Tin D. Vo

Thanks for having me, David.

Yeah, I mean, that's actually a really interesting point to observe around the machoism that comes into play.

When we think about hockey, there's just this level of competitiveness and aggression that's involved in hockey.

in hockey that is often celebrated, especially in dominant ways of thinking about what it means to be masculine or a man, um, in sports and a particular, this, this very aggressive sport.

And so one of the things, like they definitely show that, that kind of, um, aggression, um, like on the, uh,

on the ice.

Um, but I do think that there's also like within among some of the players, um, and team members, there's also this like bonding that happens that, that they show, um, between team members and sort of this like care for each other and just checking in on how they're doing.

And, um, I think that that's what this show does something really well in sort of balancing some of that, um, aspect of the, like,

very macho piece around hockey, but also this bonding that happens among team members that is not really seen when we watch hockey in the real world.

You know, I think if I want to take a step back in thinking about art in its form, media that we're consuming in our daily lives, there are, I guess, three types of ways that we want to think about the way that art is represented.

One is history, how we understand the way things have been in the past.

Second is what's happening in everyday life now?

And then third is what do we want to visualize or envision for our world in the future?

And there's different forms of art that sort of represents those different time points.

And this art piece, I think, Heated Rivalry in this current stage is almost in a way of looking to this balance of current and future state of what we want to see in our society.

And I think that's what maybe is attracting people is because sort of like when we see art in this way, we see our own values represented within the art.

And by representing this almost...

level of inclusion of queer people within sports kind of shows like there's this like desire for changing values and in shifting the values that we hold or embedding those values or making them much clearer in the way that we view this particular sport activity.

Yeah, I think maybe just another thing here just to add another layer of criticalness in thinking about the way that queer representation appears on screen.

And actually this aligns with some of the research that I'm doing with queer and trans youth around things like they're bringing up conversations around queer joy.