Representation and all that...
Jan. 18th, 2010 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfLast night, we took Ruta and Joanne, the owners of True Colors Bookstore out to the HRC benefit showing of Venice, a web tv soap with lesbian characters and featuring one or more ( I lost count) of the actors from The Guiding Light at Camp, a new-to-us bar in St. Paul. As to why we were doing this in the first place, the store and Ruta in particular, have had a rough year, what between being held up at gunpoint, computer crises, low sales and other fun. So we thought it would be a nice way to thank the two of them for all their hard work and to provide something moderately cheerful for us all to do.
And it kind of was, seeing as our expectations of the show were a tad low to begin with. In all fairness, the bar's sound system was either not so hot or perhaps the links weren't working too well. The clink of martini glasses on a marble countertop on screen was about 10 times louder than the dialog so we had to compare notes on what we thought was going on after each 6 or 7 minute mini-episode. All of the actors were, of course, very pretty and very thin, and mostly white. Apart from that, it was the usual - gorgeous lesbian designer living in Venice Beach sleeps around, ignoring the needs and wants of the woman who truly loves her (goddess only knows why, since we're not given much to work with). The dialog was pretty wooden - lots of speechifying to little effect and it was difficult to get involved in the story line in episodelets.
In short, it was the way we envisioned the L Word to be. We hadn't actually seen the L Word when it was still on, since we are a cable-free household, so we decided that we were perhaps being unjust. We picked up the first few episodes at the local video store (Movies on 35th, if you're local) and settled in to watch it last night. Good points - good writing, decent acting, relatively snappy dialog, a situation or two we could actually believe. Bad points - economically improbable (sure, they can all afford live in the same neighborhood in L.A. I believe that), not particularly diverse in any definition of the term, and I wouldn't want to hang out with these women of a weekend, just saying. But overall, compelling enough to keep us watching. And yes, at a zillion times the budget, far superior to Venice.
Which brings us the crux of the matter. Now, I'm on the lesbian end of polymorphously perverse and I came out at time when a hell of a lot of queer women, and LGBT people in general, has already spent several decades carving out a space for us to begin to live in. Yay for the mid-80s. There were collectives and bookstores and small to medium-sized presses and newspapers and film festivals and marches and rallies. Over the course of the 1980s through 90s, I was involved in 2 bookstore collectives plus running my own tiny queer/feminist/left store, attended Queer Nation actions, wrote a column on local LGBT life for the weekly indie newspaper, wrote for countless small presses and participated in numerous meetings and protests and helped create and build a women's music festival. All so that now, I can sit around and watch a couple of mainstream friendly soap opera with remarkably well-to-do yet very shallow queer female characters who feel the need to refer to themselves as "gay women." My immediate response is along the lines of "Fuck that."
Dykes to Watch Out For was and generally still is, a far more representative depiction of lesbian/bi and queer communities and characters than these shows will ever be. This kind of depiction is what comes after the gradual collapse of the infrastructure that lesbian, bi and trans women activists built after Stonewall; in short, we're settling. We're accepting the valorization of characters that do nothing of any value to build our communities. We're letting our bookstores and other institutions die away. We're still trying to write ourselves into TV shows and movies where we don't exist or exist only peripherally. We're letting institutions like presses and awards get away with calling themselves "GLBT" when they really mean that they're "G" and maybe a little "B;" "L" and "T" need not apply and get edged further and further back into less visible corners. And then we're left accepting often substandard depictions of our lives and our realities because we're hungry for something that shows us, just a little, as we dream of being seen. As this becomes our new reality, we lose our (her)story and a sense of where we've been and what we could accomplish. Ask yourself if this is enough, if it should be enough. The activists and writers and performers who built what we're giving up, warts and all, could at least dream of better things. Why can't we do the same?
And it kind of was, seeing as our expectations of the show were a tad low to begin with. In all fairness, the bar's sound system was either not so hot or perhaps the links weren't working too well. The clink of martini glasses on a marble countertop on screen was about 10 times louder than the dialog so we had to compare notes on what we thought was going on after each 6 or 7 minute mini-episode. All of the actors were, of course, very pretty and very thin, and mostly white. Apart from that, it was the usual - gorgeous lesbian designer living in Venice Beach sleeps around, ignoring the needs and wants of the woman who truly loves her (goddess only knows why, since we're not given much to work with). The dialog was pretty wooden - lots of speechifying to little effect and it was difficult to get involved in the story line in episodelets.
In short, it was the way we envisioned the L Word to be. We hadn't actually seen the L Word when it was still on, since we are a cable-free household, so we decided that we were perhaps being unjust. We picked up the first few episodes at the local video store (Movies on 35th, if you're local) and settled in to watch it last night. Good points - good writing, decent acting, relatively snappy dialog, a situation or two we could actually believe. Bad points - economically improbable (sure, they can all afford live in the same neighborhood in L.A. I believe that), not particularly diverse in any definition of the term, and I wouldn't want to hang out with these women of a weekend, just saying. But overall, compelling enough to keep us watching. And yes, at a zillion times the budget, far superior to Venice.
Which brings us the crux of the matter. Now, I'm on the lesbian end of polymorphously perverse and I came out at time when a hell of a lot of queer women, and LGBT people in general, has already spent several decades carving out a space for us to begin to live in. Yay for the mid-80s. There were collectives and bookstores and small to medium-sized presses and newspapers and film festivals and marches and rallies. Over the course of the 1980s through 90s, I was involved in 2 bookstore collectives plus running my own tiny queer/feminist/left store, attended Queer Nation actions, wrote a column on local LGBT life for the weekly indie newspaper, wrote for countless small presses and participated in numerous meetings and protests and helped create and build a women's music festival. All so that now, I can sit around and watch a couple of mainstream friendly soap opera with remarkably well-to-do yet very shallow queer female characters who feel the need to refer to themselves as "gay women." My immediate response is along the lines of "Fuck that."
Dykes to Watch Out For was and generally still is, a far more representative depiction of lesbian/bi and queer communities and characters than these shows will ever be. This kind of depiction is what comes after the gradual collapse of the infrastructure that lesbian, bi and trans women activists built after Stonewall; in short, we're settling. We're accepting the valorization of characters that do nothing of any value to build our communities. We're letting our bookstores and other institutions die away. We're still trying to write ourselves into TV shows and movies where we don't exist or exist only peripherally. We're letting institutions like presses and awards get away with calling themselves "GLBT" when they really mean that they're "G" and maybe a little "B;" "L" and "T" need not apply and get edged further and further back into less visible corners. And then we're left accepting often substandard depictions of our lives and our realities because we're hungry for something that shows us, just a little, as we dream of being seen. As this becomes our new reality, we lose our (her)story and a sense of where we've been and what we could accomplish. Ask yourself if this is enough, if it should be enough. The activists and writers and performers who built what we're giving up, warts and all, could at least dream of better things. Why can't we do the same?
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Date: 2010-01-18 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-01-19 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 07:44 am (UTC)But it was very L.A., and the characters were very L.A., even though they were depicting a total fiction (the real-life running joke had always been that there were no lesbians in L.A. - certainly no bars or coffeehouses or bookstores or any of the places they invented for the show). When in various interviews it came out that they set out to make something "sexy and fun" and that "fashion" would play a big part, it made a little more sense. I guess. And I should point out, I was a huge fan of the show regardless, throughout its run. Even with its endless parade of Wow-Of-The-Week, like the Dinah Shore weekends, and the Olivia cruises, and so on. Still, it was something, I guess.
When I came out, it was early 90's in Chicago, and it was the People Like Us bookstore and the local presses it supported, and it was the Reader and the community in its orbit, and the Gerber Hart library and its academics. For the most part those things still exist, but they seem to have been mainstreamed. Gentrified. People Like Us is long gone. The only indie bookstore left in Chicago is Quimby's, not a queer store per se but something born out of a comic shop. Sure, it stocks DTWOF but it's really not the same. And I've been out of the community (and away from Chicago) for so long now, I couldn't begin to tell you why or how or when it happened.
Anyway, sorry this got long. Thank you for bringing this up. It would be nice to think we can all still dream of better things.
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Date: 2010-01-19 04:52 pm (UTC)Re: Chicago. Women and Children First Bookstore is still going reasonably strong. And is a most excellent bookstore, I might add. :-)
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Date: 2010-01-19 02:54 pm (UTC)A couple years ago DC Comics announced they were writing the Batwoman superhero as a lesbian. Amidst the responses, someone (no idea who) said that the outing of gay characters was no longer a huge impact, that if DC wanted to be truly innovative they would write about an "ugly" superhero.
L-Word gets infuriating after season 3. :) There is a sharp dropoff in character likeability, imo.
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Date: 2010-01-19 04:46 pm (UTC)re: Batwoman. I've certainly heard the "You already have enough of those (variously defined), you don't need any more" argument more times than I can to imagine. Funny how there's never more than 2 or 3 main characters at most, generally less, at any one time. If D.C. or Marvel or Dark Horse have had any other major characters 'come out' in the last year, I've certainly missed it. And didn't she get hit by Women in Refridgerator syndrome, then brought back?
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Date: 2010-01-20 04:18 pm (UTC)I've certainly heard the "You already have enough of those (variously defined), you don't need any more" argument more times than I can to imagine. Funny how there's never more than 2 or 3 main characters at most, generally less, at any one time.
Can you recommend any literature that discusses this? I'd be interested.
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Date: 2010-01-20 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 10:04 pm (UTC)So I agree: protest shallow depictions. Make some noise.
Don't let gloss and lip service go unmolested.