Opinion
Finally, ‘Yellowjackets’ Is Embracing Shauna’s Queerness
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 3.]
Yellowjackets is one of the most queer shows currently airing on television. There’s power couple Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown / Tawny Cypress) and Van (Liv Hewson / Lauren Ambrose), and Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) who spends his time hallucinating about the boyfriend he left back home. The queerness imbued in this series isn’t strictly front-facing. There’s an abundance of subtext to go around for the rest of the gang. There’s one particular character, though, who has perhaps the most subtext to work with, a character fans have been longing for the show to make canonically queer.
Shauna (Sophie Nélisse / Melanie Lynskey) is one of Yellowjackets’ most misunderstood characters. In the past timeline, we’ve watched her suffer after the death of her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell) closed out the first season, and in Season 2, she lost her unborn child in a stillbirth. In the present timeline, Shauna appears to be a husk of the fiery young woman she once was in the 90s. Before the events of Season 1 begin, she lives a dull life with her husband, Jeff (Warren Kole), and her daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins).
Now, in both timelines, Shauna seems to be toeing a fine line between good and evil. She hates how the rest of the team views their life in the wilderness as picturesque. She’s jealous of Natalie’s position as their leader. But, most of all, Shauna just wants someone to empathize with all she’s been through. Enter Melissa (Jenna Burgess), a survivor who up until this season was a glorified extra. Like Shauna, she is opposed to Natalie’s leadership, seeking a more volatile kind of order that can allow for the Yellowjackets to become the messiest versions of themselves.
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We watch as Melissa attempts to make a connection with Shauna, making fun of other members of the group with her as a means to let Shauna know that, although she may not know it, there is someone in her corner. Later, when Shauna visits her baby’s grave, after she moved his remains from their previous resting spot, she catches Melissa watching her. Shauna pulls out a knife and claims: “No one has any right to my baby.” The wilderness is a place that takes and takes, relentlessly pushing our characters to the brink of no return. Out of all of them, Shauna has suffered the most, losing not only her life outside of the wilderness, but the parts of home that followed her there.
While some like Taissa are sympathetic to Shauna’s plights, many of the members of the group fear her and have in turn made her feel more ostracized than she already was. Although the girl in front of her wields a knife, Melissa tells Shauna that she’s sorry for everything she’s had to endure since their plane crashed. This admission is met with a burst of fury, as Shauna sees it as a threat instead of a helping hand. Yet, Melissa challenges Shauna again, revealing that unlike the other camp members, she isn’t afraid of her. In typical Yellowjackets fashion, she responds by shoving Melissa against a tree, before thrusting her knife up to her neck and threatening to kill her if she exposes the placement of her baby’s new grave.
The other survivors would undoubtedly back down by now, or meet Shauna’s anger with a threat of their own. But, instead of being afraid of Shauna, Melissa responds to this threat by kissing her. Although Shauna seems surprised at first, she lunges forward and returns the kiss with a feverish urgency. The camera pans away to showcase the bodies of the two girls colliding, Shauna never once dropping the knife, instead keeping it at Melissa’s throat. This kiss lays bare Shauna’s desperation to find a connection with someone who isn’t afraid to challenge her and who is inherently empathetic to the plights the wilderness has bestowed upon her. The only person who occupied both spots for Shauna in the past was Jackie.
While the person Shauna kisses is a surprise, the fact that she’s kissing another girl is not. Teen Shauna specifically has always seemed to be queer-coded, and although it took a bit more than two seasons to get here, it feels like this revealing of her queerness was inevitable. While Adult Shauna is married to Jeff–whom she slept with back in the 90s despite him being Jackie’s boyfriend–her initial desire to be with him stemmed from her wanting to become Jackie’s best friend. Yes, Shauna’s desire to be like Jackie is partially because of her desire to be the All-American Girl, but this leads to her wanting to consume Jackie–and her identity–in some way.
By eating a broken piece of Jackie’s ear in Season 2, Shauna doesn’t simply set off the series’ first act of cannibalism. In devouring a physical piece of Jackie, Shauna is able to keep a piece of her first love buried inside of her. Jackie will live on forever, existing through her best friend’s memory, but also her physical being. Even when Shauna and Melissa kiss, Shauna is wearing a dirty white shirt with butterflies on it—the same shirt worn by Jackie in a previous episode of the series. Shauna has always been queer, and this piece of wardrobe further proves that her sexuality is, and always will be, tied to her dead best friend.
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Season 2 show’s that Teen Shauna has become her true self, releasing any shame that she may have harbored in the past. Adult Shauna feels like a woman whose queerness has been stifled, at least physically, as we’ve never seen her interact with women like her younger counterpart. Outside of the wilderness and trapped in suburbia, she has reverted to the Shauna she was before the plane crash: rigid and desperate to find a release. However, her marriage to Jeff is a means for her queerness to lay dormant but not fully buried. They love each other, but their marriage was initiated as a way to somehow keep Jackie alive, as if by coexisting together as two people who loved Jackie, they could still somehow keep her memory intact.
While Shauna has always been queer, it’s nice to see her finally realize this, as well as finally showcase this to the devoted Yellowjackets fanbase. Although this is a series where other queer characters exist, it feels like with Shauna the show is giving us some truly messy queer representation, something that mainstream film and television often attempt to avoid. In having Shauna’s first instance of canonical queerness displayed to the audience in an intense struggle between her and Melissa–one which hinges on a life-or-death threat–Yellowjackets is proving that it’s not afraid to portray Shauna as a problematic person.
She is perhaps the survivor who has suffered the most (along with poor, ill-fated Travis), and it’s reasonable for her psyche to be cracking more rapidly than that of her peers. By allowing Shauna to bask in her queerness right as she’s become unabashedly the most volatile of the gang, Yellowjackets has made a bold step in how queer characters are allowed to be represented onscreen. The absence of social conventions that held her back beyond the wilderness allowed her to take shape as her most authentic–albeit messy–self.
Her complicated relationship with Jackie was Shauna’s first taste of queerness, which fate prevented her from fully exploring. With Melissa, Shauna is finally taking a bite out of her sexual identity. This realization in Shauna feels like the start of a feast, one that could actually fulfill her in both the past and present timelines.
Yellowjackets, Streaming, Fridays, Paramount+ With Showtime, Airs Sundays, 9/8c, Showtime
