Bosom friends and kindred spirits: Reimagining girlhood, bisexuality and queerness in Anne with an E

Questioning traditional ideas of hegemonic femininity, queerness and heteronormativity, this article examines Moira Walley-Beckett’s Anne with an E (2017–19, CBC and Netflix) as a means of revisiting queer and female histories in contemporary television. Reinvestigating classic Anne of Green Gables, this series pushes the boundaries of history by modernizing historical ideas about gender, sexuality, class and race in the early twentieth century. Using feminist theory, queer theory and critical cultural studies approaches, this article argues that these coming-of-age narratives of girlhood, bisexuality and femininity interrogate binary notions of past and present, childhood and adulthood, fact and fiction. By blending and blurring literary and fictional histories, this series pushes up against the whiteness and heteronormativity within media culture, drawing attention not only to the absence of people of colour and LGBTQ+ characters within literary and media histories more generally but also to alternative possibilities for more inclusive media representation. In this way, this series is rethinking historical and literary representations of girlhood, (bi)sexuality and feminist empowerment by putting queer people and women at the centre of its storytelling.