My tv and fandom consumption: a quest for diversity

[cimorene]

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.)

Comments

[perhael.livejournal.com]

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.

I'm actually pretty sure that Dutch tv is a lot more ethnically diverse (and has a lot more gays on it) than American tv. Perhaps not enough, but significantly more than in the US. The British are more diverse too, though maybe not as much so as we are. I don't have any statistics, though, these are just my impressions from my own tv watching.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I've noticed British tv is more diverse, too. Of course then you get stuff like MarthaFail...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my favorite show right now is Brothers and Sisters and it really bugs me how white it is. In terms of women it does really well. In terms of gay characters it does...well, really well compared to other shows, in that one of the main characters is gay and he is one of the most focused on characters, not just the sexless sidekick. But he is a white male and all his boyfriends have been white males (except for a one-night stand with a black guy), and there's no sign of any lesbians (at least so far; I'm still on season one). But it's so white! The family is half-Jewish, so that's something, but the uncle is the only practicing Jew and the titular brothers and sisters were mostly raised Christian (and I think the uncle is the only actor who's actually Jewish). The show is set in LA and there are a fair amount of background characters of color, so it doesn't totally stand out as "wtf you expect me to believe this is LA?", but all the main characters are white, all their relationships are with white people... It's really frustrating because it's such a good show otherwise. (I also personally hate that it's about rich people. I don't have any sympathy when boohoo they have financial problems and have to sell the summer home.)

Even Ugly Betty, which has a much more diverse cast than most other shows, bugs me. Betty is on her third love interest right now and all four have been white guys. And while there are a lot of latin@ actors on the show, aside from Vanessa Williams, there's never any blacks, and rarely any Asians, either. It also falls down on the lesbian front, despite having gay male characters (and the mtf character got written off the show).

[i-naiad.livejournal.com]

Betty is on her third love interest right now and all four have been white guys.

Didn't Freddy Rodriguez play a Latino love interest for Betty for a while? I can't remember the character's name, but he competed with Henry.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, he did. He was Italian-American in the show, though. I hadn't realised the actor was latino. But since he was explicitly playing a non-latino character, I don't know how that counts.

[i-naiad.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realised he was meant to be Italian-American since I was only watching sporadically. In that case he probably doesn't count, but I'm not 100% about that.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

My favourite shows right now are Criminal Minds and Lie to Me, which both have one character of colour in the ensemble cast and then are problematic. Neither one of them whitewashes the background characters that show up, which was kind of a plus for CM despite the fact that they far too rarely showed characters of colour as the main guest stars, up until the violent racefail of the Gypsies Steal Babies ep earlier this season. Lie to Me seems to make an effort to include a realistic mix of backgrounds in the guest stars, but the portrayal of race, especially Latin@s, is problematic to say the least.

And your love interest point is a really good one, too. CM keeps a deliberate thread of interracial Mulder/Scully tension with Morgan and Garcia, but then they bring in a chubby white nerd to be Garcia's real boyfriend. What does that say? You know, flirting with the hot black action hero is okay, but the fat white nerds had better remember that in REALITY they only date each other? And "she has a boyfriend, and he's nice!" is the most enraging anti-Morgan/Garcia shipping argument I can think of, but I hear it a lot.