The Way Who Lives?

Coach still lives in Brightwood and would like to tell you all about The Secret.

Last Thursday, I went over to the D.C. Queer Studies Symposium, held at the University of Maryland. As someone who spent fourteen years in Catholic school, you can imagine how hard it was to choose between going to this or attending the Pope's mass at National's Stadium.

So here's my quick, and most likely inaccurate, synopsis of a paper presented by UMD American Studies grad student, Justin Maher. The paper titled, "The Way Who Lives?: Cultivation of Exclusionary Multiculturalism in The L Word's Los Angeles," addressed the limits of queer visibility in Showtime's The L Word. In Maher's opinion, The L Word embraces POC (persons of color) characters either through the fantasy of colorblindness or as the exotic other that adds flavor to the white norm. The L Word pushes a specific type of consumer cosmopolitanism that underwrites the fantasy of West Hollywood as an inclusive neighborhood, and erases the reality of race and class tension.

Maher showed a couple clips to support his thesis, but really, he could've just randomly pressed play during any of the past five seasons.

First scene: From season one, Kit, the alcoholic black R&B singing half-sister of Bette, is pulled over by LAPD for driving on a suspended license. What could've easily been a scene that dealt with the LAPD's long history of racial profiling dissolves into a mealy-mouthed Kit praising the white officer for being "one decent human being in this soulless town."

Second scene: (I think this is from the fourth season) The L girls challenge Papi, the Latina lothario, and her East L.A. crew to a basketball game. The stakes of this game are an apparent territorializing of West Hollywood for the L girls and their ilk--the message being that thuggish p.o.c.s should stay in East L.A.

Maher claimed The L Word's "rubric of visibility" confuses the real ends of the narrative--that the multiple p.o.c. characters The L Word is lauded for are really just a foil for underlying, default whiteness.

He tied The L Word's racial agenda to the exclusionary political agenda of one of its main proponents--the Human Rights Campaign. He criticized the HRC for fighting within the system, not against the system, for avoiding radical politics, and for their policies of superficial inclusion. Last year's decision that trans rights were an expendable part of ENDA certainly comes to mind, but Justin also took on HRC's huge investment in same-sex marriage. He said something to the effect that, the idea is that if we'll play by the rules and get married, then the state will automatically begin treating us equally. In his opinion, this is another inclusion fantasy.

He ended by saying the HRC and The L Word propagate the destructive myth that GLBT organizing/activism starts and ends with the Organization (or Corporation). I took this to mean that mainstream queer media gives the message that our power lies in our ability to fit ourselves into a benign, bourgeoisie formula that will always see (racial, class, gender) variety as the spice of life, and never the main course/cause.

If anything, spending a day amidst queer academics renewed my hope of one defending my dissertation, "Girl-on-Girl Scouting: The Queer Camp World of Little Darlings."