Saturday, November 29, 2014
Every Single Week
According to Anna McCarthy, ABC’s president, Robert A Iger, said of Ellen that it “became a program about a character who was gay every single week, and… that was too much for people.” McCarthy describes this perspective as maintaining the “fantasy of queer identity as something that can be switched on for special occasions” along with a “fear of a quotidian, ongoing lesbian life on television.” Since Ellen’s coming out episode in 1997, a number of queer characters, generally secondary characters, have appeared on both broadcast and cable television. Choose a program with a queer character from the 2000s that you are familiar with and examine whether or not that character’s relationship to their sexuality is truly serialized or only focused on during “special occasions,” whether to play up a particular stance on sexual identity or for eroticizing reasons.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Regarding the Iger quote, the McCarthy reading states, “Queer TV, in short, could make history as event television but not as what we might call “uneventful” television” (qtd. in McCarthy 597). Meaning that queer television would be more episodic rather than serialized, only having relevance through an event like Ellen’s coming out episode, rather than through the whole series.
ReplyDeleteAs queer relationships are becoming more widely acknowledged, I feel like that has impacted queer characters on television as well. For example, “Pretty Little Liars” plays host to a lesbian main character named Emily Fields.Overall, I think the show does a pretty good job with serializing the character’s relationship to their sexuality. Emily starts out the series as having a boyfriend until she meets a girl named Maya. She pursues Maya, acting on feelings she has always felt. She eventually develops a relationship with her and comes out to her friends and family. In some way, the particular episodes where she begins to understand her identity and comes out can be argued as more “eventful” and focusing on “special occasions” where the show takes a particular stance on sexual identity, but these episodes are also important in the character’s arc through the series. These episodes allow her to break out of her comfort zone, show who she really is, then begin accepting it. Throughout the series, she has different relationships with different girls, and compared to the heterosexual girls in the show, Emily’s relationships play out very similarly. The series focuses on the ups and downs of her relationships just as much as the other heterosexual girls, and shows the physical aspects of it as equally as the other relationships on the show.
I also would like to mention that I was kind of annoyed with the Iger quote because what does “too much for people” even mean? No one complains when there is “too much” of a character who is heterosexual because that’s the “norm”. I can see why recognizing a gay character on television is a big deal, and perhaps even a big move forward in the fight for gay rights, especially during a time when queer tv wasn’t extremely popular. However, it’s still frustrating because I feel like even though television is at a point where it can portray queer characters more freely, it’s still in a place where it feels the need to justify those characters to an audience.