The L Word

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

The L Word

MARGARET T. McFADDEN

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

18 17 16 15 14      5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-8143-3824-7 (paperback: alk. paper);

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952397

ISBN 978-0-8143-3825-4 (ebook)

For Suzanne

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Histories of Representation and Misrepresentation

1. The Problem of Representation

2. The L Word’s Reflexivity

3. The L Word’s Complicitous Critique of Hollywood

4. Genre: Soap-drama and Politics

5. Lesbian Cultures and Communities

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In some ways, this book began when my dear friend and colleague Daniel Contreras said, in his inimitable way, Madge, if you don’t write that book, someone else will! Right he was, and I am grateful to him for his wisdom and his wonderful humor. Many other friends and colleagues contributed enormously to the project: by reading drafts, asking important questions, and helping me to sharpen my thinking and writing. I thank Chandra Bhimull, Sharon Corwin, Emma Garcia, Ben Lisle, Carleen Mandolfo, Katherine Stubbs, and Steve Wurtzler for their tremendous generosity, warm friendship, and massive brainpower. Special thanks are due to Lisa Arellano, whose brilliant suggestions are all over this book.

I am also very grateful to my generous and patient editor Kristina Stonehill, who has been most supportive throughout the process; to the series editors, Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski; and to the anonymous readers for the press, all of whom offered many helpful and insightful suggestions that have measurably improved the book. The expert members of the production team at Wayne State University Press, including Robin DuBlanc, Kristin Harpster, and Maya Whelan, were also a pleasure to work with and I thank them for their help.

Great thanks are also due to the wonderful people who make Colby College such a stimulating and fun place to work. My colleagues in American studies and integrated studies, including Cedric Bryant, Sarah Keller, Benjamin Lisle, Laura Saltz, and Robert Weisbrot, are splendid teachers and scholars and great people; I feel so fortunate to have landed among them. Two Colby student researchers also contributed enormously to this project. The very talented Noah Balazs did research on feminist and queer artists and taught me a lot about the first season of The L Word. Later, the brilliant Nicole Sintetos worked with me for four years and did so much, in so many ways, to make this book possible, and she did it while excelling academically and leading important efforts to make Colby a better place. I am very grateful to them both. I must also thank the delightful students in AM 275, the January term course on The L Word, for their very hard work, lively and intelligent conversations, cheering solidarity, and, of course, for making boob cupcakes with multiracial icing for our concluding Heckle the sixth season party!

I am particularly grateful for the sustaining solidarity and deep friendship of the members of Colby’s Interdisciplinary Feminist Council: Catherine Besteman, Lynne Conner, Jill Gordon, Mary Beth Mills, Andrea Tilden, and Ankeney Weitz. Special thanks to Lynne for our book-finishing pact and the many wonderful conversations it led us to. I am fortunate indeed to have such remarkable and inspiring women as my dear friends and comrades.

Closer to home, I thank Tom Renckens and Sarah Fagg for the great gift of their friendship and for the many delightful meals and outings we have shared over the years. I am in awe of their matchless generosity and kindness and so grateful for their love. Many a tough writing day has been saved by the pleasure and stimulation of their company. I also thank my wonderful sisters, Moira McFadden Lanyi and Nancy McFadden Wadin, for their morale-boosting faith in me and for their constant love and support.

But my greatest debt is to my partner, Suzanne Cusick, whose brilliance, wit, integrity, and courage inspire me every day. Her remarkable love and care have made my life a joy for more than thirty years, and for this I am more grateful than I can possibly express. When I think of our life together, a line of Ira Gershwin’s comes to mind: Who could ask for anything more?

Introduction

Histories of Representation and Misrepresentation

In January 2004, Showtime launched The L Word, the first prime-time commercial television drama to focus on the lives of lesbian and bisexual women. Over the course of six seasons, the program explored the deep bonds that linked the members of an evolving lesbian friendship circle, whose members live in affluent West Hollywood, California, and congregate at a café called the Planet.

Given its path-breaking subject matter, The L Word was greeted with an extensive and diverse critical reception, and was reviewed and analyzed in a wide range of media outlets, from newspapers and magazines to radio and television talk shows. Building on this generally positive critical attention, the program quickly developed a large and enthusiastic audience, reigning as Showtime’s most popular show for its first three seasons. The L Word also attracted considerable attention from scholars, who have created an ever-expanding body of articles and books that analyze and interpret the show and its cultural significance. The conversation about the program has been continued online, where an enormous and active fan community has gathered at a broad array of websites to discuss and debate every aspect of the show, to create and share fan art, videos, and fiction, and to explore what The L Word might tell us about the lives of queer women in contemporary society. If, as Stuart Hall (1992) has argued, popular culture is a central site for the struggle to establish cultural meanings, then The L Word is important because it has had an enormous impact on the conversation about what it means to be a lesbian and on questions of lesbian visibility and representation in a highly mediated and heteronormative world.

To understand the power of The L Word’s intervention in our national cultural discourse, it is necessary to begin with cultural history. Like most other minority groups, lesbians have either not been represented in popular culture at all, or they have been represented in stereotypical, dishonest, and demeaning ways that, for lack of a better word, I will characterize as misrepresentation. Invisibility and misrepresentation have had profound personal and political consequences for many queer women because they help to sustain and reinforce a culture in which discrimination and inequality are still common. The creators of The L Word were well aware of this history and its effects. As they developed the program, they had to navigate between the legitimate desires of a diverse group for honest and appealing representations of their lives, and the need to attract a large enough mainstream audience to keep the show commercially viable. In other words, the show’s creators understood the expectations and assumptions—shaped by a history of stereotypical representations—that different viewers would bring to the program.

In this book, I argue that the program’s creators, led by executive producer Ilene Chaiken, responded to this cultural context by making the question of lesbian representation a central theme throughout The L Word’s six-year run. Indeed, the show is obsessed with representation, and over the course of the series, we see many examples of image making of all sorts, including the production of documentary, art, pornographic, and Hollywood feature films; music videos; television programs; radio shows; advertising campaigns; websites; podcasts; and works of art like paintings, sculptures, and photographs. In virtually every case, the production process is exposed and demystified, and the myriad ways that lesbians are misrepresented are made explicit. By making visible the process of creating images and by deploying a variety of reflexive strategies, the program offers a sophisticated feminist critique of the history of misrepresentations of lesbians, and encourages viewers to attend critically to what they are watching. At the same time, it offers new modes of storytelling and new ways of seeing to its viewers, thereby rewriting many forms of misrepresentation and providing a compelling alternative vision of lesbian lives and cultures.

In order to offer this new vision to a broad audience, however, The L Word had to participate in precisely the Hollywood production system that it criticizes so effectively. It offers a damning account of Hollywood and the people who have power in media industries, and provides a detailed analysis of why it is so difficult to change problematic and biased representations of queer women within the structures of commercial media. At the same time, however, the program confronted its own complicity with the very structures that made it possible, and acknowledged the compromises with Hollywood conventions that the creators had to make to get and keep the show on the air.

The writers accomplished this important cultural work within the familiar genre of a soapy serial drama. This conventional and accessible frame allowed the show to present a feminist vision of a lesbian community, one in which love and friendship between women is central, and in which characters participate in a rich cultural life that is structured by its own values, ideologies, and ethics. The L Word is unapologetically lesbian centered, unafraid to explore issues of sexuality and unconcerned with presenting positive images of lesbians to a mainstream audience. The program also uses the conventions of serial drama to present a detailed account of the ways that sexism and homophobia affect the lives of queer women. Numerous story arcs make visible how these forms of discrimination operate, and these narratives solicit the audience’s empathy for the victims and its anger at the injustices. The show thus presents a powerful moral argument against the widespread sexism and antigay prejudice in mainstream society. I argue that The L Word appeals most to audiences when it gets these aspects of the affective experience of lesbian cultures right.

The creators of The L Word knew that queer women, so long made invisible in popular culture, were desperate for visibility and for images of their lives. So they made the question of lesbian representation a key theme of their show, knowing that the choices they made about how to represent their characters would generate a lively debate among their viewers. Indeed, the audience response to the show has been vigorous and contentious, as fans (and detractors) have created an enormous community in which participants struggle to establish their varied and competing interpretations of the show and, by extension, their different conceptions of what constitutes lesbian identity or the lesbian community. Along the way, however, The L Word gave many viewers images of themselves that were—however Hollywoodized—affirming, consoling, inspiring, and empowering. They loved it, even as they worried (a lot) about what it all meant.

Engaging the Debate

As the first show on a mainstream network to represent a lesbian community, The L Word was initially regarded with considerable suspicion and skepticism by viewers familiar with the commercial media’s history of misrepresenting queer women. These critics had good reason to fear that in order to attract a broad mainstream audience that included men, the program would offer stereotypical and exploitative depictions of lesbian characters. It makes sense that viewers looking at a cast that was so conventionally beautiful, gender normative, thin, and expensively attired would worry that these lipstick lesbians were characterized in ways designed to appeal more to straight men than to lesbian viewers. And these viewers’ fears that lesbian sexuality would be represented in an exploitative and pornographic way to appeal to those same men were also quite reasonable (McCroy 2003; Stanley 2004).

Other critics argued that the cast was so unrepresentative of the gender, racial, and class diversity of the lesbian world as to be a terrible misrepresentation itself. The absence of the spectrum of lesbian gender identities, including forms of female masculinity, seemed to erase a large part of the community and promote a very normative vision that was arguably designed to appeal to heterosexual viewers (Moore and Schilt 2006). The exploration of one character’s biracial identity was appreciated by many viewers, but the absence of a substantial number of characters of color also struck many as problematically unrepresentative of the community (Warn 2006). When more characters of color were added to the cast, critics also expressed legitimate concern about the ways that they embodied familiar racial stereotypes (Schwartz 2006; Lo 2006b; Martin 2007). And the show’s setting in an affluent community meant that the characters’ upscale and glamorous lifestyles seemed quite far from the realities of most queer women’s lives. If representation helps to shape our perceptions of reality, then The L Word’s very limited portrayal of lesbian women risked just replacing