Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres

Memòria del Treball de Fi de Grau

Trans Blending, Trans Erasure: Representing

Trans Realities in Euphoria
Margalida Fuentes Diego

Grau d’Estudis Anglesos

Any acadèmic 2019-20

DNI de l’alumne:43223135V

Treball tutelat per Aida Rosende Pérez

Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Moderna i Clàssica

Autora Tutora
S'autoritza la Universitat a incloure aquest treball en el Repositori
Institucional per a la seva consulta en accés obert i difusió en línia, Sí No Sí No
amb finalitats exclusivament acadèmiques i d'investigació

Paraules clau del treball:

Euphoria, trans women, representation, hegemonic discourse, audiovisual productions
Abstract
Representation of trans women is very scarce in audiovisual cultural productions, and trans
female characters frequently follow certain stereotypes. However, there has been a progressive
inclusion of diverse trans realities which help have a broader insight into this collective.
Euphoria (Levinson 2019) is an American series that narrates the lives of high school teenagers
and their conflicts with identity, sexuality, the use of drugs and relationships. Jules, one of the
protagonists, is a trans woman who represents the difficulties and life experiences of this
collective. Through her story, the series denounces transphobia by showing the institutional
violence to which she is subject, and how her transness affects her relationships with other
people. However, since the series is addressed to a young audience, its format blurs and even
erases some of the conflicts that the cisnormative society poses for trans people. Following an
intersectional approach, the aim of this dissertation is to critically analyze the character of Jules
to prove that Euphoria erases many of the problems that trans women live for the sake of
blending in its different teenage characters into a hegemonic discourse. This analysis concludes
that the depiction of Jules serves to occasionally denounce transphobia and to give visibility to
sexual orientations that deviate from the heteronorm while it reproduces transphobic
stereotypes. The attempt at omitting some stereotyped narratives about trans women also
provokes the erasure of a great part of her life experience as a member of an oppressed group.
Key words: Euphoria, trans women, representation, hegemonic discourse, audiovisual
productions
Index
Introduction …..............................................................................1
Transphobia, Privilege, and Erasure of Transness.........................3
LGBT Realities in Hegemonic Discourse.....................................7
Conclusion.....................................................................................9
Introduction
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the inclusion of trans female characters
in television films and series. Nevertheless, representation of trans women in audiovisual
cultural productions is very scarce, and it has often resulted in the perpetuation of transphobic
stereotypes. This has been the case of films such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), A Mighty Wind (2003), and Dallas Buyersʼ
Club (2013), which present trans female characters as a farce, or masculine women who try to
emulate femininity. These stories include trans characters and their transness as a crucial part
of the plot ̶ except for A Mighty Wind, where one of the main characters appears as a woman at
the end after having been portrayed as a man throughout the film ̶ , but these roles are played
by male cis actors. On the other hand, more recent productions such as the film Tangerine (2015)
and the series Orange is the New Black (2013), Tales of the City (2019), and Euphoria (2019)
include trans actresses who enact the lives of trans women, which gives a new, personal
approach to their characters. Trans men and non-binary people are less often represented than
trans women in audiovisual productions and they show completely different narratives which
should be analyzed separately; therefore, this dissertation will only focus on trans female
characters.
Euphoria is an American television series which narrates the lives of high school
teenagers, focusing on their struggle with identity, mental illnesses, and the use of drugs. It is
narrated in the first person by Rue, who has a remarkably close relationship with Jules, a trans
woman whom she meets in the first episode, so Julesʼs life is also central to the plot. Since the
series aired in 2019, there is still no previous literature on this subject; therefore, this is an
original analysis of the series. The aim of this dissertation is to critically analyze the character
of Jules to prove that Euphoria erases many of the problems that trans women live for the sake
of blending in its different teenage characters into a hegemonic discourse.
This analysis is divided into two parts following the dichotomy present throughout the
series in the representation of Jules. The first section of this project will examine the
perpetuation of certain stereotyped narratives about trans women and the erasure of diverse
realities due to the format of the series, a teen drama, and the privileged status of this character.
The second part will be devoted to the new ways of denouncing transphobia and how this
specific approach also helps integrate oppressed groups into hegemonic narratives which are
addressed to a young audience. Even though the series has been renewed for a second season

1
by the television network HBO where it first aired in 2019, only the first season is currently
available, so this dissertation will center its analysis on this first season.
Since the topics reflected in Euphoria deal with gender identity, sexuality, and
relationships between teenagers, the methodology used to carry out this project is to analyze
the interplay of these issues in the character of Jules. Therefore, this dissertation is framed
within the disciplines of Cultural Studies, Transgender Studies, Queer Studies, and Audiovisual
and Media Studies. These diverse fields of study provide a wide range of sources, which will
be divided into two types for logistical purposes: written sources and audiovisual material.
The theoretical basis for the analysis of Jules is mainly extracted from books such as
Julia Seranoʼs Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of
Femininity (2007), which is greatly devoted to the performativity of femininity and the
representation of trans people in the media. Serano divides cultural representations of trans
people into two categories: “deceptive” and “pathetic” (Serano 2007, 36), i.e. characters who
apparently deceive others by not telling them that they are trans, and characters whose transness
is used as a comic resource. This division is also followed by Talia Mae Bettcher in her article
“Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance” (2014), but she
uses the terms “deceivers” and “pretenders” for the same definitions (Bettcher 2014, 391).
Katrina Roen focuses on how gender is lived inside the trans community and the consequences
of being “out” as a trans person in her article “«Either/Or» and «Both/Neither»: Discursive
Tensions in Transgender Politics” (2001), while Jack Halberstam offers a broader perspective
of the problems that trans people face in our society, and also reviews some audiovisual
productions and the stories they tell about trans people in Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account
of Gender Variability (2018). The Transgender Studies Reader (2006), edited by Susan Stryker
and Stephen Whittle, is also an elementary work to have an insight into some of the many texts
that have been written since the 19th century about trans people.
Among the few audiovisual cultural productions that include female trans characters,
most of these roles are played by cis actors; trans women have started being cast only very
recently. To illustrate the reality of trans people, there are films such as The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), where the trans character is stereotyped as an insane and extremely dangerous serial
killer; The Crying Game (1992), which narrates the romance between Fergus, a cis man, and
Dil, a trans woman; Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), which clearly depicts the trans character
as a deceiver; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), about the road trip of a
trans woman and two drag queens; A Mighty Wind (2003), where the trans character works as
a plot twist at the end of the film; Transamerica (2005), which explores the relationship between

2
a trans woman and her son; Dallas Buyersʼ Club (2013), where the trans character is HIV-
positive and a drug addict; Tangerine (2015), which follows two trans prostitutes for a day; and
The Danish Girl (2015), about the first sex reassignment surgery. Series like Transparent (2014-
2017) and Tales of the City (2019) explore the lives of members of the LGBT community
putting trans characters as the center of the story. Recently, documentaries have also been
produced: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) focuses on the importance of the
activist and of Sylvia Rivera, and Disclosure (2020) exposes the personal experiences of trans
people who work in the audiovisual field in an interview format.

Transphobia, Privilege and Erasure of Transness

Euphoria reproduces the stereotype of a hyperfeminine trans woman. Jules usually wears short
skirts, dresses and crop tops of pastel colors; she is blond, but part of her hair is dyed pink; she
always wears makeup and usually uses glitter, and she carries pink, furry backpacks in most of
the episodes. This hyperfeminization is made obvious since the first image of her in episode 1
(fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Jules in her first appearance, episode 1.

In her first appearance, Jules is seen with her back facing the camera in a full shot that centers
all the attention on her. Even though she is riding a bicycle, she is standing, so we can see that
she is wearing a short yellow plaid skirt and a matching T-shirt. She also wears her pink hair
down and carries a matching small pink and red fur backpack. Her attire characterizes her as a
young girl, and the plaid skirt and backpack help create the image of a schoolgirl. Thus, even
though her face is not shown, and the audience still does not know her gender nor her name,

3
she is depicted as a very feminine character. This responds to a collective imagination because
“most people believe that all trans women are on a quest to make ourselves as pretty, pink, and
passive as possible”, and this tradition is followed by “the popular media, which tends to assume
that all transsexuals are male-to-female, and that all trans women want to achieve stereotypical
femininity” (Serano 2007, 35). Moreover, the first time Jules appears in the series is seen by
Rue, who travels by car, and the camera follows both, so the audience sees Jules through Rueʼs
eyes as the car passes her. Rue eventually falls in love with Jules; therefore, Jules is presented
in an idyllic way, riding in slow motion while the wind is blowing her hair, and a soft melody
similar to that of a music box plays in the background.
In the next scene, Fez, a drug dealer, talks to Rue about her and says that she looked “all
Sailor Moon-ish” (Levinson 2019, 9:08), so the other characters also recognize her by the way
she dresses. A similar conversation is present in the American series Transparent when, in
episode 6 of the first season, the protagonistʼs daughter tells her children that their grandfather
is a woman, and the girl asks: “Is grandpa magic?” (Kuperberg 2014, 8:28), to which her mother
replies affirmatively before changing her answer and saying that “anyone really can do it”
(Kuperberg 2014, 8:40). In this respect, both Jules and Maura (the protagonist in Transparent)
are perceived as magical creatures, as if their appearance helped others create the idea that they
come from a fairy tale.
Later, Jules decides not to go to a party with friends to meet a man with whom she has
talked on a dating application. Before going to the motel where they meet, a scene is devoted
to her dressing up: a full shot shows Jules in her underwear, injecting hormones in her leg, and
then putting on fishnet stockings and skirt overalls. She also puts on makeup and uses her pink
furry backpack. In this scene, the camera plays with Julesʼs reflection in different mirrors while
a lively song plays in the background. There is an ongoing tradition in audiovisual productions
of recording trans women while they are dressing. In fact, “the media hyperfeminizes [them]
by accompanying stories about trans women with pictures of [them] putting on makeup, dresses,
and high-heeled shoes in an attempt to highlight the supposed “frivolous” nature of [their]
femaleness” (Serano 2007, 15). This scene is the second time that Jules appears alone, and the
spectator has an insight into her privacy; therefore, she is presented in the series as someone
who consciously makes herself look feminine. This type of scene is constantly repeated in the
film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), but is also present in Dallas
Buyersʼ Club (2013) and the series Transparent, and it is similar to the frequent and comic
transformations of the protagonist of Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Even though Daniel is a man who
only dresses and acts like a woman as a desperate resource to spend time with his children after

4
his divorce, an emphasis is made on how he manages to disguise as an old lady and all the
problems that derive from these frenetic changes. In a similar way, trans female characters are
also presented as if they were disguising themselves before going out into the world and
interacting with other people; in audiovisual productions “their gender presentation is seen as a
lie rather than as an expression of a deep, essential truth; they are “bad” by definition” (Stryker
2006, 9).
Jules is the only trans character of Euphoria; therefore, the trans collective is only
represented by a white, privileged teenager, and does not include the diverse forms of
oppression that usually converge. This narrow approach to the difficulties of the trans collective
is present in other films such as Dallas Buyersʼ Club and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of
the Desert, but others show a different reality, like The Crying Game and Tangerine. In the latter
ones, the protagonist is a black, working-class woman, although in The Crying Game Dil is
interpreted by a man, and Tangerine revolves around the issue of prostitution and its
protagonists are two black trans women who are actually former sex workers. Therefore, these
audiovisual productions reflect a broader perspective about how different oppressions
frequently intertwine because, in fact, “trans women of color are the group most often subject
to extreme acts of violence as supposed sexual deceivers” (Bettcher 2014, 365).
This representation of a privileged woman follows the example of Bree in Transamerica,
Lili in The Danish Girl, Maura in Transparent, and Anna in Tales of the City. All these
characters are white women who, even though they are working class, they are not in a
precarious situation and they can maintain a high quality of life. Bree is a trans woman who can
afford to live alone and is going to have a sex reassignment surgery, Lili is a relatively famous
painter, Maura is a renowned teacher and owns a big house, and Anna stole confiscated money
from her trans friends to buy 28 Barbary Lane and live there for the rest of her life. Jules follows
this pattern because she lives with her father in a big house and has been able to afford surgery.
In all these stories, their economic condition plays a crucial role in the sense that they are not
affected by the precarious situation that is lived by Dil in The Crying Game, Sin-Dee and
Alexandra in Tangerine, and Rayon in Dallas Buyersʼ Club. Jules is a well-off high school
student who does not need a job to maintain her lifestyle, which silences the experience of trans
people, who ̶ according to the study “Injustice at Every Turn” ̶ are “almost four times more
likely than non-trans people to live in a household with an income of less than $10,000 a year”
(Bettcher 2014, 396). In fact, simply “coming out as a transperson presents a risk to employment
stability, personal safety, and possibly family relations, because of the widespread prejudice and
substantial transphobia that “out” transpeople face” (Roen 2001, 504).

5
 The format in which Euphoria is produced erases part of the vital experiences and the
specific problems that Jules may have as a trans woman. Since the series focuses on the
interaction between the characters and their conflicts, the everyday consequences of their
oppressions are frequently overlooked. Issues such as racism and homophobia are never
discussed in the series even though some characters are racialized or deviate from the
heteronorm. The series plunges into the lives of all its characters since they were children; in
Julesʼs case, this relates to her transition because this determines her identity and the characterʼs
construction and development.
The fourth episode of Euphoria, “Shook One Pt. II”, narrates the life of Jules since she
was eleven years old, when she already expressed herself as a girl. In fact, children “do not
develop gender constancy ̶ the understanding that oneʼs sex is fixed and does not change over
time and in different situations ̶ until theyʼre between the ages of four and seven” (Serano 2007,
295), which explains why Jules had already been “sad for a really long time . . . since [she] was
seven or eight” (Levinson 2019, 4:20). The parallelism of this feeling in Seranoʼs Whipping
Girl is noteworthy because, according to her own experience, “gender dissonance can manifest
itself in a number of ways. … But most of all, it felt like sadness to me ̶ a sort of gender sadness ̶
a chronic and persistent grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body” (Serano 2007, 85).
Transphobia is also addressed briefly with the representation of Julesʼs confinement into a
psychiatric hospital, but this will be discussed below as a new approach to institutional violence.
This episode in Julesʼs life allows the spectator to have a glimpse of the difficulty of being a
trans child, but when Jules is sixteen her problems seem to disappear and her past is not referred
to anymore but for the scene where she tells Rue that she has had “enough traumatic shit in [her]
life” (Levinson 2019, 11:19).
The erasure of her transition process is also remarkable because the only hint given about
it is the sentence “by thirteen, she started to transition” (Levinson 2019, 7:27) in this same
episode. Previous representations of trans female characters dwell on their transitions to the
point of making it a central aspect of the plot, as for example the film Transamerica, where a
trans woman is told that she has a son a week before her sex reassignment surgery; The Danish
Girl, which adapts the story of this first type of surgery; and the series Transparent, which
accompanies the protagonist through her process of self-discovery and her failed attempt at
having a surgery. Euphoria avoids this controversial representation of trans people because
“[a]fter all, the trans* body is not so easy to represent, and the visual frame that captures such
bodies either has to reveal sites of contradiction on the gender-variant body (through nakedness
perhaps, which risks sensationalizing such bodies) or through other kinds of exposure, violent,

6
intrusive, or otherwise” (Halberstam 2018, 89). However, by omitting this process, the
consequences that it might have had in Julesʼs life are also erased; therefore, a crucial part of
the development of her personality is also lost, which risks trivializing her identity and her
transness to blend her in a hegemonic narrative.

LGBT Realities in Hegemonic Discourse

One of the ways in which the series condemns transphobia is by denouncing the pathologizing
of trans people that leads to Julesʼs involuntary confinement in a psychiatric hospital. In her
book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,
Julia Serano defines transphobia as “an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against
people whose gendered identities, appearances, or behaviors deviate from societal norms”
(Serano 2007, 12). In this case, her familyʼs prejudices were decisive to lock Jules in a social
and medical institution that reproduces transphobia by treating subjects as if they had a mental
illness. Jules was tricked into thinking that they were only visiting a psychiatrist, but she was
forced to stay, although the diagnosis is not given at any point. The only version that is narrated
is Julesʼs in episode 4; therefore, the audience only knows that she felt sad, and that “she didnʼt
just hate her brain, … she hated her body” (Levinson 2019, 5:13), which led to self-harm. This
is the reason given for her confinement in a psychiatric hospital.
Her mother is the one who brings her to the psychiatric center and leaves her there until
“eventually she [gets] better” (Levinson 2019, 7:05), but her father is the one who picks her up
when she is discharged. As previously mentioned, the diagnosis is not given, and even though
Euphoria shows how an eleven-year-old Jules self-harms, the series does not risk dwelling on
to which extent this is a direct consequence of her unease with her identity, or if this psychiatric
institution actually serves the purpose of controlling her identity and reinforces transphobia.
The support that she receives from her father is also an advance in showing how the trans
collective is accepted. Jules seems to have a supportive father because he helped her in her
transition progress, represented onscreen by images of both in the doctorʼs office. Trans women
have been represented in film and television as outcasts whose only close relationships are those
with members who suffer the same oppression as trans women, as in Tangerine (2015), but
Jules is supported by her father, with whom she lives, and her friends. The integration of Jules
into a diverse society is a key aspect to stop depicting trans women as outcast individuals, which
is of paramount importance in order to stop perpetuating prejudices that ultimately affect their
real lives. This support of the trans collective by family and friends is also present in

7
Transparent, where other oppressions converge and are openly spoken about. Nevertheless, this
dialogue is not reproduced in Euphoria; its format blends in the different charactersʼ narratives
into a broader homogeneous discourse that shows a straightforward acceptance of diverse
identities. By avoiding these dialogues, as pointed out before, the series gives a false impression
of equality among different oppressed collectives that does not correspond to reality.
The series exposes a clear division between the reality of trans and cis women, and gives
an insight into how transphobia and misogyny converge, denouncing alternative and specific
risks that trans women may suffer as opposed to those which cis women may undergo in the
same situation. The portrayal of the relationships between cis and trans women in Euphoria
shows a variety of different types of social and personal interactions that break with previous,
more limited representations. In episode 3, “Made You Look”, Jules expresses the difficulty
that she encounters in having dates with men when she tells Rue that she “do[es]nʼt always get
the privilege of meeting people in front of an audience” (Levinson 2019). Her friend Rue has
suggested to her that she should not meet someone for the first time alone because it could be
dangerous, but Jules shares a completely different point of view because her experience as a
trans woman makes it safer for her to meet men secretly.
The fact that Jules is a woman is also used to denounce not only transphobia, but also
transmisogyny. One of the sentences pronounced by Rue in episode 4 while narrating Julesʼs
life sums up the transphobia she suffers from men: “Every guy was the same. Cis. White.
Married. Engaged. In long-term relationships, and always, always: ‹‹I'm a 100% straight››”
(Levinson 2019, 7:34). Apart from knowing that she only meets white men, the audience is
presented with the fact that most men who date her are already in a relationship with someone
else, which relegates Jules to a sporadic lover or affair. Moreover, all men make a transphobic
commentary: even though she is a woman, they feel like they have to defend their own sexual
orientation so it will not be questioned by the fact that they are dating a trans woman. Whether
those men are heterosexual or not is not relevant; this commentary does not focus on their
sexuality but on Julesʼs gender because sexual orientation is defined by the gender(s) you are
attracted to; therefore, if a man has the need to say that he is heterosexual to justify why he is
attracted to someone, it means that he does not fully recognize that person as a woman. In this
case, Julesʼs reaction to these words is representative of her attitude towards transphobia: she
looks uncomfortable but accepts the situation instead of starting an argument. She has assumed
that men may question their masculinity or heterosexuality for being attracted to a trans woman,
but the only way for her to date men is to ignore their transmisogyny.
Her relationships with men also define her sexual and love life because of the way they

8
treat her. Not only do they show transmisogyny, but Jules has accepted the fact that most men
do not see her as a woman, and therefore in the first episode she chats with men through an
application for gay and bisexual men who want to date other men. Thus, from the very first
episode of the series, Jules is depicted as someone who has adapted to a cissexist system and
her interactions with men are shaped by it. This is how she meets Carl Jacobs, a man who has
been hiding his sexual orientation from his family and meets men secretly. She decides to meet
Carl in a motel at night, and in that scene, she acts passively, not showing desire. In fact, in
episode 4, the audience is told that “whenever anything got too uncomfortable, Jules would just
imagine that she wasn't really herself, and this wasn't really her life. She was just a character in
a book or a movie or a show; that none of it was real, and if it was, how did it matter? It's not
like her body ever really belonged to her in the first place” (Levinson 2019, 8:24).
Her sexual orientation is also another revolutionary aspect of this character because
previous representations of trans women have generally depicted them as heterosexual. She
does not say explicitly that she is bisexual, but she feels attraction towards men and women
alike. In the first episode she has sex with a man, in the third she falls in love with another man,
and in the fourth and seventh episodes she kisses two girls, Rue and Anna. Therefore, visibility
of the LGBT collective is further fostered by introducing characters that are deviant from the
heteronorm. Previous representations of trans women emphasized their attraction towards men;
for example, the plot of The Crying Game revolves around the romance between a cis man and
a trans woman. In The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Transparent Bernadette
and Maura have been married to women, but they eventually meet kind men with whom they
want to have a romantic relationship. In Euphoria, however, this new aspect also helps represent
how women are more accepting and caring towards Jules than men, because the type of
relationship that Jules has with women is on equal terms while she acts more submissively with
men. This also breaks with the myth that femininity is linked to feeling attraction only towards
men, and fosters diversity by seeing her love life from a different perspective.

Conclusion
Euphoria is a teen drama which gathers high school students and narrates their lives exposing
their problems and how they deal with them. This exposure shows the intricacy of human
relationships between teenagers and denounces common issues such as the use of drugs, abusive
relationships, or the vulnerating of privacy and intimacy. In the case of Jules, the focus is on
her identity and sexuality, and since she is the only trans character of the series, she also

9
represents the trans collective. Nevertheless, the representation of her transness is adapted to
the format in which it is narrated; this format appeals to a young audience, thus the emphasis is
on her age and her life as a high school student. Previous audiovisual cultural productions star
middle-aged and older actors and actresses who interpret trans female characters, so Jules is
clearly distinguishable from former roles.
This approach contrasts with previous narratives about trans women and blends the trans
reality into a hegemonic discourse, which risks erasing the specifics of their oppression.
Euphoria offers an insight into Julesʼs past, which was marked by her sadness and the
institutional violence that was exerted on her as a trans woman, but the amount of time devoted
to her story is similar to the one devoted to the other characters of the series. Consequently, her
oppression is not given paramount relevance in the development of the character; being trans is
only an aspect of her identity which overall does not determine her life. This partial erasure of
her everyday problems as a member of the trans collective helps trivialize transphobia and
reinforces the cisheternormative system in which we live.
Euphoria clearly navigates between the blending in of the charactersʼ identity to create a
sense of community and the denunciation of individual problems that are ultimately projected
into society. The equality that the series tries to reflect may appeal to a specific audience and
creates the basis for the charactersʼ relationships and their conflicts, but it is a fictional equality:
real life situations are more complex due to the interrelation between different forms of
oppression such as sexism, transphobia, racism, or homophobia. The attempt at leveling diverse
experiences through the close relationships of the protagonists exposes the lack of social
analysis and critical reflection of these systems of oppression.
Even though Jules represents a privileged minority and certain stereotypes such as the
hyperfeminization of trans women, she still embodies a revolutionary aspect of new audiovisual
cultural productions: the inclusion of trans people into their narratives. The vast majority of
previous audiovisual productions that feature trans female characters cast cis male actors, as
seen in The Crying Game, The Silence of the Lambs, Dallas Buyersʼ Club, Transparent, and
The Danish Girl; consequently, the life experiences of trans people are enacted but not lived.
By casting cis actors trans people are seen only as a role that anyone can play, as characters
with whom the spectator may empathize, but they may not fully recognize their existence or
their rights. The importance of casting trans women to play trans female characters is paramount
because it allows the oppressed groups to use their own voice and stop the appropriation of their
narratives. In order to create an equal society where diversity is accepted as depicted in
Euphoria, audiovisual cultural productions need to start taking this diversity into account to

10
represent an authentic reflection of our culture.
Jules is a positive inspiration for the LGBT community not only because she is trans, but
also because she is bisexual. The emphasis on her gender identity and sexual orientation in
Euphoria also gives trans and bisexual people a model with whom they can identify. Providing
oppressed groups with characters in teen series that embody their experiences is beneficial for
both these communities and the rest of the society because it helps normalize the interaction
among different collectives. Moreover, conflicts and prejudices that arise from this interplay
are referred to as a way of denouncing oppressive systems ̶ in this case, transphobia. Even
though these topics are not always openly discussed in Euphoria, their representation through
teenagersʼ lives and their relationships with their peers will surely result in a positive impact on
the audience, especially because it is addressed to young people who can pave the way for a
more egalitarian society.

11
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Levinson, Sam. 2019. “Pilot”. Euphoria, season 1, episode 1. Directed by Augustine Frizzell,
aired June 16. HBO, Television.
Levinson, Sam. 2019. “Made You Look”. Euphoria, season 1, episode 3. Directed by Sam
Levinson, aired June 30. HBO, Television.
Levinson, Sam. 2019. “Shook Ones, Pt. II”. Euphoria, season 1, episode 4. Directed by Sam
Levinson, aired July 7. HBO, Television.
Secondary Sources
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014. “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and
Resistance”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 2: 383 ̶ 406.
Halberstam, Jack. 2018. “Trans* Feminisms”. In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of
Gender Variability, 107 – 128. Oakland: University of California Press.
Kuperberg, Ethan. 2014. “The Wilderness”. Transparent, season 1, episode 6. Directed by Jill
Soloway, aired September 26. Prime Video, Television.
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