"It's like I've come home": Race, queerness, and hybrid identities in sex education

Anamarija Horvat is Lecturer in Media Studies at the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. Her research expertise lies in media, feminist, and queer studies, and her monograph Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television (2021) examines how queer memory has been represented in and created by contemporary on-screen representation. She has also published a number of works in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Television, Transnational Screens, and NECSUS on issues such as representations of queer migration on television, transgender memory, and queer cinema and television in contexts such as the United States, UK, Serbia, Croatia, and Spain, as well as publishing work in other venues including The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Queer Studies and Communication and The International Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media and Communication.

Sex Education’s queer student Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa) makes a grand entrance to the school dance in S1:E7, sporting glittering eye makeup, a multicolored suit, golden earrings, and a green gele, the traditional Nigerian headwrap usually worn only by women. Within the context of S1, the moment is of pivotal relevance, representing both a renewed self-acceptance and a new sense of empowerment for Eric, who has spent the previous episodes dressing in muted colors after dealing not only with the psychological aftermath of a homophobic attack but also with his father’s continued disapproval of his gender self-expression. In this context, the relevance of Eric returning to bright colors and glittering eye makeup, but also his repurposing of the gele as something he can himself wear, stands as an especially powerful signifier within the series. More specifically, it points toward the way in which Eric’s Nigerian heritage stands not in contrast with but is rather an essential part of his queerness, serving as a source of empowerment through which he is finally able, at the season’s end, to triumph over his trauma....