LIBRARY WITHOUT DUST

Revisiting The L Word

7/13/2017

This article contains spoilers for The L Word, spoilers up to and including Season 6 of Pretty Little Liars and a spoiler for The 100.

I have some thoughts on the proposed return of The L Word and most of them are not particularly good. I want to preface this by saying I know that the show was enormously important to lots of people and I don’t want to take that away. I also know that it was a welcome shift in a post Queer as Folk world for a show to focus so exclusively and explicitly on female sexuality and same sex desire. I don’t want to write a polemic on something that made queer female experience visible in a way which provided enormous support for some viewers. The show talked openly about many aspects of female sexuality, it challenged heteronormative relationship constructs and addressed political issues of its time, such as the U.S. military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. However, I have some serious reservations about the handling of bisexuality and trans experience in the show and in this piece I revisit and expand upon some thoughts I touched on an earlier piece What About the 'B' Word? about bivisibility in mainstream television.

As always, please feel free to leave me comments here or on Twitter.

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Reflections on the 'Twin Peaks' Pilot

5/3/2017

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I’m binge-watching Twin Peaks in preparation for the May 2017 release of Season 3, which picks up twenty-five years after the conclusion of the original series, which aired between 1990 and 1991. All of my Twin Peaks posts should be approached with caution for those who haven't seen Seasons 1 and 2, as there will be spoilers.

I’m going to put it out there. The pilot episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks is, in my view, one of the greatest television pilots of all time. Although Twin Peaks is inconclusive, surreal and strange, the pilot episode seamlessly introduces the key players and hints at a multitude of complex relationships, character secrets and motivations with a deft and subtle hand.

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Riverdale: It Started Out With a Kiss

3/4/2017

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I’ve just binge-watched the available Riverdale episodes on Netflix and it’s a pretty unequivocal thumbs up from me so far. There’s a dark, gothic undercurrent bubbling beneath the surface and the characters are interesting, fresh and engaging. Music is incorporated in a manner which makes me think of Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks with the dreamy, electronic pop from Josie and The Pussycats and introspective acoustic ballads from Archie. The set is lush and colourful with strange old houses and graveyards, dark institutions, a river which holds a multitude of secrets and characters who all seem to be hiding something. This televised take on the Archie comics holds plenty of promise and I’m excited to see where the story goes. A number of issues such as white privilege, misogyny and slut shaming are all packaged up in the dialogue in a slick, entertaining package.

BUT. I want to talk about the kissing.

NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SEASON 1

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Strangest of the Strange: Queering 'Stranger Things'

9/6/2016

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SPOILER WARNING: THERE ARE MULTIPLE SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1 IN THIS ARTICLE

Netflix original series Stranger Things has captured the hearts and imaginations of the Netflix generation. A deeply nostalgic breath of fresh air amidst re-runs, reality television shows, endless talent contests and period dramas, the brainchild of Matt and Ross Duffer bears all the hallmarks of a future cult classic.

Stranger Things is set in small-town America during the ’80s and for those who spent time immersed in ’80s and early ’90s horror, sci-fi and coming of age stories, the echoes of the past will clearly resonate. The group of nearly-teenaged misfits could be the boys of Stand By Me, the Losers Club of Stephen King’s It or the comic book-obsessed vampire hunters of Lost Boys. The school is populated by a teen-genre cast of clichés that wouldn’t look out of place in Pump up the Volume or Heathers. The Duffer brothers have further ramped up the nostalgia factor by casting Winona Ryder in a lead role. Ryder is an inspired choice and her very presence evokes fond memories of late ’80s and early ’90s cinema - the “strange and unusual” goth Lydia Deetz of Burton’s Beetlejuice, the beautifully weird romance of Edward Scissorhands and the mawkish blood-lust of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

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Revisiting HBO's 'Looking' - Representation, Responsibility and LGBT Television

6/27/2016

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I feel like I've been waiting years for my first glimpse of Looking: The Movie, the film which picks up where the HBO series finished off, following its cancellation at the end of its second season in March 2015. For those who are unfamiliar with the show, Looking focused on the lives and loves of a group of gay men living in San Francisco. Jonathan Groff's character, Patrick, is the focal point of the show and Groff has previously stated in interviews that the show was an exploration of male intimacy - from casual sex to love to friendship and everything in between.

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Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without gloves

12/3/2015

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Yesterday (1 December 2015) was World AIDS Day and as a result I spent a lot of time thinking about how far we have come in breaking down the fear and misunderstandings which surround AIDS. Of course, we're not there yet, and there is still a level of ignorance which continues to surround HIV and AIDS.

I wanted to watch something backward-looking, with a focus on the struggles faced by queer communities in the 1980s. I settled for the award-winning three part Swedish TV drama, 'Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves' (Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar) which takes its haunting title from the opening scene where a nurse wipes the tears from the face of a dying AIDS patient without her gloves. The series focuses on the impact of AIDS on Stockholm's gay community and is based on a series of novels by Jonas Gardell, called 'Love', 'Disease' and 'Death'.

It was released in 2012 in Sweden and as it was picked up by the BBC and shown on 2 December 2013 to mark World AIDS Day 2013, it seemed like the perfect choice.

Each part begins with a reminder from the narrator that the story is a true one and the heart-wrenching recollection of a "war" fought "in peacetime". The series is gloriously shot and heartwarming at times, but yet. The touching love story is interspersed with scenes of the suffering, the futility of death and an aching reminder of homophobia and oppression of the time.

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what about the 'b' word? bisexual erasure from 'the l word' to 'orange is the new black'

11/4/2015

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There’s no doubt when watching television shows which champion queer experience that bisexual erasure remains the unspoken elephant in the room of popular culture. Despite its many advancements in terms of queer visibility, contemporary television struggles to depict bisexual characters in a meaningful and representative way.

Bisexual erasure is the tendency to “ignore, remove or falsify” evidence of bisexuality, and it’s alive and well in popular culture. In the absence of identifiable character representation, bisexual people continue to feel as if they don’t really ‘fit’. The more sexuality is portrayed as a straight/gay binary the more illegitimate attraction to more than one gender feels and the more marginalised bisexual people become. While not wishing to detract from the positive work certain television shows do in their efforts to be as inclusive of the LGBT experience as possible, these efforts make it even more frustrating to see bisexual experience represented in a way which wholly fails to grapple with the identity in queer-positive television. Looking at a handful of shows, this blog post demonstrates examples of bi-erasure in popular television shows and explores why this issue matters.

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Revisiting The L Word

Reflections on the 'Twin Peaks' Pilot

Riverdale: It Started Out With a Kiss

Strangest of the Strange: Queering 'Stranger Things'﻿

Revisiting HBO's 'Looking' - Representation, Responsibility and LGBT Television

Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without gloves

what about the 'b' word? bisexual erasure from 'the l word' to 'orange is the new black'

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Strangest of the Strange: Queering 'Stranger Things'