LIBRARY WITHOUT DUST
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Television
  • Music
  • Films
  • Books
  • Fandom

Revisiting 'The L Word'

7/13/2017

 
Picture
​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.

Read More

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

6/27/2016

 
Picture
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.

Read More

Series Review: Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without gloves

12/3/2015

 
Picture
​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'.


Read More

    Categories

    All
    Bisexuality
    Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
    Glee
    HIV/AIDS
    LGBT
    Looking
    Orange Is The New Black
    Riverdale
    Stranger Things
    The L Word
    Twin Peaks

    Archives

    April 2019
    July 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    September 2016
    June 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015

Proudly powered by Weebly