Dear Hollywood, I am tired of cis-white-heterosexual media. Give me Queer Media that’s beautiful and sad and sexy and warm and happy and literally just normal. Normalize Us!
This past week, I went down the rabbit hole of watching TV. I started with watching Skins (2007), a TV show I had watched when I was in high school. I thought I would feel nostalgic, but instead I left the ending credits of the first episode feeling empty, uncomfortable, weirded-out. I was feeling disgusted at the strict gender roles of the show, the sexualization of the women on the high school cast, the vapid compulsory-heterosexuality, the obsession with conforming to the white norms of society. After that one-episode hiccup, I turned to my queer-representation movie list, and watched Moonlight (2016), Pariah (2011), Rafiki (2018), and Paris is Burning (1990). After finishing those movies, I felt a range of emotions: shocked, saddened, heart-warmed, hopeful, and most of all, full. I was excited to see representation — although most of the representation featured authentic stories of death, rejection, and violence.
But these stories need to be told. The movies I watched featured queer, Black folks and their true stories. While I am not Black, I am queer, non-binary, and Filipinx-white, and I related and understood many of the themes that came up in these movies that dealt with alienation from family, falling in love with love that’s not seen as normal. These movies reminded me of the importance of questioning the media I consume, letting myself sit with and understand what makes me uncomfortable about cis-white-heterosexual media, why I will not accept norms prescribed to me through media and why I will actively seek out and create stories like mine. I want to use this space I have with you to make the statement, plea, argument that we need to demand futures where we belong. We deserve realities where we are accepted, loved, valued, and upheld. Queer and trans BIPOC deserve not just a reimagined future, as Alison Kafer asks for in Imagined Futures, we deserve a reimagined now. We need to replace media that upholds white supremacy with media that tells our stories. I will not be force fed white cis heterosexual media any longer.
Now I will make my case for why the media we consume right now is trash, and why Queer BIPOC need to tell their stories and be heard.
While I was processing what Skins made me feel, I began to see that what was so problematic about Skins was that it was building norms in society. Because of the plot that centered white men and their pleasure, the scenes of white women being sexualized and seen as the hallmark of beauty, and the overall lack of presence of queer and trans BIPOC, I was made to believe that to be desired, I must be a skinny cis-white woman. And to be attractive and perceived as a woman, I must be desired by men. Now, as a queer non-binary POC I realize how important it is to see media as another institution that can produce white supremacy like any other institution — i.e., the government, technology, mass incarceration, UC Berkeley. To understand the process better of how institutions produce norms to hold power, I will use Michael Foucault’s concept of biopower to explain how media is a technology that pushes individual bodies to conform to cis, white, heterosexual norms. Moreover, given that reality, I will discuss how important the process of “queering” the media is. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s work, I will show how important the process of reimagining a bright, queer future in the media is to our liberation. Not only do we need to queer the media we consume; we need to actively question our media consumption and challenge the norms given to us. We need to queer our pasts, our present, in order to queer our future.
In Michael Foucault’s lecture Society must be Defended from March 17, 1976, Foucault described his conceptual tool of biopower that I will now use to explain the entrenching effects on our society of media reproducing problematic norms. Foucault defines biopower as a new form of power where those in authority (rich, cis, white, heterosexual men and women) can make both individual abodes and the human population move towards an outlined norm. These norms circulate throughout society through a process called biopolitics. Biopolitics is how biopower functions in a society; biopolitics functions by regularizing bodies that make up a population by focusing on creating norms that benefit those in power. For example, eugenics is a form of biopolitics enacting biopower because white people can police human sexual reproduction to make sure that only desirable white traits are produced. Eugenics pushes a normal where only cis, white, heterosexual bodies are seen as desirable and accepted.
Social Media and media in general are a site of biopolitics because through these images that are widely consumed, hegemonic norms are spread and reproduced again and again until they are solidified and used as tools of classification. Eurocentric ideals of beauty are widely accepted because of media; seeing white women and mixed-race women as the height of beauty in movies, television, Instagram, etc., creates a hierarchal category where dark-skinned folks and Black folks are seen as less beautiful, and therefore, less worthy of love and less human. Foucault is not saying this action is necessarily a conspiracy; rather, Foucault’s framework helps us see how this dissemination of norms circulating in society can produce rigid categories of whiteness as beauty, purity, goodness and blackness as darkness, ugliness, impurity that are seen as just normal. This dualism serves white supremacy and categorizes Black folks and queer folks into a dark unknown where their stories are not visible. Black women in particular are impacted by this biopolitical process — black women experience misogynoir in this country. Misogynoir, coined by black queer feminist Moya Bailey, describes the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women particularly experience. Misogynoir is a product of the biopolitical campaign of white supremacy in our media, and results in Black women and Black trans-women being masculinized so their humanity is not recognized. This is precisely why the #ProtectBlackWomen became widely spread during the uprisings in the summer for Black Lives Matter, where Breonna Taylor’s story became widespread. Say Her Name was chanted throughout the country in an effort to show that Black women matter despite what social media and the media tells us.
The Black Lives Matter Movement is intertwined with my argument demanding more Queer and Trans BIPOC media because the regime of white supremacy advances a system of oppression that classifies all bodies into this dualism that whiteness and heterosexuality is goodness and purity, and Blackness and queerness is darkness and impurity. These systems of oppression overlap. Now that I have established why media is biopolitical, I will use Alison Kafer’s Imagined Futures and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage, and some of the aforementioned movies I watched to discuss the importance of media as a site of reimagination for QTBIPOC.
Alison Kafer claims in Imagined Futures that in reimagining a future where queer and disabled folks are seen as beautiful, we need to reevaluate who we include. Kafer says:
“What is needed, then, are critical attempts to trace the ways in which compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness and compulsory heterosexuality intertwine in the service of normativity; to examine how terms such as “defective,” “deviant,” and “sick” have been used to justify discrimination against people whose bodies, minds, desires, and practices differ from the unmarked norm; to speculate how norms of gendered behavior — proper masculinity and femininity — are based on nondisabled bodies; and to map potential points of connection among and departure between queer (and) disability activists. As we shall see, one productive site for such explorations is the imagined future invoked in popular culture.” (17)
I included this excerpt from Kafer’s text because Kafer challenges in this passage the norms that white supremacy advance, particularly in popular culture such as social media. Kafer asks us to challenge how our media upholds narratives of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. Kafer uses the word “normativity” here to show how prescriptive norms produce social expectations which becomes a way of managing societies; these norms are a form of biopower which achieves the conformity of cis-white-able-heterosexuality as the norm to strive for. But Kafer asks us to question why a future with disability is imagined as a future that no one wants. Why is it common sense to not include disabled folks? Why is it common to only have white-cis-heterosexual-able-bodied stories told? Kafer challenges these prescriptive norms by asking us to re-imagine futures where Black people, queer people, trans people, disabled people belong.
Using Kafer’s theories of queering our futures, I would like to go a step further and challenge us to reimagine and “queer” our present too. Like Kafer, I am yearning for an elsewhere and elsewhen (3) where the stories of Queer and Trans BIPOC can be highlighted and uplifted. I am calling for more movies like Pariah (2011) where a Black lesbian tries on a strap-on in the mirror and fiddles with making it feel comfortable on her skin, I am calling for movies like Moonlight (2016) where Black men are soft and sensitive and joyful, I am calling for movies like Rafiki (2018) where two Black women fall in love. But part of this reimagining of the present and the media we consume calls for queering our pasts too.
To queer our futures and nows, we must look to the past and understand that queer Black and brown folks have always been here. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage tells us that the Black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. Tinsley claims that African men and women “resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships” (192) on the Middle Passage. But these queer narratives of resistance were invisibilized so we are led to believe in the present that queerness is just a new, fleeting trend. The erasure of queer relationships in history contributes to white supremacist narratives that our stories do not deserve to be told.
One of my favorite images I’ve stumbled upon on social media is old vintage photos of women loving women. While I can’t find the original images that inspired me, I have attached this one particular image that I found after a google search of vintage lesbian photos. The women in this photo are unnamed, and I’m not sure when this photo was taken.
But images like this give me hope. Images like the ones in Moonlight and in Rafiki give me hope. Here are more images of Queer Black resistance.
In queering our past, we queer our futures and our presents. By understanding that queer relationships have been invisiblized by the biopolitics of media, we can begin to understand how important queering our media right now is. This is urgent. Queer and Trans Black and Brown People of Color deserve to have their stories told and heard. We will make a name for ourselves. We will resist. We are the past, present, and future. We are everything.
We are death we are love we are life we are normal we are exceptional.
— M, lilbebecyborg
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. M. Bertani & A. Fonatana (Eds,)
(D. Macey, Trans.) (pp 239–263). NY: Picador.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/23617.
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14 no. 2, 2008, p. 191–215. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/241316.
