars-are-queer.
Nadworny, Elissa, and Kira Wakeam. “Surviving Teenage Girlhood Takes on a Whole New Meaning on ‘Yellowjackets.’” NPR, NPR, 31 Dec. 2021, www.npr.org/2021/12/26/1068160177/yellowjackets-showtime-plane-crash-story.
Vamvounis, Sarah. “Devoted, Desiring, Devouring: Cannibalistic Queer Female Intimacies.” Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, 2024. ProQuest Dissertation and Theses Database, https://www.proquest.com/openview/a5ce68e042418862b279ed3f0e36c16 4/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.
