My tv and fandom consumption: a quest for diversity

Since the beginning of RaceFail especially, I've felt more and more oppressed by the sense of underrepresentation in the media that I watch of characters of colour and actually, any characters who aren't white men. (I don't mean to indicate that I wasn't aware of it and pissed off about it before, just that it's more and more often taking me all the way to the point of choosing not to watch.)

I broke out into a rant here about how Leverage, the last tv show I started to watch (and liked!), presents the entire story centred way too much on yet another over-privileged middle-aged American white guy and his white guy pain, in spite of the other characters in the ensemble cast. As my rant here indicates, it's not just the underrepresentation of characters of colour, it's the complete absence of gay and lesbian characters who aren't evil or dead; the way even white, over-privileged American women are relagated to sidekick status more often than not. In a comment to a post on the lack of gay characters in media, isilya articulated some of what I've been feeling more and more of:

I've lurked around AfterEllen.com for years, because their slogan is "Because visibility matters", which I wholeheartedly agree with. I guess it's also refreshing to shake off the dirty feeling I get from the white male fixation of fandom.

And that's it exactly: a huge onslaught of white maleness everywhere I look in my world - not just in reality, but in my livejournal and my own recs page. And dirty feeling is exactly right. (I've spent hours and hours at AfterEllen since then, including a crazy night where I registered an account to dive into the nutbar accusations of anorexia on a post about Lindsay Lohan. It doesn't help the feeling much, just underscores the impossibility of finding portrayals of lesbians in the media.)

About a week ago, I was at a "How can I search it out?" place. I was thinking that turning to the tv of other countries would do something. After all, in Indian movies there are Indians, and in East Asian tv - which is fairly widely available online - there are Asians. But that's not really the problem, is it?

Because what is really hurting society, here, is that our own society, the society of America, of Britain, of Western Europe, is multi-cultural, mult-lingual, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic, and that the millions of people of colour there are erased from the media representations of that society.

The problem is that the stories "we" tell "ourselves" - where by "we" I mean the white middle-aged male controlling fist around the money and power of Hollywood (and hell, the money and power of industry and government) sells us - are not stories about us; they're stories about the world we live in twisted just enough to remove us and the people we love and know and identify with from it (and when i say "we", I mean everyone who's not a white man, pretty much; and I mean that I am a lesbian; but the situation is not the same for everybody).

I'm angry. And I await the output of the new press verb_noire eagerly, and I can look around all I want for more authors and characters of colour and gay people, but I'm still going to have this problem with tv. I like to watch it, but I am put off by what I'm watching. I retreat to books just to consume something with a female protagonist: something that sf movies and television don't offer. My whole life, I've rarely enjoyed male protagonists and preferred to read women's adventures over and over. By preferring books to visual media and by drawing on my parents' library for my reading instead of the world of the bookstore and library, I was raised on a still horribly biased but much more friendly and representative diet of fiction; my mother, an avid (not to say compulsive) reader since childhood, had spent half a decade before I was even born collecting fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries by and for women. (Of course, the characters of colour, or gay characters, were still very thin on the ground - that is overwhelmingly true of the field - the only thing that really leaps to mind is Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers series. My dad only had a handful of Delany books until I discovered him in high school and expressed interest in more.)

star trek diversity. the fact that that phrase is meaningful is sad.

Here's a crazy thought I had today: original Star Trek was one of the best racially representative shows in science fiction tv. It certainly did better than TNG (the only black member one of 2 black regulars on the cast was a savage alien - extra points if you've reimagined aliens who originally allegorically represented the USSR as ultra-violent, hulking black guys with a tribal bent; the other's a blind sidekick, essentially, the way he's usually written as Data's bff, whose sole romantic encounter is with one of the vanishingly-few black women they meet! And Whoopi's Guinan is a magical, sexless, ALIEN negro who tells fortunes, provides motherly advice as well as sassy straight-talking, and wears a robey-muumuu thing that I'm pretty sure is also offensive) and DS9 (one Indian, one black guy who is essentially the governor of a huge-ass COLONY and a diplomat, but is somehow militarily ranked below Picard and Kirk; a bunch of aliens, but none of them dark-skinned; of the two newly-introduced races we have Bajorans who are white, and Cardassians who are PAINTED GREY but always played by white people!)

I believe Voyager had a black Vulcan and a North American native (as well as maybe an Asian cast member? Am I remembering that right?). BSG has some racial diversity from what I've seen (I've not watched it myself), but the Stargate franchise has always been pretty abysmal (Teal'c: he's black, alien, AND a magical negro! And let's not start on Ronon and Teyla's treatment in canon).

So I mean, essentially, race has not made progress in mainstream tv sf since 1964.

sneakers of the day

Or "sneakers made out of stuff you could make a suit or blazer out of". Check out the tweed and shimmery grey linen.



I actually have a pair of red tweed sneakers with driving moccasin soles and bowling-shoe/golf-shoe red leather panel down the middle from like, 2003. From a distance, tweed blurs into one colour, but I really like it on shoes nonetheless. It has texture. It's a bit playful. That's Vans "Tory" and Keds Champion Linen Sparkle, in the pictures.