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Another Bury Your Gays Trope – It ‘Kana’ Be True?

To all in the Kana fandom we feel your pain. This week Bhavna Limbachia, the actor who plays Coronation Street ’s Rana Nazir, took to social media with a video message to fans confirming that her journey on the soap will be coming to an end.   In the same message she revealed that her and her producer (Iain MacLeod) had collaborated to come up with an “amazing exit storyline”.   However, if rumours are to be believed, this exit storyline involves her character dying on the day of her wedding to her partner Kate Connor (played by Faye Brookes). Together they are referred to by fans as ‘Kana’.   Given that this spells the end of an all too rare mainstream TV wlw relationship and the demise of yet another queer female TV character, it’s difficult to understand how this can be described as “amazing”.   Add in the fact that the character is Muslim, and thus represents a minority within a minority, and it makes it even harder to comprehend how an exit like this can be described in such op
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An Exercise in Catharsis Following the Berena Split

Looking back now it’s all so obvious. I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and couldn’t figure out why I felt so different, so ‘wrong’.  Why didn’t I see it earlier?  It’s so simple really, it’s because when I looked around I couldn’t see myself.  I grew up in a rural, small town environment before the birth of the internet when there was zero representation of myself on TV.  I didn’t recognise the true version of myself because it didn’t exist in the world around me.  Or rather, it did but it wasn’t visible to me.  Even after moving to the ‘big smoke’ I had a very slow awakening and looking back I can easily parallel my gradual dawning of realisation with the very gradual increase in w/w representation in TV/media.   However, even though that representation clearly piqued my interest, it hasn’t always been positive - doomed, clandestine affairs; infidelity; deaths; passionate but brief affairs before living a straight life (tropes I believe they are called).  I bel
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