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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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I keep seeing people calling Good Omens queer bating and a I can't help but ask why? I read the Aziraphale/Crowley relationship threw an Ace lens and they are clearly as close to married as they are probably going to get without stepping on holy ground.... and they love each other... why is it considered queer bating?

Personally, I think it's mostly young queer fans turning legitimate grievances on the wrong target. A case of getting so fed up with queerbaiting in media as a whole that they're instinctually lashing out at anything that seems to resembles it on the surface, without taking the time to consider whether this is, in fact, the thing they're mad at. Good Omens is a scapegoat, if you will. The equivalent of snapping at your partner after a long day. Your friend was an asshole, your boss was an asshole, the guy in traffic was an asshole, and then you come home to your partner who says something teasing and you take it as another asshole comment because you've just been surrounded by assholeness all day, to the point where your brain is primed to see an attack. Your partner wasn't actually an asshole, but by this point you're (understandably) too on guard to realize that. Unless someone sits you down and kindly reminds you of the difference between playful teasing and a legitimate insult - the nuance, if you will - your hackles are just gonna stay up and you'll leave the room, off to phone a different friend to tell them all about how your partner was definitely an asshole to you.

Only in this case, that "friend" is a fan on social media doing think pieces on the supposed queerbaiting of Good Omens, spreading that idea to a) people who aren't familiar with the show themselves and b) those who, like that original fan, have come to expect queerbaiting and thus aren't inclined to question the latest story with that mark leveled against it. Because on the surface Good Omens can look a lot like queerbaiting. Here are two queer coded characters who clearly love each other, but don't say "I love you," don't kiss, don't "prove" that love in a particular way. So Gaiman is just leading everyone on, right?

Well... no. This is where the nuance comes in, the thing that many fans aren't interested in grappling with (because, like it or not, media is not made up of black and white categories; queerbaited and not-queerbaited. Supernatural's finale is proof enough of that...) I won't delve into the most detailed explanation here, but suffice to say:

Gaiman has straight up said it's a love story. He's just not giving them concrete labels like "gay" or "bi" or "asexual," etc. because they are literally not human. Gaiman has subscribed to an inclusive viewpoint in an era where fans are desperate for unambiguous rep that homophobes cannot possibly deny. The freedom to prioritize any interpretation - yes, including a "just friends" interpretation - now, in 2021, feels like a cop-out. However, in this case it's an act of world building (they are an angel and a demon, not bound by human understanding of identity) meeting a genuine desire to make these characters relatable to the entire queer community, not just particular subsets. Gaiman has said they can be whatever we want because the gender, sexuality, and romantic attraction of an angel and a demon is totally up for debate! However, some fans have interpreted that as a dismissal of canonical queerness; the idea that fans can pretend they're whatever they want... but it's definitely not canon. It is though. Them being queer is 100% canon, it's just up to us to decide what kind of queer they are. This isn't Gaiman stringing audiences along, it's him opening the relationship up to all queer possibilities.

We know he's not stringing us along (queerbaiting) because up until just a few days ago season two didn't exist. Queerbaiting is a deliberate strategy to maintain an audience. A miniseries does not need to maintain its audience. You binge it in one go and you're done, no coming back next year required. The announcement for season two doesn't erase that context for season one. No one knew there would be more content and thus the idea that they would implement a strategy designed to keep viewers hooked due to the hope for a queer relationship (with no intent to follow through) is... silly.

In addition, this interpretive, queer relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale existed in the book thirty years ago. Many fans are not considering the difference between creating a totally new story in 2019 and faithfully adapting a story from 1990 in 2019. Good Omens as representation meant something very different back then and that absolutely impacts how we see its adaptation onto the small screen. To put this into perspective, Rowling made HUGE waves when she revealed that she "thought of" Dumbledore as gay in an interview... in 2007. Compare that to the intense coding 17 years before. Gaiman was - and still is - pushing boundaries.

Which includes being an established ally, particularly in his comics. Queerbaiting isn't just the act of a single work, but the way an author approaches their work. Gaiman does not (to my knowledge) have that mark against him and even if he did, he's done enough other work to offset that.

Finally, we've got other, practical issues like: how do you represent asexuality on the screen? How do you show an absence of something? Yeah, one or both of them could claim that label in the show, outright saying, "I'm asexual," but again, Gaimain isn't looking to box his mythological figures into a single identity. So if we want that rep... we have to grapple with the fact that this is one option for what it looks like.

Even if he did want to narrow the representation down to just a few identities for the show, should Gaiman really be making those major changes when he's only one half of the author team? Pratchett has, sadly, passed on and thus obviously has no say in whether his characters undergo such revisions. Even if fans hate every other argument, they should understand that, out of respect, Good Omens is going to largely remain the same story it was 30 years ago.

And those 6,000 years are just the beginning! Again, this was meant to be a miniseries of a single novel, a novel that, crucially, covered only Crowley and Aziraphale's triumph in being able to love one another freely. That's a part of their personal journey. Yeah, they've been together in one sense for 6,000 years, but that was always with hell and heaven on their backs, to say nothing of the slow-burn approach towards acknowledging that love, for Aziraphale in particular. We end the story at the start of their new relationship, one that is more free and open than it ever was before. They can be anything to one another now! The fact that we don't see that isn't a deliberate attempt on the author's part to deny us that representation, but only a result of the story ending.

So yeah, there's a lot to consider and, frankly, I don't think those fans are considering it. Which on a purely emotional level I can understand. I'm pissed about queerbaiting too and the knee-jerk desire to reject anything that doesn't meet a specific standard is understandable. But understandable doesn't mean we don't have to work against that instinct because doing otherwise is harmful in the long run. We need to consider when stories were published and what representation meant back then. We need to consider how we adapt those stories for a modern audience. We need to acknowledge that if we want the inclusivity that "queer" provides us, that includes getting characters whose identity is not strictly defined by the author as well as characters with overtly canonical labels. We need both. We likewise need to be careful about when having higher standards ends up hurting the wrong authors - who are our imperfect allies vs. those straight up unwilling to embrace our community at all? And most importantly, we have to think about how we're using the terms we've developed to discuss these issues. Queerbaiting means something specific and applying it to Good Omens not only does Good Omens a disservice, but it undermines the intended meaning of "queerbaiting," making it harder to use correctly in the future. Good Omens is not queerbaiting and trying to claim it is only hurts the community those fans are speaking up for.

#good omens #mymetas #queer

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arotechno · 3 years

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Jughead (2015), Issues 9-11: Discussion and Commentary

This brings us to the first arc written by Ryan North, who saw that the aroace Jughead train had left the station and simply could not resist tagging along for the ride. If you’ve followed anything about Jughead as a character at all, then you’ve probably seen many screenshots from these three issues before. It’s the Sabrina arc (that’s right, as in the teenage witch)!

I have a lot of analysis at the end of this one, so buckle up!

The gang ends up at Pop’s, as usual, where Jughead meets the shop’s new mascot, a talking burger lady. Jughead is, unsurprisingly, thrown off his game by this. After all, burgers are his one true love, but girls? He doesn’t really have an interest in them. It’s a confusing moment for him, and when his friends witness this, well… they assume he’s got a crush on her.

This is an iconic page in the “aro Jughead” canon. Here we have Betty trying really hard to be a good friend and doing what in her mind is the best for him, trying to help him through what she and the others perceive as his first crush. Jughead, meanwhile, is diving headfirst into a spiral of confusion (and later, discomfort) at the idea of having any sort of interest in another person.

I want to give my utmost respect to Ryan North for explicitly having Jughead say that he doesn’t get crushes. It’s not the only time that North does this during this arc, and I think it makes all the difference between making this awkward and relatable rather than making it seem like Jughead is being stripped of or “cured” of being aro.

Betty pushes Jughead to talk to Sabrina (the burger lady—it’s Sabrina), and after a while of running into each other day in and day out as Jughead frequents Pop’s on a regular basis, they strike up a friendship. Jughead has gotten what he wanted—to be friends with the cool burger lady—and he seems genuinely satisfied.

…But unfortunately, things do not go as planned for Jughead. The next time they see each other, Sabrina asks Jughead out. And Jughead, in true stereotypical oblivious aro fashion, agrees, without realizing until it is much, much too late that what he has just agreed to is a date. Like, a real date.

If you think about it, Jughead has probably never been asked on a real date before. And this is something I ABSOLUTELY would have done (and may still do today, if I’m completely honest with myself) as a teenager. Jughead’s immediate regret is so palpable here, and so relatable to me as an aromantic.

In his panic, Jughead turns to his friends for help. They are… not helpful. They’re trying to be helpful, sure, but whereas Jughead doesn’t really seem to want to go through with this at all, his friends are more set on giving him romantic advice (with varying degrees of usefulness). Jughead really has to go out of his way to defend himself and insists on multiple occasions that he thinks the girl in the burger costume is cool and interesting, but that he doesn’t like-like her, he doesn’t even really know her!

Unfortunately for Jughead, he ends up going on the date. And who does he call for help? His only other openly queer friend (I say openly because let’s be real with ourselves, none of those kids are cishet), Kevin Keller.

And okay, this scene with Kevin is genuinely kind of funny. You get the impression that Kevin has had a lot of practice dealing with straight bullshit, and that he’s more than a little disappointed that Jughead’s “big emergency” turned out to be something this totally mundane and not worth his time.

Ultimately, Kevin is also super not helpful, even after Jughead steals his phone in an attempt to get him to come to the table and diffuse the awkward situation Jughead has found himself in. So Jughead resorts to what I can only assume is plan Z, which is to call Archie for backup.

Only semi-related, I really love the way Ryan North writes conversations between these two. It just feels really genuine and believable. And anyway, I don’t know what Jughead was expecting, but resident himbo Archie Andrews is of no help to him, and only ends up making things a hell of a lot worse.

This leads to Sabrina rushing off to the bathroom and casting multiple spells to try to get Jughead to at least play along, if not outright fall in love with her, all of which fail spectacularly and only end up making her far angrier with him. I don’t blame her for being upset—the date was a total disaster, and right at the moment Jughead was about to be honest with her, Archie showed up and made things worse. Sabrina storms out, and vows that she’ll get revenge on Jughead for this, somehow.

All of Sabrina’s subsequent spells on Jughead also backfire. She tries to make him fail his classes, and he passes with flying colors; she tries to make him spend the whole day with resident asshole Reggie, but he ends up befriending him against all odds. She even ends up unleashing a giant eldritch horror by accident, and—well, that’s not important.

In the end, Jughead decides to make things right. He never meant to hurt Sabrina, and she seems to be in a tough spot, having just moved to town, so he brings her some food as a peace offering and explains what really happened. And Sabrina is… surprisingly receptive, in fact more receptive than Jughead’s friends were when he came to them for help, despite the fact that this is something they should already understand about him. Being upset with Jughead wasn’t doing her any favors, so Sabrina already seems to be at peace with what happened and is more than willing to forgive him and be his friend despite all that transpired between them.

This is a really great scene. There’s a nuance to it—the way Jughead acted on their date was unfair, both to Sabrina and to himself. He needed to be honest from the beginning, but instead, he just kept trying to escape. At the same time, Sabrina gets it, and it wasn’t very cool of her to try to use magic to get what she wanted, either (not that Jughead knows she did that).

Jughead helps Sabrina re-enroll in her old school and quit her job at Pop’s to move back in with her aunts, so that she can live out the rest of her teenage years the way she’s supposed to. Afterwards, Sabrina and Jughead both seem really happy, and thus volume two ends on a positive, quiet note.

I really like this arc, for the reasons I’ve already stated and more. It’s funny and awkward and endearing (I say that a lot about this series, don’t I?), and it portrays a realistic and relatable aromantic problem without it being aboutaromanticism. It’s more about Jughead being honest about his feelings and making a new friend than about Jughead being aro, even though that contextualizes the situation. A great deal of the series is about that—Jughead being honest with himself and others. In the first arc, it’s Jughead shaking off a persona of apathy. In the second, it’s Jughead being honest with Archie about their friendship and the way Archie’s behavior has been making him feel. Here, it’s about Jughead being honest about who he is at his core, and accepting it about himself—and Sabrina accepts it, too, no questions asked. Even if he never says “I’m aromantic,” the sentiment is there plain as day, and it’s a refreshing beat for the story to land on.

That said, I do have a bone to pick with this arc. There’s a line in the sand here between Zdarsky and North. In the last arc, we saw Zdarsky portray that really subtle but meaningful interaction between Archie and Jughead, in which Archie seems not only keenly aware of Jughead being aromantic—even without the word—but also tacitly supportive of him, such that he knows immediately when he’s crossed a line. Here, we see Ryan North take a bit of a step back from that, such that Archie may be aware of Jughead’s orientation but seems way too quick to assume all that’s changed the moment there’s even a sliver of possibility that Jughead has a crush. That’s the reality of having different writers stepping in to interpret the same characters in loosely connected stories like this, but it still bothers me. I prefer Zdarsky’s style of storytelling in general, but in particular I also prefer his portrayal of Archie, as much as Ryan North’s on-the-nose aro moments and undying love for Reggie make me very happy. As a whole, nobody ever stops to ask Jughead what he wants, they only tell him what they think Sabrina wants. Jughead says so himself:

I suppose one could make the argument that Jughead’s friends, or even Jughead himself, are only really aware of the asexual bit (if at all—for all we know Veronica and Reggie have no idea, for example) and that’s why they don’t only never mention aromanticism but also sometimes seem ignorant of it. It’s possible that the aro side of Jughead’s orientation is still something he doesn’t have the words for, despite it being a truth he knows about himself, and in fact I think that would have been an interesting angle to take, had this series continued beyond 15 issues. But what I have an issue with isn’t so much the fact that Jughead’s friends are unhelpful (because let’s be real, sadly a lot of us have been there), but the fact that never are they asked to apologize for pushing him to do something he so clearly didn’t want to do. Whether he or they know he’s aromantic or not, he was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of going on this date—and not just due to a lack of experience. I would have liked it had Archie, or Betty, or Kevin apologized, or even once asked him what he really wanted. Betty comes the closest, by talking it out with him in the first place, but even she still earnestly pushes him to go through with the date anyway.

Anyway, there are two arcs left for me to discuss, and frankly I’m not as enthused by either of them as I was for these past three, for a variety of reasons. The Ryan North train continues for one more arc, and then it’s on to Mark Waid and Ian Flynn’s big finish. Those two updates might come a little slower. Until then, I was going to include a compilation of Jughead looking uncomfortable, but I've only got one image slot left thanks to tumblr, so instead I leave you with this:

Same, Jughead. Huge same.

#mr. north i promise i respect you #techno's jughead reread #aro #aromantic #aro jughead #ace jughead #aroace jughead #jughead #jughead jones #jughead comics #op #long post

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trisshawkeye · 3 years

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I'm a little hesitant to weigh in on the discourse going around, since I can't speak to the Chinese LGBTQ+ experience, but what I can speak to is one of the reasons why a queer person might find the nature of the sex scenes in MDZS, and in particular the extras, interesting and relatable to their experience as a queer person.

First off I want to stress that YOU DO NOT NEED TO READ THE MDZS EXTRAS. In fact, if you think they might be triggering or upsetting to you, or just not your cup of tea, then just don't read them. You don't need to read them to enjoy everything else MDZS has to offer. Indeed, if any of the following would wig you out—slightly dub-con kissing, misunderstandings around a sexual encounter due to each party thinking the other didn't want it in the same way they did, an inexperienced couple figuring out what they like and finding out that includes mild consent-play—then maybe you might want to skip the scenes in the main novel too. It's okay to have preferences and for those preferences to not include that. If you don't want to read those sections, then I'm not gonna judge you, don't read them. There is plenty else to enjoy. Look after yourself first!

Okay, with that out the way, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about shame and sexual fantasy.

While not written to this particular audience at all, Lan Wangji is a painfully relatable character for a certain type of gifted queer kid growing up in conservative Evangelical Christian spaces. The combination of having a strict, rule-based moral code one is expected to follow, and being held up as a well-behaved, good example to others from a young age, both in terms of pseudo-academic achievement and in terms of following of said moral code, and then finding yourself and your worldview becoming increasingly incompatible with the code you are trying to live by, is one that really fucks you up. Lan Wangji is a character laser-targeted at my own set up of hang-ups and neuroses, oh boy. I love him so much and want him to be happy.

And to be fair, that's not to say the Gusu Lan sect rules are bad per se, and characters such as Lan Xichen show that it is possible to have a different relationship with them such that they inform your behaviour but still allow for flexibility and compromise. But Lan Wangji definitely strikes me as someone who took rule-following deep into his own sense of identity, and that gets very messy for him when he starts questioning how to handle moral quandaries that the rules can't easily address by themselves, or finds himself trying to follow them in a way that conflicts with how the rest of his sect are doing so.

So when this kind of strict moral purity forms a big part of your identity, and then you suddenly get attracted to someone 'inappropriate' (or indeed, anyone at all as a horny teenager who’s supposed to behave themselves), your new and growing sense of desire runs smack bang into your existential need to be someone who is Good(TM), who follows the rules, who wouldn't in their right mind to anything that contradicts them. You can't just dream soft dreams about sneaking away to kiss your crush and you both enjoying it, because even that is shameful, it's wrong, it flies in the face of everything you're supposed to be and you'd never do that. And so one way for your mind to get around this is for your fantasies to take a darker turn, to imagine that you were pushed beyond all reasonable human limits, that you lost all control, that you were drugged or manipulated, that the other person took advantage of you or somehow provoked you into assaulting them, and that way you can sort of excuse yourself, you can imagine yourself in that situation because at least then it wasn't really your fault, you can kind of keep your internal sense of identity consistent. But now you've imagined you're in that situation and you have that 'excuse', you have a kind of free rein to act out the things you want to do and it doesn't really 'count'. And all the while you're entirely aware that this is a fucked up fantasy, that it would be unforgivable if you did such a thing or such a thing was done to you in real life, and now you're worried that even imagining such a thing is a failure of your moral character, and it builds into a destructive cycle of shame and self-loathing, and it's just a real mess all round.

Now, I think this is something that Lan Wangji worked through and came out the other side of, and he was no longer ashamed of his desire for Wei Wuxian by the time he came back in the body of Mo Xuanyu (and probably even by the time of the first siege of the Burial Mounds, though it was far too late at that point). But for a sixteen-year-old Lan Wangji to have these violent fantasies about being provoked into raping Wei Wuxian because that was the only way he could imagine himself in a situation in which he could express that desire? And then later in life finding out that consent-play holds some appeal? Yeah, I can see that, I can relate to it.

And so in the incense burner chapter? When it becomes clear they're visiting one of Lan Wangji's teenage fantasies, especially right after the adorably domestic scene that is Wei Wuxian's dream, he is absolutely embarrassed by it, he's mortified—it's obvious he still considers it to be shameful and would honestly rather Wei Wuxian didn't see this side of himself so clearly, although he loves and trusts Wei Wuxian enough not to hide it from him when he says wants to stay. And then, when Wei Wuxian sees where it's going, and finds it hilarious and honestly kinda hot, knowing that it is just a fantasy, and one that meshes well with his own consensual-non-consent kinks to boot, you know what? It's a relief! It's an honest-to-goodness relief and entirely delightful to me that he turns around and basically says, hey, it's okay, this doesn't make you a bad person, you don't have to be ashamed of this, I love you, I'm enjoying this too, I want to see where this goes, let's have sex!

Because none of this does make Lan Wangji a bad person—none of these fantasies were acted upon except for one intensely-regretted kiss (and then only really regretted on his own part), and then later in the context of entirely consensual, mutually enjoyable sex as adults between him and Wei Wuxian. And being able to revisit those fantasies and take away the shame he's associated with them all this time is probably pretty healing for him!

Like I said at the start, you don't have to read these chapters. They were not written for you personally, and you are not the target audience for them. If you're going to be at all distressed by the content then I actively encourage you not to read them, it would be a form of emotional self-harm to do so. It's not like you're missing out on anything important (or even very well-written, if I'm being honest, particularly once it's gone through the mangle of a translation that I don't personally think handles the nuances of the smut scenes very well, from what I can gather from various pieces of discussion about it). It's totally fine if you find these kinks unpleasant and don't want to touch them with a barge pole! But that doesn't make having or writing or enjoying these kinks or fantasies somehow morally wrong—it's not shameful, it's not homophobic, and please, please stop accusing the author or fans of being so just because you don't personally like it. Because you’re just reinforcing the shame-based, purity-based thinking that screws so many of us up in the first place.

(Aside: I’m not saying this is necessarily the correct way to interpret Lan Wangji’s character and motivations with respect to these scenes, since I too am a Westerner coming at all this material through the veil of translation and with very little understanding of its surrounding literary context—I’m more describing how, from my own experience as a young repressed religious queer, I found myself vibing a lot with this character and his relationship with sexual desire.)

#lan wangji #mo dao zu shi #mdzs #mdzs discourse #cw rape mention #in the context of discussing rape fantasies #and why one might have them #and in the context of a chapter in which a rape fantasy is observed but no one is actually raped #ugh i already feel like i'm oversharing please don't make me regret posting this #this is just like the don't consume horror if you don't like it discourse goin on over in the tma fandom all over again #mdzs meta

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queermediastudies · 4 years

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Blue is, in fact, not only the Warmest Color, but her name is Emma - Alec Thomas

Blue is the Warmest Color is a 2013 film adaptation of a comic series of the same name, made by Julie Maroh in 2010. This film follows a French teenager named Adele, who is what seems to be very introverted and unsure of her place in the world. Adele dates a boy named Thomas at school, but when they eventually have sex for the first time, Adele is left unfulfilled by Thomas, realizing there might be more to her sexual identity than she knows, and decides to break off their relationship. Her openly gay best friend Valentin hears about her confusion, and decides to take her out to a men’s gay bar. Adele leaves Valentin and wanders off to a neighboring lesbian bar, where she ends up meeting Emma, the blue haired girl who is also a graduating art student. The two have resounding energy off one another almost immediately, and they become friends quickly. It isn’t long after that they kiss for the first time during a picnic, before they bloom into a full relationship with one another. Emma’s family is very welcoming of Adele’s presence and relationship, while Adele’s more conservative parents are told Emma is a tutor for Adele’s philosophy class at school.

The film fast forwards a few years, and we see Adele and Emma living together while they continue their jobs. While Adele finishes school and gets a job teaching at an elementary school, Emma tries to further her painting career by throwing parties to socialize among her art peers. It’s at one of these parties that we meet Lise, a pregnant old colleague of Emma’s. Emma makes fun of Adele’s current job choice, saying that her writing could do exceptionally well, and Adele asserts that she’s much happy with where she’s at now. It’s here where we see some disparities come to light, as it seems like Adele and Emma don’t share that much in common even anymore, and out of loneliness, Adele sleeps with a male coworker. Emma finds out about the affair, and subsequently and ferociously kicks Adele out, ending their relationship. 3 years pass before they end up meeting again, only to find out Emma is now in a relationship with Lise and has a family with Lise’s daughter, while Adele still cannot overcome her heartbreak. Adele expresses how in-love she is with Emma, and despite their strong connection, Emma declines, but tells Adele that she’ll always have an “infinite tenderness” in her heart for her. More time passes before we see the two convene one last time at one of Emma’s art exhibits, where the two meet, but don’t really connect. It’s clear that Emma would rather tend to all her patrons and guests at the party, so Adele congratulates her before quietly leaving the exhibit. The film ends. I argue this film is a generally a great depiction of a heart wrenching love tale between two women, which effectively explores themes of sexuality and queerness explicitly, in order to create a film that leaves audiences wanting more among an ambiguous ending.

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This movie definitely connects with some of the talking points we’ve discussed in class. Probably one of the easiest examples we see coming to light is in one of the first scenes in the film, where Adele’s friend group displays some signs of heteronormativity. In the clip above, we see Thomas staring at Adele from afar, with Adele’s friends insisting they’re “so obviously into each other”. Adele then begins to tune out of the conversation as the rest of the group starts discussing other cute boys, while Adele remains silent, clearly uncomfortable to some degree. It’s clear here that Adele’s friend group is using heteronormativity in the sense that they believe Adele is straight, despite no context being added whether they’ve discussed this before. Seeing as how the rest of the film pans out, they clearly haven’t discussed this. “For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of signifiers, social codes and forces linked to institutional power which interact to shape the idea of normal or deviant, good or bad, and which has the function of including and excluding people,” (Andersson, 2002, p. 3). In this scene, Adele is unsure of her sexuality, but it is clear how it should be demonstrated among the institution of her school in the ways of heteronormativity. This environment excludes any notion of queerness existing normally, which is reinforced by Adele’s friend group. This becomes problematic for Adele, as it feels as though Adele is almost pressured into going out and sleeping with Thomas because of her friends' heteronormativity enacted upon her. She is then only left to be unfulfilled, simply because she wasn’t attracted to men it seems at this point.

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The above clip happens once Emma and Adele start spending more time together, and Adele’s friend group at school seems to pay attention to this fact. They all begin to grill and question her about where she met this girl, only to find out it was at a gay bar. Her “friends” then start getting heated with Adele, begging her to “fess up” to being lesbian, and to “just admit it”, while another girl starts making remarks about how she doesn’t care if Adele is lesbian, but that she’s slept naked in her bed a few times and seen her checking out her ass, calling Adele a “whore”, and then asking the question “Does your bitch have a blue p---y?” before Adele starts to fight. While this is clearly homophobia, it’s carefully inserted into the film to show some of the general public’s opinion on gay or lesbian reception, those of which lines match pretty well with Adele’s parents ideals. You could compare this to a time where “homosexuals” were compared to Communists in the U.S. “Communists bore no identifying physical characteristics...Homosexuals too could escape detection...Because most people confronted with accusations of homosexuality during these witch-hunts quietly resigned, it is impossible to determine the number of careers and lives that were destroyed.” (Gross, 2001, p. 22). This scene almost plays out like an interrogation or a witch-hunt of Adele, which I think draws on some lines on queer folk having to “admit” their queerness publicly, while cisgender folk never have to admit their sexuality in the same way. This part especially demonstrates queerness in a real world lens. To me, this scene was put into the film in order to demonstrate the harsh world that queer folk often experience. It’s made for the audience to have a better understanding of Adele’s current position, and therefore allows the audience to become more compassionate with Adele’s struggles along her life, for simply choosing who she wants to love.

Another dominant theme we see arising out of this film is sexuality and pornography. That being said, I wouldn’t recommend watching this film with your parents in the same room, because boy, you would be in for a trip. The film’s graphic sex scenes are all pretty exposed for Adele and Emma, leaving almost literally nothing to the imagination of the audience. I think this is done in the film because it wants to show the raw and unfiltered bodies of the two lovers, and more obviously done to display queer love on screen. “Queer film study, then, understands cinematic sexualities as complex, multiple, overlapping, and historically nuanced, rather than immutably fixed...queer film study explores how and why the fluidity of all sexualities relates to the production and reception of cinema.” (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004, p. 2). We especially see this sexual fluidity occur within Adele, when she sleeps with Thomas at the beginning of the movie, along with her fling with a male coworker that ultimately ended her relationship with Emma. Adele’s sexuality isn’t ever exactly defined, which leaves it ambiguous to the audience, therefore showing that even Adele is still discovering what her sexuality is exactly. While the sex scenes are explicit, to me, I wouldn’t qualify them exactly as porn, because they are also increasingly dramatic with expression. In a way, if we didn’t have these scenes, I don’t know if the audience could even understand the level of obsession that Adele and Emma have for one another. It’s in these scenes that we get just a glimpse of what it means to love as humans, and how sex is one of many facets to deepen our love for one another.

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For myself, the above clip is one scene in particular where I think the movie doesn’t really hit the nail on the head. In the scene as discussed in the intro paragraph, it features Adele and Emma in a restaurant, a few years after they’ve broken up, with Adele confessing her deep love for Emma again. Emma declines Adele’s love, citing that she’s with someone else now, and thus leaves. Before Emma is able to do that however, there’s a pretty lengthy portion of the clip where the two begin to passionately make out with one another, even getting to literal third base blatantly happening at the dinner table. Don’t get me wrong, my issue isn’t at all with any of the pretty graphic sex scenes in the movie, but this one in particular stands out because it’s literally in public. Literally a waitress confirms an order for coffee before the scene starts, and then the camera even pans out at the end of the scene to witness two other customers dining a few tables away. I felt like this part ran into a few problems, since both Adele and Emma completely ignore everyone else in the room in order to sexually fulfill one another, which for me not only feels a bit insensitive to not only the other people in the restaurant, but a bit unrealistic and hypersexualized. I think this part is more damaging to queer identities, in the sense that the ideal is being pushed that when it comes to sex, they are completely unable to control themselves for their lust for one another. You also get a sense of the power of looking at these characters by the minor characters in this scene, which pins them as public interpretations of sexuality inside the restaurant unfairly. They are more than just the objects of lust being viewed upon by other customers and work staff, but this scene doesn’t help that argument whatsoever.

Much like most things in the movie, the ending is completely ambiguous. You see Adele walk off around a street corner, to supposedly never talk to Emma again. We see this love come together, fall apart, and have a smidge of possible recovery, only to be let down again. Shortly put, I wanted more out of this story, because it felt like it wasn’t over. Maybe the reason it ended was to show that things don’t always have a “Happily Ever After”, especially when it comes to real life. Overall, for myself as a cisgender white straight man, I think this film is great in terms of queer media exposure. I think white and straight people have been given too much in terms of amount of privilege, especially when it comes to roles in love stories in cinema. I was forced to be critical when it came to my analysis of this movie, simply because I wasn’t the identity featured in this movie. I had to interpret information from a queer lens, which made me more objective and honestly a bit uncomfortable - but in a good way. I was forced to feel and see the things these characters were experiencing, in the exact same exposed ways they were seeing them. In a way, I think that made me more drawn to the story, simply because I was experiencing something that I had never gotten the chance to see anywhere else. The fact that the entire film is in French plays a big role as well, as I noticed I was using a lot of nonverbal cues in order to determine how a character might feel at any point in time. To conclude, I think this movie does a mostly great job on representing queer identities in order to create a love story that is unequivocally matched to any other story you see. It hits on the realistic parts of life and love that humans experience, in order to show how rough love can truly be.

References

Andersson, Y. (2002). Queer Media? In E. Kingsepp (Ed.), Media Research in Progress. Stockholm: Stockholms University.

Benshoff, H., & Griffin, S. (2004). Queer Cinema the Film Reader. New York, NY: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group.

Gross, L. (2001). Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. NEW YORK: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/gros11952

#queermedia #blue is the warmest color #moviereview #queermovie #loveislove

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mashkaroom · 3 years

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This isn’t related to anything, but frozen 2 was actually...pretty good of a movie, and you can literally see the disney profit model holding it back. firstly, the music was really good -- i was really impressed with the writing team and with the vocal performances, especially by idina menzel. the songs that didn’t make it in because the plot was rearranged were also excellent. wrt to the visuals, i’m not the biggest fan of this specific animation style, but it’s clear it’s very well done -- i’ve no choice but to be impressed. the plot was whatever (also they fully put a couple of trolls in charge of the kindom for a bit -- is there no fucking line of succession in this goddamn kingdom?? maybe the plot of the movie should have been establishing a functional bureaucracy) and they really yada-yada-ed the magic system, which was basically of the central conceit of the movie so...why did they not put more effort into it? the explanation, such as it was, of the magic system was both confusing and ultimately pretty meaningless -- it added next to nothing of value to the lore or theme or worldbuilding. the themes were clearly meant for a more mature audience (which is i guess what you get for waiting 7 years to make a sequel [which btw just wrenched out a memory out of me that frozen 1 came up literally constantly in my 7th grade latin class -- i cannot emphasize enough how bizarre of an experience learning a dead language throughout the entirety of your teenage years along with 400 more of your cohort is]) -- but anyway, they establish all these themes and then don’t commit to them. Like, the central plot conflict of the movie is literally colonialism lmao. it’s such a strange place to discuss it. My suspicion is that they decided right away to go with a “connecting with mother” storyline, since the “women in the same family connecting with each other” bit worked so well in the first movie; then they were like “is this too basic?” and decided that they should wrap that into a “reckoning with ancestry” thread to cash into that “young leftist with white guilt” market. Then they had somebody on the writing staff who was like “what if we made this about colonialism?” So re: those elements, first of all the mother plotline is boring as shit. Like it doesn’t ring true even to losing a loved one early, but it especially rings soooo hollow wrt the actual relationship that is portrayed in the first movie between elsa and her parents. like we see the parents be so misguided it borders on abusive. and that’s a really interesting dynamic, story-wise, bc the parents are dead and can’t redeem themselves but the baggage they left behind is still there, so the burden of processing that falls exclusively on the daughters. i dare say this is something probably relatable to many of us, bc it’s my sense that most people grow up with pretty misguided parents! (lowkey i feel like the best parenting i’ve seen in my circle are parents who basically went off of vibes rather than idk a philosophy or whatever) i actually would have loved to see a children’s movie address dealing with parents in a nuanced way that isn’t just “one of us is right and the other is wrong” but rather addresses what responsibilities parents and children have to each other, how to navigate intent versus effect, what the value (or lack thereof) of forgiveness is, how to uncover your identity when your entire life was shaped by societal and parental expectations, etc. And the Frozen premise is ideally suited for this! Moreover, a lot of these beats actually DO happen in the movie! Into the unknown is basically elsa trying and failing to convince herself that she wants the life she has and any thoughts to the contrary should be dismissed (and it’s gay as hell, but we’ll get to that later). The climax of show yourself literally says that it was the truth about herself rather than her mother that will bring her peace. But all of these beats are facilitated supernaturally rather than by the very fitting preexisting character background, which makes it lack the satisfaction you’d expect in such a resolution. it never features any reckoning with what made her feel the way she did in the first place -- a projection of the mother’s face singing the climactic realization literally undercuts the entire plotline. like here you can see how basically being propaganda for the american lifestyle (in this case the nuclear family e.g.) undercuts their message. this predictably only gets more egregious when they attempt to tackle colonialism. so quick summary of this plotline: anna and elsa’s grandfather basically genocided an indigenous people -- the northuldra -- after tricking them into building a dam that stifles the power of the forest or something. also their mother was actually northuldra. also magic comes from the northuldra forest? it would probably be pretty problematic re: the magical native stereotype if it was clearer what was going on lmao. at the end, anna breaks the dam even though it’ll flood Arendelle; however, elsa (who was literally frozen because of the sins of the past) swoops in at the last moment and freezes the wave so it causes no damage. However, in an earlier version of the story, the wave actually DOES destroy Arendelle and then they rebuild it with a mix of Arendellian and Northuldran architectural styles. this version actually proposed a genuine vision for how to deal with the impacts of colonialism instead of the final movie where sisterly love absolves everyone of consequences.

ok, so about the gay: i know people read a coming out into let it go, and maybe this is just cause i watched frozen 1 when i was still straight, but i didn’t really see it. but the lyrics in frozen 2 elsa’s songs match up so well with the coming out experience, i have difficulty imagining the song-writers weren’t aware of it, especially since people were already calling for elsa to be gay. Like let’s take a look at these songs -- into the unknown first. She sings

“Everyone I've ever loved is here within these walls I'm sorry, secret siren, but I'm blocking out your calls I've had my adventure, I don't need something new I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you”

This idea of having being afraid of ruining relationships even (and especially) with the people you love most by coming out is something that a lot of queer people can relate to. Then she sings:

“Are you here to distract me so I make a big mistake? Or are you someone out there who's a little bit like me? Who knows deep down I'm not where I'm meant to be? Every day's a little harder as I feel your power grow Don't you know there's part of me that longs to go”

How much do i need to explain this? (like all my 7 followers are some form of queer anyway lol) But again this battle of trying to hide but knowing deep down that you can’t, longing for “someone a little bit like me” -- it’s classic queer. Then she sings a bridge-type thing:

“Are you out there? Do you know me? Can you feel me? Can you show me?”

I mean, again, what is this but longing for community. Then in the climactic song “show yourself”, she sings this:

“Something is familiar Like a dream, I can reach but not quite hold I can sense you there Like a friend I've always known”

this is literally just about reading stone butch blues.

The climactic lyric is “You are the one you've been waiting for all your life” (sung to her rather than by her) and i mean again, this is about finally giving yourself permission to live as your true self. And not gonna lie, i dug that shit. it felt quite authentic. obviously they didn’t actually make her gay, bc of course, but she is gay in my heart!

Ok, so what would have made the movie live up to its full potential?

1) fixing that stuff i already said about the parents; it felt like such bs that anna and elsa were dealing with ancestral sins but also their parents were saints whose love fixed everything? how much more interesting would it have been if reckoning with their parents’ impacts on them led them to reckoning with the impacts of their entire ancestry and in turn their society? if reckoning with their personal responsibilities to each other led them to consider their society’s responsibility to fix the past wrongs that allowed it to flourish? this wouldn’t even be counter to disney’s individualism, but it allows for a slight reconceptualization of it that i think would feel fresh.

2) having actual consequences for the colonialism and genocide

3) either cutting all the new magic system stuff or developing it in a way that in turn helps develop the themes. frankly, the “sometimes people are born with magic” that was implied in movie one was enough.

4) making elsa gay, and i say this not just because i want gay characters but because that genuinely makes sense within the story

5) basically, the central theme should have been “i have all this baggage and i can’t resolve it by looking for answers only within my society; in order to be fully at peace with myself, i must work to right the wrongs of my society that obscured the different ways of knowledge that could help people like me; sometimes you must go into the unknown in order to understand the known” which is a message i think very well suited for the united states!

#In general Disney has created this really cowardly mold for children’s media #where the messages rarely go beyond the individual and are universally basic as shit #and that comes from a fundamental lack of respect for the audience #people keep telling me that pixar has deep multidimensional messages #and i’m sorry to say that your standards are just low #like people keep citing inside out to me and the message of that was literally “it’s okay to be sad sometimes”#cheburashka had a more complex message than that.#i know nobody asked for this long-ass analysis #and i myself watched frozen 2 in like may so idek why i started thinking about it again now #but it's just such a weird yet revealing movie #frozen 2 should have been abolishing prisons #but like seriously idk where they pulled colonialism from #but if they wanted to address a serious issue #prisons would have been perfect #because elsa basically spent half her life in a form of incarceration for being a perceived societal menace #i guess that's more difficult to weave into a story arc #oh holy fuck this reminds me that when i was 16 i was paid (very little might i say but nevertheless)#to 'ghostwrite' a witch cozy #whatever the fuck that is #but literally 'witch cozy' was the entirety of the prompt #no plot or characters or anything #there were 3 novellas #in the first one they made me changed the gay love story to a het one lmaoooo #in book 2 she busts a crime ring or sth and then realizes that social determinants made them commit crimes #and then in book 3 she becomes a prison abolitionist lmaooo #she starts running a rehabilitation program in the local prison using theater #this character was so self-insert it was ridiculous #no offense at whoever's writing the flash but 16-yo disaster child me had 15x more social consciousness than yall #sorry to analyze a different piece of media in the tags for another long-ass media analysis #but in s1 of the flash the local prison can't handle the new metahumans

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rebelsofshield · 4 years

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker-Review

After two great but flawed films, the third trilogy of The Skywalker Saga comes to a sputtering dud of a close in a disappointing, if occasionally fun, film.

(Review contains minor spoilers)

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A message has been sent out to the galaxy from the seemingly dead Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) anxiously searches for the potential rival to his rule while also planning to turn this new player to his benefit. However, in order to defeat Palpatine, he will need to officially complete his goal of turning Rey (Daisy Ridley) to the Dark Side of the Force. Meanwhile, Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) work desperately to lead the scattered remains of the Resistance to victory. As the threat of Palpatine and his new fleet of super powerful ships becomes clear, a team forms to desperately search out a way to locate and destroy this new Final Order before it is too late.

The Rise of Skywalker arguably had one of the most difficult tasks of any Star Wars film. Not only functioning as the end of this particular string of films, this final installment of The Skywalker Saga is also burdened with bringing some sense of closure to the succession of plot threads, character arcs, and themes that have been seeded, toyed with, and explored since the first film debuted in 1977. It’s an incredibly hard challenge and it is easy to understand the amount of pressure that must have been on writer and director JJ Abrams, co-writer Chris Terrio, and the whole cast and crew to stick the landing.

From the outside, Abrams seemed like a logical, if safe, pick for the job. The Force Awakens, while it relies heavily on familiar imagery, is a well-paced, very fun film that is buoyant with heart, humor and an incredible ensemble of characters. After Rian Johnson’s delightfully strange, esoteric, and daring The Last Jedi, offering another fun romp to round out the trilogy seemed like a comfortable, if not especially brave, way to end a series of movies that was mostly chugging with momentum and heart. A plan may not have been evident, but having had delivered two films that were still among the strongest in the saga, a road map may have not been needed.

The Rise of Skywalker, however, proves to be a long, loud, and fumbling film that somehow goes out of its way to highlight the weakest aspects of this trilogy in a sloppy and uneven package. There is fun throughout, and on a surface level, much of it is a perfectly serviceable experience, but it sits as one of the most crowded and confused Star Wars experiences in recent memory.

Much of this comes down to Abrams and Terrio’s cluster crash of a script. The decision to return Palpatine as a form of connective tissue, bringing the Dark Side threats of nine films under a single roof, is not an inherently bad one. Ian McDiarmid’s wonderfully campy master planner was easily one of the strongest parts of both previous trilogy cappers, Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi, and returning once more to his grand schemes, cackles, and monologues felt like it could have been a smart move to creating closure and consequence. Palpatine ultimately becomes symbolic for many of the larger sins evident in The Rise of Skywalker. His much hyped return is revealed in as purely flippant a manner as possible and his galaxy destroying resources are hand waived in with just as much nonsense and confusion. He exists purely as a scary, familiar plot device and nothing much more.

It becomes representative of a larger film narrative that feels more and more hacked together and confused the more one thinks about it. The Rise of Skywalker’s first thirty minutes are a chaotic nightmare that feel edited together with little thought to cohesion or comprehension. The audience is given no time to linger on a single scene and we hop from location to location with little thought or understanding as to why or clarity of transition. It’s a film that begins at a sprint and wants you to hear everything it has to say while it hurtles forward at top speed. The beautifully orchestrated first third of The Force Awakens that lovingly introduced us to an incredible new cast of characters feels like a far gone thought and the emotional start to The Last Jedi’s own ensemble saga feels all the more impactful. The Rise of Skywalker barely gives the viewer time to breath until close to the end of its first act and by then it will have lightly already bludgeoned many into indifference.

Much of the first half of The Rise of Skywalker plays out in a series of fetch quest related set pieces that range from fun to nonsensical, but it’s ultimately this portion as we head into the film’s playful middle where it is at its strongest. After spending two films mostly apart, Rey, Poe, and Finn finally get to spend time adventuring together and despite the lack of context, this trio of adventurers really sing as a group. The banter, chemistry and cooperation between this makeshift team is the film’s clear highlight and is a testament to the groundwork done by both prior films and the strength of these performers. Anthony Daniels’s C-3PO also gets some of his meatiest and most emotional material to date and Abrams smartly plays the shiny protocol droid as a mix of heart and humor.

All things considered, the individual character arcs for each of our central three heroes are threadbare but populated with great individual moments and asides. Isaac gets to lean into Poe Dameron’s swaggering heroism to an even greater degree here while also building on, ever so slightly, the developments to his person experienced in The Last Jedi. His occasional butting heads with the far cooler minded Rey is a nice touch, but his chemistry with Finn is a forever highlight, even if a much teased romance between the two never manifests. A connection to Poe’s past, Zorii Bliss, is a great new inclusion and is played with gruff seriousness by Kerri Russell of Felicity and The Americans fame. Yes, there are hints of a romantic connection between the two, but nothing serious occurs and hopefully leaves room to keep our famous Resistance pilot among our potential queer characters.

Finn was maybe the one character who did not get to live up to his potential in The Last Jedi. After The Force Awakens turned him into a charismatic but engagingly flawed co-hero, his story of finding purpose couldn’t help but feel like a weak link in a strong chains of subplots and it certainly didn’t help that it included the much maligned Canto Bight sequence. While Finn doesn’t experience as much of a clear character arc here, John Boyega certainly gets much more to do. As the emotional heart of the team that keeps Poe and Rey connected, Finn becomes an important balancing act to the crew and is privy to many of the film’s emotional moments. A smart move sees Finn bonding with another newcomer, Jannah, played by Naomie Ackie, who shares a similar past. The conversations between these two make for some of the film’s best moments and Jannah, along with Zorii, escape the film as its two best additions. There is even a subtle but very interesting development for Finn in this film that doesn’t get highlighted as much as it should, but will delight fans of the character. I won’t say more than that.

It’s ultimately Rey where The Rise of Skywalker heads into murky water. Dasiy Ridley has always been a talented performer and this film easily marks her strongest performance in the saga. Ridley brings nuanced and complex emotion to her close ups and manages to oscillate between playful heroism and conflicted personal drama with great skill. After years of (incorrect) criticism that Rey was a character that was played too safe, The Rise of Skywalker takes great pains to push her into uncharted waters and uneasy futures. It is here that The Rise of Skywalker consistently makes its largest storytelling missteps. One significant reveal is likely to produce audience eye rolls and feels like a betrayal of some of its predecessors’ most thoughtful themes. Ridley does her best with these moments and they do lead to some beats of weighty character conflict, but they feel like an ultimately safe and simultaneously sloppy route to take her character and it ends up bringing much of the film down with it.

The Rise of Skywalker leans even further into Rey and Kylo Ren being dyads of both ends of the Force, but it’s ultimately Kylo that ends up being the most disappointing of the central characters of this trilogy. After spending two films being an unpredictable and intriguingly unhinged antagonist bursting with moral confusion, Abrams saddles Adam Driver’s Dark Sider with a mostly clear plot trajectory that lacks a fair amount of the nuance that made the same character such a magnetic part of the past films. He is privy to much of the film’s best action beats and one sequence in particular that functions as a creative escalation of the Force bonds from the previous film is some of the most inventive stuff in the movie, but it isn’t enough to really sell the final steps of his character journey. That being said, there is one, potentially very pandering and indulgent moment that mirrors The Force Awakens that comes across with great emotional vulnerability due in large part to Driver and his co-star’s performances.

The old guard are given surprisingly little to do here. After spending much of the press tour discussing Carrie Fisher’s posthumous role in the film, the end results end up being something of a mixed bag. Having Leia be a central part of the narrative is welcome and it’s nice to get a proper goodbye to the character, but the artificiality of her inclusion is far from seamless and often times is more distracting than it is moving. Billy Dee Williams’s long awaited turn as Lando Calrissian proves fine, but doesn’t amount to much of consequence. He feels like a stand in for all of the original trilogy characters that are inaccessible to this film’s plot. Luke’s return is serviceable as well and is competently acted but is directly tied to some of the wonky storytelling choices made with Rey and is often peppered with disappointing bouts of misguided nostalgia and fan service.

The Rise of Skywalker is a very big movie. There’s quite a lot going on and many players, new and old, don’t get their fair share. It’s hard not to be a little angry that after the abuse hurdled at her for over two years, Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose is given such little to do that she might as well be a bit player. The same can be said for Maz Kanata or any of the other supporting characters of the trilogy. The elusive Knights of Ren finally appear to do little more than stand around and look cool and their one action sequence is a titanic disappointment. The always petulant General Hux is sidebarred as well, but has a rather fun bit of character development that lets him leave the trilogy as a strangely despicable but enjoyable secondary villain.

As an action spectacle, The Rise of Skywalker is occasionally fun but frequently hollow. The early and middle portions concerning our heroes out running and sneaking past First Order forces prove to be the most successful and fun. Abrams injects some of these bits with clever uses of mobile cinematography and an Indiana Jones-esque chase sequence on the sands of Pasana is pure fun. The large Return of the Jedi meets Avengers: Endgame finale feels empty and weightless though. Despite the massive scale demonstrated, it all feels mostly hollow and heavy on effects and explosions. Because it is so predicated on the earlier mentioned loose and bizarre plot choices, it’s unclear what we are supposed to be feeling as we head into this chaotic showdown. Strangely enough, Abrams skimps on the cameos for our big rallying cry. For a film that rarely shies away from fan service, the one moment that seems primed for it is barely utilized.

Even John Williams feels tired. While his score blends together themes from all eight films with mastery, there isn’t much new to really give the movie its own identity outside a briefly heard finale piece.

The Rise of Skywalker isn’t awful. It has moments that are quite strong and more often than not it opts for surface level fun rather than daring choices. However, it’s moments of sloppiness and baffling script choices make its safer moments all the more frustrating. It is not the worst of Star Wars franchise, but it is far, far from the best and it’s hard not to leave the film disheartened, not necessarily by the events of its story, but rather that after all the love and adventure, it ends on such a half-hearted stumble.

Score: C+

#Star Wars #The Rise of Skywalker #review #reviews #JJ Abrams #Chris Terrio #Daisy Ridley #John Boyega #Oscar Isaac #Carrie Fisher #Mark Hamill #Billy Dee Williams #Naomie Ackie #Kelly Marie Tran #Kerri Russell

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years

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“After the disappointment of the Andrew Garfield-led Amazing Spider-Man movies, everyone’s favorite wallcrawler has been having a renaissance. Entering the Marvel cinematic universe in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, the webslinger fully redeemed himself with well-crafted live-action film in Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

Yes...okay...that was definitely what Homecoming was....

“and a wildly successful spin-off film Venom, ”

I mean financially successful sure...

“In the midst of all his success, Spider-Man has quietly become one of the most inclusive and socially conscious superheroes of today.”

*raises eyebrow*

Okay...go on...

“Last week, it was announced that Spider-Man: Far From Home would feature two out transgender actors playing trans characters, the first big-budget superhero film to do so. Spider-Man: Homecoming also featured a queer character, as well as numerous people of color.”

Wait who was the queer character in Homecoming?

“It’s also worth mentioning that Spiderverse included a Jewish version of Peter Parker, who is typically portrayed as either secular or Christian.”

....ehhhhhhhhh....yes and no.

In media adaptations barring maybe one (the 1994 show cos I do not remember where he got married) Spider-Man is portrayed as...I guess secular but really it’s more that they just don’t say anything.

It’s not that the character is not a believer in a faith per se, especially if you go by older adaptations during times when hardly anyone was secular. It’s just that they, understandably, aren’t saying anything.

In the comics Peter is some kind of Christian but probably a Protestant (unless you go by Amazing Grace where he is an atheist but that’s hot trash we don’t talk about) but we don’t really talk about it that specifically.

We just know that he and his family celebrate Christmas and very, very occasionally Aunt May references going to church and that she, Peter and MJ believe in a monothetistic deity they refer to as ‘God’.

And really apart from the Church thing there is no clue to Peter’s religion and Marvel probably (wisely) would rather keep it that way. He even got married in a civil ceremony!

However in the SUBTEXT...he’s Jewish. And it’s basically an open secret that he is and always has been Jewish.

“The Spider-Man video game also featured a wonderful easter egg for queer fans by having a giant rainbow flag, as well as several smaller ones, scattered around the game’s fictionalized New York City map. ”

I mean that’s wonderful but I wouldn’t call that an Easter Egg so much as...it’s just what you’d find in modern NYC.

“Even the Venom film got in on the fun, with fans shipping Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and the titular male alien-symbiote after the two kissed in the film. Sony even encouraged the pairing, releasing a romantic comedy-esque trailer for the film to promote the home release. While some complained of queer-baiting, most felt that it was all in good fun and included queer people in on the joke, instead of making us the target.”

Again, good for them but I don’t think that was the movie actively trying to be positive towards queer people.

Brock and Venom kissed when Venom was bonded to Brock’s ex-fiance and had a pronounced female form, being an adaptation of a character literally called She-Venom.

And it was based upon a script written in the 1990s so really it was more the movie did it and then people took it as a thing that was shipping Venom and Brock (even though Venom is sexless). Brock and the symbiote have been shipped numerous times in the comics but the subtext has always been that the symbiote, if any sex, is female. In the Spec cartoon it is referred to as Symbi (a pun on Cyndi) and in the Spider-Girl comics it is marked out as female (granted this happens after it’s bonded to a woman).

And again, headcanon away but like...that probably wasn’t intentional at all Sony were just being goofy or unintionally made something people took a certain way.

“Indeed, even in the comics, Spider-Man has always been a fairly inclusive hero. Miles Morales was introduced in the early-2000s, taking over the mantel from Peter Parker for several years. ”

Okay, this is so weird for me to be correcting such a praising point but lets really look at this.

First of all Miles didn’t take over Peter’s role for several years he did it permanently.

Second of all Miles is from 2011 so that’s not the early 2000s, that’s the early 2010s, but okay maybe that was a typo.

Third of all, is it really all that logical to say this franchise that began in 1962 has always been fairly inclusive and then cite a character from 2011 as proof of this? Wouldn’t examples from during the FIRST quarter century have been more apt?

Fourth of all...eh. Has Spider-Man been fairly inclusive from the start? Yes, no, its complicated.

Look there were exactly 0 LGBTQ+ characters in Spider-Man until maybe the 1990s and even then I couldn’t off my head tell you who they were. Felicia Hardy is bisexual but we didn’t find out until the 2000s and it was most prominent in an AU. Really the most significant LGBTQ+ character who’s had the fact that they are queer be more than a one off reference was Max Modell and he debuted 2011 and IIRC wasn’t established as queer until 2012. In defence of Spider-Man the Comics Code literally FORBID any character be anything other than straight until the 1990s and even then it was relatively rare, even in X-Men which you’d think it wouldn’t be.

If we’re talking POC again this one is a bit complicated Glori Grant, Joe Robertson, Randy Robertson are frequently appearing POC characters but not in every run and they aren’t usually as prominent as like Jameson, Aunt May, Harry Osborn, MJ, etc. Characters of other ethnicities are even less frequent and I don’t even know what we should make of Puma/Thomas Fireheart. I mean A for effort, they wanted a Native American character who wasn’t really a villain and wasn’t exactly a sterotype so there is that I guess.

Again though...most other Marvel franchises decade by decade weren’t much better with this and we should give credit where credit is due to the same guy who created Black Panther writing a nuanced scene where 2 black people in the 60s separated by age discuss different approaches to civil rights with neither being proven right or wrong.

When it comes to disabled people, outside of evil insane villains, forget it, there is nothing before Flash Thompson in 2008 unless you count Aunt May’s chronically poor health.

“Spider-Gwen quickly became one of the highest-selling female superhero comics. Spider-Woman was a prominently featured bisexual character, and the female Asian-American hero Silk also had LGBT supporting characters, Rafferty and Lola, who were in a healthy relationship. Additionally, many view vampire villain Morbius, who is getting a spin-off film starring Jared Leto next year, as a metaphor for those suffering during the HIV crisis of the '80s. ”

Again...Spider-Gwen and Silk are 2010s characters so that’s not ‘always fairly inclusive’.

I don’t even know if Jessica Drew is bisexual, I’ve never heard that but I don’t think she is.

Morbius as a metaphor for HIV...MIGHT be true if we are specifically talking about his 1990s solo-book which I’ve never read. But the character as originally created 100% was never about that because he was created in the 1970s before HIV was known about.

“Unlike his Marvel counterparts Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, Spider-Man’s world has accurately reflected real world diversity for years.”

....Not really.

I’m not even saying Spidey maybe haven’t been comparatively better at it than those guys but he’s deffo not been accurate.

Plus to be fair to the other guys, Captain America and Iron Man have had at least one major black supporting cast member and in Cap’s case he was fairly candid about social strife and issues.

And with Thor it’s not that fair to throw shade at him for not reflecting the real world given that 90% of this characters and stories are literally pulled from fantasy and myth. I don’t even know if there are any queer figures in Norse myth let alone poc.

“While it’s a seemingly simple idea that any of us can be a superhero, it’s sadly still a radical concept in a endlessly growing film genre that has predominetly centers straight cisgender white men. ”

Well that’s mostly because the comics the movies adapt are about those types of people.

“That is because relatability and inclusion has always been core to Spider-Man’s appeal and message. It’s why the late Stan Lee decided that, unlike other superheroes who expose parts of their faces, Spider-Man had to wear a full-face mask.”

Stan Lee only speculated that that was part of Spider-Man’s appeal, he never had any input on that design choice it was all Steve Ditko...who frankly was unlikely to have been thinking about that...

“Even further, Spider-Man isn’t the king of a country, a billionaire, a woman out of a Greek myth, or a brilliant scientist. He’s just an average high-school kid from Brooklyn who always strives to do the right thing even while struggling to balance his everyday life and hiding a secret identity.”

WHOA there buddy...Spider-Man isn’t routinely ‘a kid’ nor is he from Brooklyn.

MILES is from Brooklyn but Peter, as evidenced by that great big caption in Captain America: Civil War, is from QUEENS.

“And it’s the idea of balancing a secret identity with everyday life that has always allowed Spider-Man to connect with queer audiences long before comic writers were allowed to explicitly include LGBT characters.”

...I’m not denying this necesarrilly but whilst i’ve heard stories from poc who connected with Spider-Man I’ve never heard this about LGBTQ+ fans of Spider-Man.

“Indeed, perhaps the strongest part of Spider-Man’s inclusivity is the subtlety to which it has been done. While Black Panther, Black Lightning, and Wonder Woman rightly put issues of identity front and center, Spider-Man’s quiet diversity allows audiences who typically cry “SJWs are ruining my favorite characters” to actually see diversity showcased without it being overt.”

Errrrrrr...sure....*represses memories of when Miles Morales was first announced*

Lets um...wait and see what happens when those trans characters show up in the movie this year okay.

#Spider-Man #Peter Parker #Miles Morales

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miseriathome · 6 years

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Heh, see, that's where you're wrong. No group "belongs" together. That'd be like saying, white people belong together - at which point we're one step away from what white nationalists stay. "Queer" is a political, and the funny thing is... plenty of non-political "queers" are sick of the fuck that queer theory was invented and pushed onto people - which those in LGTB readily accepted. Let's face it. The only experience people like you care about is from the ones conforming to your ideology.

This is a super non-specific ask and I’m just going to assume it’s about the thing I just wrote just now, because otherwise this could be about literally anything I’ve done involving the word queer and that would just be way too many things. Also, I understand the limitations of using the ask box, but this doesn’t actually make a very good argument (if it even contains an argument???), and even if it did, I have more opportunity to outvoice you by sheer nature of having an unlimited character count and also controlling what I give a platform to. Reblogging to respond to something as long as the stuff I write is the best way to go, imo, but other people who want to remain anonymous are free to submit responses if it means not getting incoherent anon asks.

I think I, myself, already implied that no group “belongs” together. Because the false logic of saying “all trans people are trans” is the idea that all trans people have the same experiences, which is not only false along lines of race/class/ability/religion/etc, but also within the nature of the trans experience itself being an incoherent experience (since transness is just as socially constructed as cisness). Therefore what I propose is group membership based not on “belonging” but on desire and willingness.

First things first, though, is that you literally can’t debate without nuance. Like… it’s an incredibly well-known fact around here that yes, queer is a slur; this point has been beaten to death in shitty tumblr discourse. Everyone who reclaims queer for themselves knows this, and that’s why they do it. To say otherwise is an unrealistic sanitation of history and a denial of many peoples’ lived experience. And that is why the reclamation is inherently political–because you can’t just call yourself a bad thing without bringing up either why it’s bad or why it’s perceived as bad or why it’s not actually bad, or why it’s bad and that’s okay. Those are all political things. So if you (hypothetical you, not you specifically) are calling yourself queer but you hate queer theory and queer politics… you would honestly be better off not calling yourself queer. Lie legitimately better off, for your own emotional wellbeing. It’s not good to surround yourself with things you vehemently disagree with.

Moreover, queer has never been apolitical. This point has also been discussed extensively. There’s a reason for all the slogans like “we’re here, we’re queer,” “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you,” “queer power,” etc. It’s because back in the LG(B) days, queer was the word for everyone who was left over, who had no chance of playing into respectability politics and being accept into either LG(B) spaces or normative Straight spaces. So queer people were poor, they were non-white, they were disabled, they were trans, they were kinky, they were polyamorous. People who didn’t all themselves queer fit into either the normative LG(B) mold (white, middle class, cis) or the normative Straight mold (also white, middle class, cis).

See the problem? Queerness has been there for the people who have needed it since identity politics began.

Your use of the passive voice (”…queer theory was invented”) is actually really telling. You know what you’re willfully ignoring? The fact that queer people invented queer theory. No one cared about the lives of queer people except themselves. No one was going to document their lived experiences or contemplate the social construction of the norms they were breaking or take a stand against not only heteropatriarchy, but also class differences and white supremacy. Queer theory was just regular critical race/class/gender theory, but written by queer people with their queerness in mind. It’s really not like… it’s own special thing that people came up with out of the blue to fuck with tumblr users. So to put down queer theory is literally to say that intersectional critical race/class/gender theory (YES, that is an academically-recognized branch of sociological theory) should not include thoughts about queer identity. That’s all queer theory is, is the incorporation of queer sexology into existing sociology (read as: specific kinds of identity politics into existing frameworks of identity politics).

And to speak to the point of “[was] pushed onto people” (and I guess also “which those in LGTB readily accepted,” while I’m at it)…. it wasn’t. Queer theory was suppressed by dominant LG(B) voices. Just look at radfems who did and still do everything they can to try to delegitimize trans experiences. The people who read works of queer theory were the people who either actively searched for them or stumbled upon them, chose to read them (because reading is a choice, much like sending an anon is), and then chose to accept the ideologies presented (or even better them). You can’t be forcibly indoctrinated into an ideology unless you’re alienated from all other ideologies, and that literally cannot happen when it’s minorities coming up with the ideas, because normative culture is, in fact, against queer theory being understood. In fact, the rhetoric of nonconsensual agenda-pushing by queer people is just another way to demonize them in the public sphere.

I kind of feel like people who are against queer theory in general have this strange misinterpretation of the phrase to mean “a specific theory that relates to queerness, for example its cause,” as opposed to what it actually means which is “a collection of theories (ie “theory” in the abstract) about queerness and the things proximal to it.”

My “ideology” is that I think coalitional politics is more effective than solidarity politics, and that compassion is much more valuable than empathy. It’s literally an ideology of praxis. In which case, it’s absolutely fine and possible to disagree. If you’re sick of your interpretation of queer theory as “people talking about how unity can exist without shared experiences,” then okay, but you should use language that says exactly that, because what you’re actually saying to me seems to be “I hate people talking about their own life experiences and agreeing that these voices are legitimate.” Which is just... not good.

Also. Comparing queer politics to white nationalist supremacist politics is also. Not good. That’s just some shock value bullshit.

#anon #ask #queer theory #reply #long post #anon hate #?#praxis #rhetoric #queerphobia

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ladyquinzy · 7 years

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Exclusive: A Behind-the-Scenes First Look at Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern in JT Leroy

When Savannah Knoop offered the director Justin Kelly the rights to her 2008 memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy, it began a nearly decade-long development process to bring the story to the screen. The film chronicles Knoop's experience as she became swept up playing the mysterious alter ego JT Leroy, who was created by her sister-in-law, the San Francisco-based writer Laura Albert. In public, Knoop embodied the elusive gender-fluid teenage author who became a national phenomenon in the early aughts. Eventually, Kristen Stewart signed on to play Knoop, and Laura Dern took the buzzed-about role of Albert.The story of JT Leroy is a saga worthy of the screen, and is one that still lives in infamy. Also the subject of last year’s documentary Author: The JT Leroy Story, the adventure began with an unknown writer called Terminator, whose acclaim in underground lit circles caused him to spiral into a fever dream of cult celebrity status. Revealed to be Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy (JT for short), the writer published a series of acclaimed magic-realist books chronicling his experiences as a queer, gender-fluid teenager, raised in rural West Virginia by his prostitute mother. Celebrities and the media devoured the novels, Sarah (1999), The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (1999), and Harold’s End(2005). Fashion and Hollywood became obsessed with the elusive author, who often appeared at photoshoots and events in a blonde wig, sunglasses, and black hat, hobnobbing with everybody from Winona Ryder to Asia Argento, Courtney Love, and Bono. But it was all a lie. Albert was behind the persona of JT, authoring the books and posing as him on phone calls and emails; Knoop became the public face, putting a person to the name for cameras and public audiences, while Albert tagged along as a brash, British woman named “Speedie.” When an explosive New York Magazine piece outed the two of them, Albert’s literary world came crashing down, and Knoop was left to pick up the pieces.Now, with the film freshly wrapped, Kelly and Knoop (who co-wrote the film) are offering W an exclusive first look at Kristen Stewart in character as both Savannah and JT, and Laura Dern as Laura Albert. They also hopped on the phone to discuss working with the two A-list actresses, perfecting characterization through wardrobe and hair, and privacy and identity in a post-JT Leroy world.

You’ve been working on this project for a very long time. How does it feel to be on your last day of production?

Justin Kelly: It feels amazing. Savannah and I started working together in late 2009. We’ve been writing, rewriting, developing and getting it off the ground for so many years that it feels amazing. It’s wild.

Savannah Knoop: And it feels like it took as long as it needed to take. We just kept writing and working and thinking about it until it was time to go.

I know the casting process was a big element in getting the film made. Laura Albert, for those who know her, is kind of a larger-than-life character. And with Savannah, you’re casting yourself, which is also daunting. How did you end up with Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart in these lead roles?

Knoop: We’ve always had Laura Dern in our earliest preconceptions of the character. Images of her were actually even in our first lookbook.

Kelly: She’s obviously a genius, and it was very surreal that we were lucky enough to get to work with her. She got the layers of the part in a way we didn’t expect, and it became very exciting. I think people are going to be enamored at the complexity of her performance as this eccentric genius.

Knoop: And she plays it with so much heart. Laura [Albert] is so dynamic and complicated as a character. It was always about merging her interior sense of self and her public sense of self. It felt like this total gift, because she could flip so fast into these different parts of the character. She’s a master of improv, which felt essential to capturing the essence of Laura Albert. One of the things that’s key to the character is how funny she is, and Laura Dern is hysterically funny. And when it came to Kristen, I didn’t have any preconceptions about who was going to play me. I didn’t have any idea. It’s a queer coming-of-age story, which is different from an ingenue coming-of-age. The character is a mix of being in control of her destiny, and letting life take her where it may. It felt exciting to think of Kristen playing the role because it felt like she could identify emotionally with that.

Kelly: I first met with Kristen about two years ago, and she really truly understood the material. She asked a lot of questions I hadn’t even thought about. The nuances that she brings to this character are really incredible—it’s almost hard to talk about. She’s such a precise, detail-oriented actor, and she never stopped getting to know the character, just like you never stop getting to know a person.

In a way, both Laura and Savannah are shapeshifters. So you have actors playing characters but then the characters are also playing characters.

Kelly: Right, you constantly have Laura Albert switching between playing a 20-year-old West Virginian gender-fluid person on the phone and this loud British woman, “Speedie”, in person. Laura Dern had to navigate those three roles.

Knoop: And, for both “JT” and “Savannah”, Kristen really embodied her research into the dual characters. She’s a master at copying gesture—she would do this mouth thing, and I was like, “That’s me!”

Kelly: We got to do a bunch of test shoots, and Kristen worked on this very particular kind of smile that Savannah does herself, but which becomes more exaggerated when Savannah is dressed up as JT. I remember sending a photo of that moment to Gus Van Sant, because he had met Savannah as JT, and he couldn’t believe that it was Kristen. He was like, “That is Savannah, you’re playing a joke on me.” So I was like, “Oh my god, we’re doing something right!”

Knoop: One thing I didn’t think about until we were watching it was that it played almost like a fairy tale. To see JT and Speedie traveling through airports, these freaky people—their looks are so maximal. You enter this world where these people are their superhero personas; their secret selves, but in public.

Kelly: Totally! And for me, it was the first film I’ve done where we had the time to develop their looks with hair, makeup, and wardrobe ahead of time. They both have these very iconic personas that involve lots of wigs and disguises. It was pretty exciting to build these characters with them.

Knoop: And the looks are key because they change the way the characters were behaving and moving. What you put on makes you feel differently, act differently, and relate to the world differently.

In these behind-the-scenes images, you can see Kristen Stewart going through so many hair phases as Savannah. Was it weird to relive your own haircut history?

Knoop: She was a hair-hopper! That was one of the initial grounding points for her character.

Kelly: Kristen has about five hair looks in the movie, because Savannah was in her twenties, a young queer finding themselves. And Laura Dern has six wigs for Speedie. If you Google Image search any of it from that time, it really was that extreme. The crew members would go, “How did anyone believe this?”

Last year, the documentary Author: The JT Leroy Story came out. Watching it and looking back on Speedie and JT, they look like such criminals. If you encountered them, you would probably know right away they were up to something.

Knoop: That was always a huge part of the original JT mystique. It was an Emperor’s New Clothing sort of a thing. The more excessive of a disguise, the better.

Kelly: We did think about doing a softer version of the looks to make it more believable, but decided to go for it. And a lot of them are completely emulating the original ones. This is a project where wardrobe, hair, and makeup really got to use all of their talents and creativity.

Savannah, as a writer and producer on the movie, it must have been really uncanny to watch actors re-enact things that actually happened to you. Did you ever feel like you were experiencing déjà vu?

Knoop: Yeah, I did! It’s intense. In a way, the project was an exercise in taking something you remember and layering it over, and over, and over. The only thing I can think to compare it to is where you look at a photograph and the photograph becomes the access point to your memory. In making this movie it’s like a snowstorm of transposing memories over each other. And a movie is a more compressed version, so you’re trying to find the emotional arc through all of the noise.

Now that shooting is almost over, how do you feel this movie takes that time in your life and relates to our current moment, in regard to identity?

Knoop: I think we are in a different moment culturally now than when it all happened. Language is shifting and the conversation is becoming wider and more complex. It is a queer story. It is multilayered.

Kelly: Agreed. In the eight years that we have been working on this, ideas of gender and queerness have shifted in a way that we weren’t even totally aware of. For example, Laura or Kristen would be talking about JT and say, “He’s not confused about his gender, he just likes to play with gender.” When your two lead actors understand that, and you realize your audience will understand that as well, it totally changes how the story could be heard and felt.

Knoop: We’re trying to be honest to what the story is about, which is the messiness of intimacy. It’s about how you can get so close to somebody and it becomes so complicated, you know? It’s about queering relationships and it’s not necessarily about tagging an identity. It’s about identity being fluid and how that works within all human relationships.

Originally posted by https://www.wmagazine.com/story/jt-leroy-movie-kristen-stewart-laura-dern-exclusive-first-pictures

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sunsinherbranches · 7 years

Text

The Evolutions Of Hell

Thiess the Livonian Werewolf had a very straightforward Hell to invade: a physically accessible place, located beyond a watery passage to the underworld (which seems likely to me to be a survival of something related to the Slavic myths of Veles, in which the chthonic cattle-lord god is ruler of the waters, and who, post-Christianisation, was partially recast as a Devil figure). It contained stolen things – field fertility, cattle blessings, and so on – which could be retrieved for the good of the community. (And indeed the earlier court conflict which made Thiess’s werewolfing more known in his village seems to have raised his status, possibly because people recognised him as someone who would go to great lengths for the common good.) For all that it was framed in Christian terms, it was not theologised in a Christian form – it was a thieves’ den staffed by the enemies of God, not otherwise made more complex with matters of sin, punishment, or even damnation. The nuances of orthodox theology were lost on Thiess, who claimed not to understand them.

It is less clear in what I know of this narrative what the Devil’s sorcerers got out of their end of the deal. Access to the food and resources stolen from the collective, perhaps, or magical powers inaccessible to ordinary folk – presaging, perhaps, the capitalist-imperial model in which certain forms of wealth and power render one immune to consequences. A guess might be that the sorcerers wished to be removed from the risks of community – when the collective status rose or fell, they did not wish to be bound to the same fate as others, and would make whatever deals it took to protect themselves and their families.

It is quite likely that they felt that those stored-up supplies were rightfully theirs – after all, they worked to bring the grain to harvest as well. Crop failure wasn’t fair, and wouldn’t anyone do what it takes to stave off starvation? “You wouldn’t want to see my children waste away, would you?” they might say. Security, certainty, the preservation of life itself, those were worth a deal with the Devil, who was, after all, only building a granary.

Perhaps the werewolves seemed to them the one on the Devil’s side. “I’ve done everything I can to protect my own, and here come these thieves in the night. They steal cattle and tear them apart to fund their burglary, they venture into the granary I helped build, they take the seed that I helped put there….” You can see it, right?

Here’s the interesting trick to it: regardless of whether or not I would place each of those people among the Devil’s partisans, all of them are opposed to this theological concept of Hell, this place into which the essentialities of life vanish and leave people bereft. For the most part, people have worked to close the gates of the Hell that they understand. Some may do it out of concern for whole communities, a more expansive care; others may do it to secure a better place for themselves, their families, because being able to provide for others gives them status and security, or whatever else. But the Devil’s party and those who steal back from them, whichever political faction one aligns with them, are agreed that their communities need food and there must be mechanisms to attain that end.

So, with this underlying model of Hell, we see that, over time, people as a collective close the gates of Hell when they find them and feel able, more or less. There is a general trend to come up with technologies, understandings, and worldviews that make existence feel less threatened. And this has two effects, for an ontology of Hell.

One is that the techniques to close a Hellmouth are just as effective at opening one. Perhaps more so. And it doesn’t take much to get people to use them – to decide that their own personal power or wealth (or greater certainty of survival) is worth a price that other people will pay. There is enough food produced in the world, at the moment, but its distribution is affected by corporations, by individuals seeking power, by forces that are rather abstract and inaccessible on the scale of the individual human. And many of those forces are at best indifferent to humanity as a whole, and even less invested in the non-human web of being, and easily harnessed by someone operating as one of the Devil’s sorcerers, wanting to secure their own position at the cost of the common good. (And this gets worse for topics other than food – though gods know there are plenty of Purity Of Food arguments out there in various forms and I need to write more food theology – I mean, how many people have thought that the way to abolish the Hellmouths of War was to have weapons too scary to actually use? That’s the entire fucking Cold War in a genetically engineered nutshell.)

And it’s easier to be tempted to the Devil’s party than it used to be. As the networks go global, the consequences to the community are more likely to wind up Not In My Backyard. If several tons of food are destroyed here, well, it’s not the people here that might suffer, it would’ve been shipped thousands of miles away. The runoff from that leaky pipeline isn’t in my water, it’s in water over there, and maybe I need that oil, did you ever think of that? “You wouldn’t want to see my children waste away, would you?” And the massive structures that make it possible to produce the bounty create vast separations in place between the people commanding their operations and the people doing the work, as any study of the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker’s wages will reveal.

The other effect is that what counts as an existential threat gets a whole lot more abstracted. People who do not have immediate fear of starvation, plague, or warfare might well get more and more sensitive to anything that hints in those directions, trying to recalibrate the same level of anxiety about mortality to different conditions.

It’s easy, of course, when things can be treated as an easy analogy to the primal fears of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Consider the response to the AIDS crisis in the ’80s: here was plague and death, and it was concentrated in communities that were seen as undesirables (queer people and drug users). The response was twofold – to cast those suffering the plague as being condemned and damned (keeping in mind that that is a Christian theologisation of Hell, there, and not terribly compatible with the lupine one), and to encourage fear of contagion among other populations. To, in short, suggest that HIV was something that could steal the life essence from the community, and that – rather than working to close that Hellmouth with medical science and compassion – the appropriate action was quarantine, isolation, and panic, and being very clear that it must not be allowed to steal from us, and make sure that we never slipped into being like them, the ones from whom that theft was acceptable and correct. It was a Devil’s bargain, made by the Devil’s sorcerers, and they had the power to not only condemn so many to wasting, brutal, and isolated deaths, but to seed fear and steal more lives for Hell.

It was left to the people who would venture into Hell and care for those stolen lives – who were seen as tainted, risky, and treacherous afterwards – many of whom were already at least half-monstrous due to their own queerness – to steal back as much as they could.

Then there are times the analogies, the sense of existential threat, are framed a little bit differently, but we can still see the echoes of it. Consider the shape of the discussion as framed by certain parents of autistic children – how many of them speak of that language of Hell and theft. They say their child was taken from them, stolen away, they want to steal that person back – the person that they imagined existed, the phantom, the imaginary person – to put that person in place of the child they have. Meanwhile, actually autistic people have to fight to be heard, to get a place to speak, there are countless stories of having discussions of autism in the world dominated by people who are not autistic. (I’ve read several of them recently, but do I have the links saved? No, that would take forethought and realising they were going to be relevant to something the next week.) That narrative of theft and recovery, that sense of struggle against the Devil’s minions, whatever incomprehensible forces have stolen our children, it speaks to something primal, something compelling, those old werewolf stories… that is, if one forgets that those autistic people are still here and have their own perspective to offer.

And I have known autistic people who have taken comfort in changeling stories – in hearing of children who were “taken away”, replaced with someone strange, who knows unfamiliar words, who does not act like the other children do, quite. Who have said, “That is me. That is a story about me.”

But those stories also have changelings burned with hot pokers and abused and killed, in the hopes that the fairy folk would return the “real” lost child. And this is something that is still done to autistic children today.

Much like it is done to queer ones, to gender-variant ones, to all of these things that lead someone to conclude that someone has stolen a rightful child and taken them away to Hell. And because we cannot find the gates of Hell that hide that stolen property, we try other means to get it back.

Perhaps that’s how we can decide which side is the werewolf and which the sorcerer: which person thinks that other people are a property that can be stolen from them, or an item which can be dismissed.

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

– Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

When I look at some of the blocs that comprise what’s called the alt-right, I see a lot of people operating from a condition of existential threat. Sometimes that’s quite explicit – consider all the cries of “white genocide”, for example, from people who are afraid of being outnumbered, as if being outnumbered (and having a number of recessive genes) is an intrinsic pathway to annihilation. Sometimes it’s more veiled, though not all that veiled – the *Gator obsession with the idea that people wanting games they found interesting, or critiquing aspects of existing games, meant that they were going to destroy the brainless shoot-em-ups that they wanted. Or MRA obsession with women having sex with people other than them, or women they find unattractive having sex at all, or other such things. This threatens them at a core level, on an identity level, in a way that they cannot respond to with anything less than a Horsemen-are-riding scope of agitation.

And it’s broader still than that. Dominionist theologies are all about trying to enforce a particular flavor of Christianity on people who do not follow it, demanding compliance with a particular form of power. And when challenged, the cry is the same as it has always been: “You don’t want my children to waste away, do you?” A simple “I don’t subscribe to your religion” from someone who does not want to be bound by those principles is seen as a core attack, as a Devil’s play to destroy them. They have an invasiveness about them, a prurience, that holds that other people conducting their own lives must conform, because they truly believe that they have a right to the Devil’s granary of stolen lives and stolen power. Those people who want to steal back the right to go about their ordinary daily lives unmolested by the dictates of godbotherers are attacking what is rightly theirs, their holy right to call down damnation.

But “damnation” only means “we’ve decided to give your life to the Devil”. That’s all it means. All that so-called holiness and the accumulation of power is just the means to steal lives – black lives, queer lives, Native lives, disabled lives, women’s lives, so many other lives – and feed them into Hell, and profit off those storehouses. No amount of “It’s for your own good” and “this is your salvation” can repay a stolen life, no amount of saying “We are opposing Satan!” can make up for a single person thrown into Hell. You do not oppose the Devil by feeding souls into his engines.

As long as other people are an acceptable sacrifice, as long as there are people whose lives can be consigned to Hell, then there will be sorcerers. Who they think is expendable will vary – there will be not just the ones that we know as popular bigotries, but there will be those who want to condemn people of other political parties, or people who have been victims of particular crimes. There will be people who want to consign people who write the wrong kind of story or play the wrong kind of game to expendability, and make bank on their marginalisation. There will be people who find other people’s marginal status, their relegation to the brink of reality, to be very handy, since someone whose life depends on finding a job might well be someone who will do anything. Be any thing, and for a pittance besides.

People. Are. Not. Things.

Not pawns in a cosmic game, not win tokens, not items to bend to the will of power or destroy if they displease. They do not exist to be stacked like cordwood in the bellies of slave ships or the depths of warehouses or set to slave in governor’s mansions or shackled to jobs that cannot even pay them what it costs to live because others can afford to expropriate their life, steal their breath, and store them away in Hell.

(And if you want a Kemetic version of this rather than a lupine one, try my post from last year, in response to the Pulse shooting: Put It All On Trial. Look, I say the same thing, over and over again, in different metaphors.)

But this is what Hell is, now: those Hellmouths of simpler times, when humanity’s worries were tangible, concrete, and we could imagine walking into Hell and carrying out seeds and thereby saving the world are not gone, but they are, in at least some ways, buried under other, more intricate ones.

The Horsemen are still riding. You can hear their hoofbeats, and they sound something like this:

It’s not that we want you to starve, but surely you don’t think you’re entitled to food? Starvation is bad. Just do the work. It doesn’t matter that the work doesn’t need you to do it, and you are replaceable, interchangeable, meaningless to the system: the system needs bodies and time, and your life is your problem. Send it to Hell for all we care.

(Seen elsewhere: “How badly did we fuck up the world that ‘Robots can now do much of the necessary work’ is seen as a crisis?”)

It’s not that we want you to go to war, fight, be maimed, die, we support the troops. But you know those people Over There hate us and our freedoms, and we need to put the hurt on them so they know who’s right. They can go straight to Hell, am I right? What do you mean, joining the Army was your only hope of getting an education and a better life? Isn’t that a bit of a Devil’s bargain?

It’s not that we want you to get sick and suffer, but really, if you were responsible, this wouldn’t have happened. Are you sure you’re not too fat? Are you poor on purpose? Why didn’t you go to the dentist before this happened? Someone probably should’ve looked at that injury at the time but now it’s way too late to do anything about it, sorry. What is that, we couldn’t possibly give treatment to that, is it even a person?

It’s not that we want you to die, but people like you shouldn’t exist. They’re trouble, you know, the cop was probably afraid for his life. You know what they say about the wages of sin being death. She defied God’s will. It’s a mercy, you know, someone shouldn’t be forced to live like that. It’s the lügenpresse’s fault. Couldn’t she have been nicer when she turned him down? Someone should do something about people like you.

How many ways does this rhetoric send people to the granaries of Hell each day? Hell is no longer content to glean our seeds, it demands our selves as its tithe. Sixteen tons, and what do we get?

The Devil’s sorcerers may not outnumber the rest of us, but many of them are powerful and their bargains have bought them powers that the rest of us do not have: affluenza, say, or the position to be so far removed from damage one causes that nobody can imagine bringing it to trial (though hey, someone’s been charged with involuntary manslaughter regarding Flint’s water, that’s a news story recently, how novel that someone who had some responsibility for poisoning an entire town might actually get charged with something), the ability to literally get away with murder, at least so long as the victim is one of the ones already damned.

People are not things. People are not optional. A rhetoric that says, “Well, sure, you exist now, but in an ideal world that wouldn’t be the case” is a rhetoric of annihilation, and a tool of the Devil’s sorcerers.

But the Devil’s sorcerers, too, are human, and forgetting that is a path towards becoming one of them, and storing up and expending lives into Hell.

The Harrowing of Hell shall not be complete until, as Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, the last sinner is dragged kicking and screaming into heaven. The Hounds of God must steal them all back.

Hey look, this turned out to be Universalist theology too. Go me. I’ll add it to the categories tickies and maybe someday someone reading my UU backposts will be amusingly confused.

As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been following developments on two news stories.

The fire in a low-income apartment building – Grenfell Tower – is one of them. Here we have lives stolen by landlords who were unwilling to use a recent renovation to put in anything like building sprinklers (and who may have damaged some of the safety precautions intended to slow the spread of fire in a building), most obviously, but there are layers beyond that – that austerity measures reduced the funding for fire brigades notably, that an attempt to introduce legislation requiring such housing to be “fit for human habitation” was defeated by a Tory vote (and that many Tory politicians are landlords). And, further, that part of the reason so many were saved was the Muslim inhabitants, awake because of Ramadan, noticed the fire and started getting people out; the diversity of the population there was preservative.

The other is the shooting in Virginia, in which a man armed with a rifle shot at the House Majority Whip, aides, and others, injuring several. (And, because he is a white man, he was initially taken into custody alive.) And I cannot say that after all these years of “Second Amendment solutions” I am surprised by the terrorism there, even as I recognise that it is terrorism, is anti-democratic, is as hostile to the underlying nature of governance as the administration this man might well have thought he was fighting. It is actively difficult to deal with people who one believes are Hell’s partisans without losing an understanding of their humanity. People have wrestled with this one for ages. But one must be so very careful with unleashing Hell’s tools, those Horsemen – of bringing out Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death and setting them riding – because they leave the gates of Hell open, and they go where they will once unleashed.

It is by acting as a community that we save each other, and ourselves. Including from violence. Deliverance is in the hands of the shapeshifting other who we welcome home. Have each other’s backs. Know what it costs to venture into Hell, even if you cannot do it today, and know that building a home to come back to is why the werewolves can change their skins.

The Evolutions Of Hell was originally published on Suns In Her Branches | Kiya Nicoll

#suns blog reblogs

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sexhealtheduuncg · 4 years

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Anjali Valentine, CA

1) I'm probably in the anomaly when I say this, but my healthcare experience has been quite positive, actually as someone who's LGBT-identifying. (I'm bisexual). I didn't really come out (I don't count being outed) until I was 17-18 years old, and I didn't publicly come out (on social media) until I was about 19. When I first started realizing I was bisexual, I was in a relationship with a guy, so it never really occurred to me that my healthcare might be differently impacted by being bi. When I was single and in LA, (and I hope this comes off right through text) I'd say I was open to the possibility of sexual experimentation with girls and definitely was attracted to some, but got really turned off towards the idea because I was constantly being pressured by male partners to be with girls for their pleasure. That said, I had an amazing doctor at UCLA (also an OB-GYN) who was really well versed and non-judgmental about having LGBT patients. I told her I was bisexual and she instantly told me about how most STI tests were very geared around assuming patients were sexually active with the opposite sex, and that she could order panels for certain STI's that were often overlooked for people attracted to the same sex. HIV testing was part of the STI test panel regardless, but you didn't get tested for things like trichomoniasis. UCLA also had an LGBT resource center that was fantastic, especially with offering meetings and events to discuss queer sex education. They offered dental dams, female condoms, regular condoms, and pamphlets on resources available for queer issues (even ones not related to sex education). I would definitely have to say that I was the most comfortable in my sexuality while living in Los Angeles in just about every facet - I could be open about it with my professors, peers, healthcare providers (including my therapist), the campus assault advocates, and so on. 2) The healthcare system needs to be reformed in more ways than just the medical field. It needs to be an all around effort to raise awareness about LGBTQIA+ identifying people and it also needs to have separation of church and state. Right now, tons of states still fund abstinence-only sex education because of a heavily influenced Christian agenda about premarital sex being a sin and whatnot. If we can't even discuss contraception/protection for heterosexual people, then there's no chance we can even begin to discuss what it means to have a healthy sex life as a queer-identifying person. Sex education is simply not current anymore, either. Right now, we're at the lowest birth rate we've had possibly ever because most millennials are deciding not to have children for a multitude of reasons. Sex education is still heavily centered around preventing an unplanned pregnancy (the agenda to end teen pregnancy was really big when I was growing up with shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager) but not nearly enough focus is given to preventing STI's (unless you want to show graphic pictures of what STI's look like as a scare tactic to young, impressionable adolescents). Most kids learned about sex because of scare tactics in their sex education classes, not because of a healthy and open conversation to answer any questions they might have. On that note about STI's, most people I know still never get tested because of the stigma surrounding having an STI in general. (The other common barrier is financial limitations, which I will address later on). It's also worth mentioning that in many areas, it's still an option for parents to opt their kids out of taking sex education to begin with because they think the information will make their kids more interested in sex (god forbid) or that it's evil in some way. I also think that gym teachers shouldn't be the ones to teach sex ed classes, it should be people actually educated beyond basics (such as Planned Parenthood staff). I think the majority of the issues surrounding LGBT healthcare have to do with ignorance of LGBT people in general. The movie Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington illustrates this beautifully because it came out during the height of the AIDS epidemic and shows attitudes towards people afflicted with AIDS - even highlighting the social death AIDS-afflicted people often face because of misinformation about the disease. If you check out a documentary called United in Anger, it's about a group that formed in New York City called Act Up (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) to raise awareness about people with AIDS (this is also the group that went to the White House lawn and scattered loved ones ashes who had died from AIDS as a message to former President Reagan for never addressing AIDS once in his presidency). One of the biggest barriers to tackling LGBT related healthcare issues is the lack of accessibility to drugs to treat HIV, one being AZT and a new one called PrEP+ that just came out. (AZT helps prolong the lives of people already afflicted with HIV so it doesn't progress to AIDS, and PrEP+ is a drug to protect people more vulnerable to being given HIV from someone else to help their body develop immunity). Most people afflicted with the illness are already marginalized in so many ways that being able to afford a potentially life-saving drug is simply not possible. This is also reflective of a larger issue within American healthcare, which is the constant refusal from our government to implement universal healthcare. 3) I'd say I'm pretty satisfied with the level of care I get, but that said, I also know I speak from a position of privilege by having access to quality health insurance and an amazing doctor who works at an LGBT-friendly clinic here in Salt Lake City. I'm also in a relationship with a man, as opposed to someone female or non-binary, which often doesn't make my sexuality obvious to people. 4) I really don't think most medical professionals are educated on LGBTQIA+ related issues. This is also pretty reflective of a lot of larger issues within medicine, such as how most doctors appointments are done on a time crunch, which doesn't allow for much trust to be built with a patient. There's also so much to tackle within intersectional identities in patients, such as racism, sexism, sexual orientation, and so on. A lot of beliefs are still pretty heavily ingrained such as POC having a higher pain tolerance, women often being written off as hysterical or overdramatic when they talk about pain, and so on. It also doesn't help that medicine is still such a white male dominant field, and I've had friends from more marginalized populations who try to be a change in the system only to be bullied out of their pre-med classes, or face discrimination from professors, and so on. 5) I don't have any other thoughts for now, but I'm def gonna send more your way if they come up! I could honestly talk about this forever because of all the intricacies and nuances that accompany any kind of marginalized identity, but I don't think they'd make a whole lot of sense in an email. Name: Anjali Valentine Pronouns: She/Her/Hers Something unique about me: I love to dance and perform! I take voice lessons and train in urban and hip hop, jazz, tap, heels/burlesque, and a little bit of ballet. I want to be in the entertainment industry as either a cast member for Saturday Night Live, or on Broadway (or some kind of theatrical equivalent in another city). I also love to do photography!

#whatdoyouthink

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queermediastudies · 4 years

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Carol, Romance and Lack of Inclusion

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A US trailer for the film.

Carol, a film based on the book The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett, came out in 2015 and attained great critical success. Nominated for 6 Oscars, 5 golden Globes, and 9 BAFTA film awards. It also won two awards in the Cannes film festival, best actress (Rooney Mara), and the Queer Palm award, due to its being “The first time a love story between two women was treated with the respect and significance of any other mainstream cinematic romance.” (IMDB). It is, refreshingly, explicitly queer, avoiding much of the LGBTQ+ audience’s need to undertake a “queer reading” (Doty, 1993) of yet another heterosexual film. The storyline, acting and production of this film are all extremely well done; however, it has several problematic factors such as its lack of LGBTQ+ cast members in its lead roles, lack of racially diverse casting, and marketing that hid the film’s queer storyline.

The movie tells the love story of two women living in the 1950s. Therese, played by Rooney Mara, is a department store clerk in New York City. While at work, she runs into a customer, Carol, played by Cate Blanchett, with whom she has an unexpected connection. The two women gradually begin a romantic relationship. Carol’s soon to be ex-husband, Harge (played by Kyle Chandler), complicates things by attempting to stop her contact with their daughter due to the “immorality” of her relationship with Therese. Unable to see her daughter, Carol takes Therese on a road trip, where they fall deeper in love. On their road trip, they discover that Harge has hired someone to follow them and collect evidence of Carol’s “immoral behavior.” After Harge’s discovery, Carol leaves Therese a letter with her best friend Abby (Played by Sarah Paulson) in which she ends their relationship. Heartbroken, Therese returns to New York and begins a new chapter of her life in which she embraces her lesbianism. After deciding that living a life free from Harge’s shaming of her sexuality is more important to her than having full custody of her daughter, Carol leaves him for good and calls Therese. The movie ends with their long, lingering eye contact across a restaurant, implying that they end up together.

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A silly (but informative) video that summarizes and comments on the movie.

This movie tells a beautiful, if complicated, love story between two women set in the 1950s. It does not fall for many of the storyline pitfalls that many other lesbian films do, such as an unhappy ending due to homophobia, or sex or love scenes directed for the male gaze. In fact, the film was intentionally directed as if seen through the eyes of 1950s underground female photographers.

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A Vanity Fair interview with Cate Blanchett in which she discusses the film’s directing style.

It is “unabashedly romantic” (Blanchett, 2016) and urges the audience to fall in love with Carol along with Therese. It also does not follow a rule of “gay and lesbian representation: no sexual interaction.” (Dow, 2001), but includes it in such a way that it contributes to the story without adding gratuity or oversexualization of either character. There is a great deal complexity to the two characters, and their love story is not the only thing happening in the film, which feels refreshing because “mainstream Hollywood films that deal with actual gay and lesbian lives and issues are extremely rare.” (Bernshoff and Griffin, 2004). They are not one-dimensional characters, they face outside pressures, such as Therese learning what she wants, not only in a partner, but in her professional life as she works to become a professional photographer. Carol’s struggle to separate from her husband is one of her character’s key driving factors, and it is complicated greatly by her social standing.

Therese’s character is relatively lower class, she works in a department store and her apartment is small and dingy. Carol on the other hand is an older, unhappily married woman whose family (or at least her husband’s family) is extremely well off. The social structures we see surrounding the two women are very different, and we see how they affect the two women in different ways. Although she works hard to make it in the world, Therese’s social circles are much more accepting of her queer identity, and it is almost as if there is nothing to lose for her. However, for Carol there is everything to lose. Her daughter, Rindy, is the light of her life, but when she leaves Harge for a woman, he punishes her by forcing her to keep away from their daughter. Throughout the movie we see Harge’s vicious and determined homophobia and its direct negative effects on Carol, but unlike in other films, it does not destroy her will to love who she wants.

Despite the movie’s overall beautiful representation of a romantic relationship, there are several issues with the film. The book it is based off of was written by a Queer woman and the storyline of the film is blatantly queer, however neither of the starring Actresses in the movie are queer. This is a missed opportunity in terms of the film’s casting, particularly for the film’s queer audience and for the queer actresses who likely auditioned and were denied one of their few opportunities to play a queer character in a mainstream movie. Both Blanchett and Mara are fantastic actresses, however, this does not take away the fact that queer women could have been cast into the film’s starring roles. There were queer actresses in the film, namely Sarah Paulson, playing Carol’s friend Abby, and Carrie Brownstein, who played a woman Therese flirts with at a party, but their roles were relatively minor. Based on this, it can easily be said that the movie’s production is “merely satisfying demands for inclusion without actually challenging the larger structural and systemic labor issues.” (Martin, 2018).

One of the film’s US promotional posters.

In addition to its lack of inclusion of queer cast members, this movie is overwhelmingly white. Very, very few people of color were cast in this film, and the only characters who were played by people of color were playing the roles of domestic staff. This film could easily have provided more opportunities for actors of color, but it chose not to. For a movie whose storyline and direction are so openly inclusive and somewhat groundbreaking, this lack of diversity in casting is disappointing. Both Carol and Therese were complex characters, but as with many other movies and tv shows about queer people they do not represent much intersectionality. They are both white, cisgender, able-bodied lesbian women, and the only aspect of identity that the film deals with is sexuality. Carol also avoids many of the issues of gender discrimination that were present in the 1950s that could easily have made its’ storyline and character development more nuanced. It can be seen as almost the opposite of the Oscar winning film Moonlight (2016), which is entirely made up of complex, intersectional characters. Despite its inclusivity to sexuality, it turns a blind eye to aspects of identity such as race and disability that likely play an important role in the lives of many of its viewers. As well as this, despite its’ openly queer trailer, the posters for the film deliberately displayed the two main characters as facing different directions and looking away from each other. This could have been an intentional choice to convince less accepting heterosexual moviegoers to watch the film, and it also implies that the film’s homosexual content should be hidden.

The first time I saw this film, I was 16, and just beginning to think about my sexuality as something other than straight. I voraciously consumed tv and movies about Lesbian and Bisexual women, hoping to find something I related to and felt included in. Carol, and its rich and beautifully stylized cinematography, was one of the few movies that made me feel heard and understood and felt like home to me.

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A scene where we see how Therese views Carol.

Unlike other movies I had seen, such as Blue is the Warmest Color, this movie made me feel like it was made for me. I was able to relate to the romance and feel like I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I did about, likely because I am able to relate to the two characters in the film, particularly Therese. Like most other movies about queer women, this movie is directed at young, white, able-bodied, cisgender, middle-class queer women, of which I am one. It did not challenge my identity or the way I saw the world. Despite its many obvious flaws, to me the most important aspect of this movie was how it displayed the growing relationship between Therese and Carol in a way that felt relatable and evoked deep feelings that made me relive the intense and beautiful experiences of first love.

References

Bernshoff, Harry and Griffin, Sean (2004). “Introduction,” in Queer Cinema: The Film Reader, 1-15.

Carol. (2020). Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402927/awards?ref_=tt_awd

Doty, Alexander. (1993) “There’s Something Queer Here” in Making Things Perfectly Queer, 1-16.

Dow, Bonnie (2001). “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18(2), 123-140.

Martin, Alfred L. Jr (2018). “Pose(r): Ryan Murphy, Trans and Queer of Color Labor, and the Politics of Representation.” LA Review of Books.

#cateblanchett #lesbian film #queermedia #film analysis #carol #rooney mara

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