Since I’ve been more “out” about my involvement in media studies the last couple of years, at any given time I get a lot of people asking me “What are you watching?” For the longest I’ve been recommending Wynonna Earp and the like. It’s still a very fun show, and I continue to advocate for it, but we’ve gotten a new crop of LGBTQ rep featured on network shows like Black Lightning (Stop sleeping on this one, y’all!) and streaming fare such as One Day at a Time and Everything Sucks. I’ll hopefully get to those on this blog as well, but right now I want to put in a plug for the new Queer Eye. Continue reading
Elizabeth Bridges - Writer, Professor, Reviewer
Tag: Media Culture
Buffy series finale, “Chosen,” S7E22
It’s funny to think of Buffy as 20 years old, since it isn’t for me, not exactly. I mean, I became aware of the show at its outset. I had seen the lackluster 1992 movie of the same title a few years before, which had followed in the wake of some pretty hilarious teen satires like The Brady Bunch Movie (Sure, Jan!) and the darkly comedic apotheosis of all 80s teen fare, Heathers. The trailers and the title certainly set it in that light, so my friends and I had high hopes. Unfortunately, the story meandered, and the humor kept its fangs retracted, despite a potentially great cast in Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry, Donald Sutherland, and even Rutger Hauer for god’s sake. We even got a very young Hilary Swank. When I heard this property had been turned into a show, I merely rolled my eyes. Continue reading
My first date was with a boy – the kind of pseudo-date where your mom drops you off at the movies. I was 13, in the 7th grade, and we went to see Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. You know – the funny one, the one with the whales. That movie was both my gateway to Star Trek fandom and my gateway to attempted heterosexuality. I’m still a Trek fan. The other thing not so much. Continue reading
Lincoln in S1, already bound and tortured
As you may have read in previous posts, I’ve had a lot to say about the death of Lexa and The 100 EP Jason Rothenberg’s participation in the dangerous and demeaning “Bury Your Gays” trope. But along with recognizing the (to put it mildly) problematic death of Lexa and the ways in which it tangibly damaged the LGBTQ community, the death of Lincoln gives us occasion for a long-time-coming reflection on the equally deplorable depiction of ethnic / racial minorities on the show.
The media has tried to send us a message over and over, most recently with the death of Lexa in episode 3×07 of The 100. That message is: gays can never be happy, queer sex is punishable by death, and lead characters can never be in same-sex relationships. In other words, more of the same that we’ve been getting since the Hays Code in old Hollywood stipulated that homosexuals can only be portrayed as unhappy and must be punished. This is a pattern. It is a trope – whether employed consciously or not. It can be nothing other than a trope if you can name more dead TV lesbian and bisexual women than living ones.
And we are tired of it. Continue reading
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