Snowflake Challenge: Day Eleven

[kiki_eng]

Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Torchwood came out during a point in my life when I desperately needed a queer genre show. Having Jack Harkness, the charismatic and indestructible omnisexual person, was really important, as was everyone else in Torchwood's queerness. The thing where everyone in Torchwood is seen with partners of more than one gender had an impact on me that I don't think I realised at the time, but I'm really appreciative now for all those different shades of queerness and different personalities.

I wasn't fully out when Torchwood aired, but I watched it with other people, and I think I felt safer because of that. Being able to talk about Torchwood and know that other people liked it and loved Jack Harkness was important for me. Torchwood's representation helped me feel safer and more sure of myself.

Comments

[silveradept]

Torchwood was very good at making everyone queer and making queerness normal. I think the showrunners felt like that could get away with a lot more in Cardiff than they could have with the TARDIS. And it worked well.

[kiki_eng]

Yeah, having a new show centred around Jack definitely helped set them up for that queerness, I think.

[silveradept]

It certainly helped. I thought it an interesting decision to have Gwen be, essentially, the party character to get the reveal of being canonically queer, because it let people essentially believe that Gwen was the normal in the group of weirdos, which might have kept them watching longer.

[kiki_eng]

The whole how to do minority/female representation in media and not alienate the majority/men is a whole can of worms, I think.

[silveradept]

That it is. And someone keeps handing people a can opener without knowing what they'll do with it.

[kiki_eng]

I'm sorry?

[silveradept]

Apologies. It sounded like you were concerned about the ways that minorities were represented with the idea of keeping the majority watching, I was being annoyed that shows and showrunners seem to want to trample all over those concerns and not particularly care about what they have to do to those minority characters to keep the majority watching.

[kiki_eng]

Okay, thanks for explaining. Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. As a queer woman who's been desperately searching for media representation since before I knew I was queer I have a lot of thoughts on representation in media and am also kind of tired of thinking about it at all.

I'm basically sick of how excited I am about crumbs and the notion that crumbs are the only thing that you can give some minorities without alienating the majority and there needs to be this glacial progress in terms of representation, that the average viewer needs to be coddled, that the average viewer relates best to a straight white cis male that performs his masculinity in certain ways.

Like, the notion that you can't create media about gays and not have it be about being gay or that any time you represent a character who is different from that default character the story is about how they deviate from that expected norm. (There's a thing going around tumblr now of a really illustrative twitter series Seanan McGuire did on that - here.) The thing where we're conditioned by the glut of material about that norm to think about that demographic as being the norm and to sympathise with that perspective, and the idea that that perspective is necessary and needs to be maintained for something to be truly accessible? Um, what. Like - I didn't like Gwen when I was watching Torchwood and she wasn't the favourite character of anyone I knew, I mean, she's also not straight, but I don't know that she served that "everyman"-type purpose; she had such a distinct personality. I mean, Torchwood was great in that who everyone was was so unrelated to their sexuality in that that was never anyone's defining characteristic, but the notion that what makes a character relateable is how closely they adhere to that norm is ridiculous to me.

...and then on the other side of that same coin, that you need to maintain a certain number of minorities but that it doesn't really matter who they are so you can just kill them off and then introduce a new character to fill that minority slot next season or have a series of interchangeable female love interests, like, that's what? Bad writing and a desire to keep the main cast low so you can spend less money on actors? ...and then, yeah, lazy stereotype usage in those representations because the writers don't know how to write those characters or their bosses aren't willing to greenlight anything that differs too much from those expected stereotypes.

I mean, I do think that there are people out there who have had and continue to have a more pleasurable media experience because they are coddled and that the many mainstream episode of the week minority explanations do serve an educational purpose - like there are people out there who know what "trans" means because of CSI probably, and that knowledge is valuable, but, like, just fucking make John Cho's romcom and cast Laverne Cox in everything and make a Hallmark film where the high powered female exec gets to fall in love with her bubbly assistant instead of the asshole she's dating and maybe consider the possibility of casting and writing stories about people who aren't white or cis or male.

I know that the constant reiteration of that norm serves some people but I'm unclear on why we should care. I dislike the notion that history is progress, continual positive changes going forward, but it's fucking 2018 and people need to fucking put on their big person pants and learn how to get the fuck over themselves and empathise with someone who isn't some white straight cis dude. (The fuck are we doing pandering to racist misogynists and so forth?)

I watched a Hallmark-type film with Meghan Markle in it and it was a bit fascinating watching her apparently cast as white in her all white family and dating her white boyfriend and, like, you couldn't have cast anyone else who wasn't white or anyone at all who wasn't white-passing-to-a-lot-of-people in that entire thing?

Or Seth Meyers' joke at the Emmy's that no woman wanted to host that because: hotel room, like, yeah, there's no woman in media who would have wanted that exposure.

tldr; shenanigans, basically

Sorry this is long and rambly and probably increasingly incoherent. (Feelings.)

[silveradept]

Not incoherent at all. And yes to all of those things, especially creating shows that don't cater at all to the majority and just expect them to enjoy it.

Gwen definitely has a strong personality and character. Even if I liked Tosh the most, all of Torchwood were definitely unique.

I'm sorry if I opened a can of worms or brought up bad things.

[kiki_eng]

No worries. Sorry again for the length and delay.

[spikedluv]

I loved Torchwood! I'm glad it helped you, knowing people liked the show and Jack.

[kiki_eng]

Thanks. :) Torchwood was great, yeah.