![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Because they make my points waaaay better than I do.
From "The Passion of Mr. Gaeta": (Spoilers at the link for the end of Battlestar Galactica!)
Popular media has consented to allowing queer characters to exist, but only if their sexuality never has to be seen as equivalent to the hetero characters' relationships. If we are quiet and closeted, in other words, we are just fine. If you are a pushy queer, like that bossy Cain woman, expect the worst.
This is a pretty half-assed approach to queer liberation. Covert representations of queer characters are better than no representation at all, I suppose. The problem with such “open secrets,” though, is that they reenforce the closet more than they tear it down. To find out about these queer characters’ sexualities, one has to do more sleuthing than Angela Lansbury. Queer sexuality becomes information only for those “in the know.” Keeping that information out of the canonical representations implicitly upholds the notion that queer sexuality is something that needs to be guarded against lest that it scare the horses or offend the general public. Eve Sedgewick reminded us many years ago that closetedness is a performance “by the speech act of silence.” Well, BSG’s silence around queer Gaeta and Hoshi’s sexuality was deafening. Apparently in space, nobody hears you come out.
Remember: silence is a commentary, too. This sort of blinders-on thinking is what caused that RaceFAIL nonsense to implode. (Or so I gather--jesus christ I'm not commenting on that I never said anything PLEASE DON'T HURT ME) Basically, you're responsible for what your work puts out into the ether, whether you intended it or not. Your control over the interpretation ends with the first person who sees it who didn't help make it. And it's a given that one of those people who sees it--be he/she the first or fifty-millionth--is going to have issues with it. Picking fights with groups that aren't just the oddballs screaming into the internet but are, say, 10% (gay) or 50% (female) or roughly 80% (not white) of the world's population by closeting, hampering or marginalizing them, respectively, is just Not A Good Idea. It's also hurtful and maddening to counter since we're still at this "But we made Dumbledore gay!" (see link for why that's bullshit) level of "progressivism" vis a vis minority groups.
From "The Passion of Mr. Gaeta": (Spoilers at the link for the end of Battlestar Galactica!)
Popular media has consented to allowing queer characters to exist, but only if their sexuality never has to be seen as equivalent to the hetero characters' relationships. If we are quiet and closeted, in other words, we are just fine. If you are a pushy queer, like that bossy Cain woman, expect the worst.
This is a pretty half-assed approach to queer liberation. Covert representations of queer characters are better than no representation at all, I suppose. The problem with such “open secrets,” though, is that they reenforce the closet more than they tear it down. To find out about these queer characters’ sexualities, one has to do more sleuthing than Angela Lansbury. Queer sexuality becomes information only for those “in the know.” Keeping that information out of the canonical representations implicitly upholds the notion that queer sexuality is something that needs to be guarded against lest that it scare the horses or offend the general public. Eve Sedgewick reminded us many years ago that closetedness is a performance “by the speech act of silence.” Well, BSG’s silence around queer Gaeta and Hoshi’s sexuality was deafening. Apparently in space, nobody hears you come out.
Remember: silence is a commentary, too. This sort of blinders-on thinking is what caused that RaceFAIL nonsense to implode. (Or so I gather--jesus christ I'm not commenting on that I never said anything PLEASE DON'T HURT ME) Basically, you're responsible for what your work puts out into the ether, whether you intended it or not. Your control over the interpretation ends with the first person who sees it who didn't help make it. And it's a given that one of those people who sees it--be he/she the first or fifty-millionth--is going to have issues with it. Picking fights with groups that aren't just the oddballs screaming into the internet but are, say, 10% (gay) or 50% (female) or roughly 80% (not white) of the world's population by closeting, hampering or marginalizing them, respectively, is just Not A Good Idea. It's also hurtful and maddening to counter since we're still at this "But we made Dumbledore gay!" (see link for why that's bullshit) level of "progressivism" vis a vis minority groups.
