September 13, 2016 - 20:40
Thinking on what I wanted to write about for this race journal entry, my first thought was that I would know exactly what to write about if this were a course on gender or on sexuality. I could write thousands of pages on representations (specifically, the lack thereof) of non-binary and trans people in media, and I think about it pretty much every time I watch a movie, catch a TV show, or pay attention to pop culture. At first, I brushed this thought aside, because I knew I needed to focus on race. Then, I realized that this thought has everything to do with race. It speaks to the huge privilege I live with to not know what to write about, to be able to "move on" to other identities in my head of which I am painfully cognizant when engaging with mainstream media. And that's the nature of privilege, isn't it?--I just get to not think about it.
This got me thinking about visible and invisible identities, and the murky space between those two descriptors. When I came out as queer in high school, I became suddenly aware of a deep, 17-year-long subconscious hunger for queer characters in the media I consumed. I devoured shows and movies with gay and lesbian leads (not even distinguishing between the two, as desperate as I was to see any semblance of myself or my "community" on screen). I spent a lot of time feeling a whole lot of anger at the fact that I just didn't see queer characters in most shows or movies, and if I did, it was most often a stereotypically flamboyant gay man, with whom I didn't really identify. Over time, though, I changed my strategy--I decided that any character, in any show, could be queer if I decided that they were. Maybe they just didn't talk about it in the script, but I could tell from the sandals they were wearing in that one scene, or the way they wore their hair in another, that they most certainly liked ladies. (This made it particularly exciting when an actress who had historically played "straight" characters came out as queer, and I could say "I knew it!!!").
And in this reality, I unearth more layers of my white privilege. Because even as a queer person, while I can claim to feel underrepresented in media (and while this is not at all untrue or invalid), I can look at the screen and, for the most part, see my body, my skin, reflected back to me like a mirror. It is a privilege in itself to be able to "decide" that a character secretly holds aspects of my identity--that this can be a fun game that I play. And amidst the pain of searching for my sexuality, it is fun. It seems to speak volumes that it took me so long to think about what to write about for this journal entry at all, and I'm carrying that awareness with me as I approach upcoming entries.