ABSTRACT
Killing Eve is a narrative that constructs the tensions between queerness and heteronormativity as intertwined with violence, power, and the forbidden. This chapter examines the interconnection between heteronormativity and racialized gendered constructions of the normative Asian woman character, who struggles with the moral impulse to “be normal” and resists her desire for a woman who is a ruthless assassin. It also examines the bind of queer impossibility in Killing Eve through Shimizu's framework of politically productive perversity that builds upon a queer feminist analysis that challenges assumed racialized, gendered, and sexual normativities. The advancement of this framework re-centers Gopinath's argument of the “erotics of power,” that are at play in both the representations, and how people critique them. Gayatri Gopinath frames the notion of impossibility “as a way of signaling the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora”.
