The Queerness of Grace Helbig: Speculative Sexualities, Oblique Signification

Over the past several years, YouTube has transformed from just another online video-sharing
platform to a proper medium in its own right. Beyond the viral video, YouTubers thrive with
regularly scheduled videos ranging from vlogs to dramas. As such, a blossoming fan base has
emerged around a closely-knit, Los Angeles-based network of YouTubers, such as Tyler Oakley,
Hannah Hart, Joey Graceffa, and Grace Helbig. While representing a unique medium and
revolutionizing traditional categories of celebrity and fandom, these teen-oriented fan bases
succeed precisely on the culture of fan fiction. Much like in previous fan cultures, fan fiction
prospers primarily on the “slashing” together of often homoerotic pairings. Yet, YouTube fan
fiction has evidenced a crucial shift in language, abandoning the terminology of the “slash” for
the romantically infused language of “shipping” (advocating a pairing’s relation-“ship”) and
promoting particular OTPs (One True Pairings). Even the taxonomy of the slash pairing (i.e.
Hannah Hart/Grace Helbig) has been replaced by the hashtagged portmanteau (i.e. #Hartbig),
swallowing the erotic encounter of the slash for the queer hybridity of the OTP.
Unlike slash involving fictional characters, shipping produces speculative sexualities, whereby
fans promote and advocate for their OTPs in the hopes of enabling long-term monogamous or
polyamorous couplings in real life (IRL) that might someday prove themselves to be “canon.” As
a fluid and dynamic fan base, able to have close interactions with their celebrities, YouTubers
often read or perform fan fictions on their channels, and play with preconceived notions of
popular ships, since such speculative, erotic writings generate intrigue that translates into views
and subscribers. At the same time, such speculative sexualities confront the YouTuber’s own
desire for privacy in the face of an open-access form of celebrity that often reveals too intimate
details about their personal lives. As such, YouTubers often play with ships as a tactic for
concealing and obfuscating their actual relationships and sexualities through methods that in
themselves reflect queer practices.
Approaching this matter through the lens of close reading and visual analysis, I wish to focus
precisely on one YouTuber in particular, Grace Helbig of itsGrace (formerly DailyGrace). As a
straight-white-female in her late-twenties, Helbig might appear as a paradigm of heteronormative
sexual identity. However, moving past the definition of queer as merely an indicator of gay or
lesbian, this paper argues that the manner in which Helbig represents her own amorous
relationships throughout her videos and vlogs demonstrate a distinctly queer methodology of
self-making and survival at the intersection of humor, medium-reflexivity, privacy, and market
concerns. Throughout her videos, much like many other YouTubers, Helbig neither denies nor
confirms her relationships, but rather produces a system of oblique signification, whereby lovers
are strategically and cheekily made manifest in a passing reflection in a mirror, paired selfies,
shared living spaces, and so on, but never acknowledged. Studying closely Helbig’s various
ships, this paper articulates how speculative sexualities and oblique signification operate as two
intersecting strategies and tactics, respectively, of queerness in the redefined language-landscape
of fan fiction.