q-sputnik

I sit on my red IKEA sofa, it was the cheapest and is ok for my ‘taste’, but have difficulty self-reflecting my cultural capital while sitting on that sofa since ‘taste’ is not preference according to my aesthetics but my actual habitus. I am forced to admit that I belong in a middle-class because I do a postgraduate degree and therefore it does not matter that today I am unemployed, what is important is the potential income I will get with a postgraduate degree. Having been to an Art&Design College falls rather heavy on my head too, especially with the accompanying stigma of the New Media or Digital Artist which tends to be the scorn of Media Studies theorists. Eventually, it all comes down to experiencing what one critics, can you really talk about photography if you never experimented with a camera? At the same time, is it enough to read the history of cinema and be a film expert? This is the great divide cultivated in educational institutions between theory and practice, the dis-illusio of the intellectual field who is a definite no-no for art students, intellectuals write to cover their lack of talent but your portfolio talks for you, not your degree. For theory students hands-on knowledge or the ‘industry’ are unknown concepts,

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Watching the episodes where the heterosexual women and family audience meet lesbians for the first time, it is hard not to notice that in both series the lesbian/s are middle aged, respectable women. The plot is built around a lie or the covering of the whole truth.

-In the Golden Girls, the character enters the plot to create disturbance, as expected in a sitcom genre, returns to equilibrium when she symbolically and actually leaves the house. While staying there she spends much time with one of the ‘girls’ with whom she shares a lot in common, like the death of their previous partners or the circumstances of their childhood. But the lesbian falls in love whereas the straight woman does not. The terror in her face when the lesbian talks to her about the way she feels is the comic element of the episode, where the audience is supposed to distance themselves from the lesbian by means of laughter. It is the decisive point when the lesbian becomes ‘the other’. Laughter here saves her from identifying with homosexual desire and is also a covered homophobic comment. But the scene does not cut there, we actually see the lesbian lie down on the sofa, a scene that assures us that she is a descent person like the rest of us. This is a moment of guilt, when the ‘live’ audience will go ‘aagh’. Equilibrium will come when the lesbian will in fact find it enough that they can just be friends. She threatens the family home audience no more, in fact she does not even need to leave, she can be family.

-In Kate and Allie the de-escalation starts from the peak of the lesbian couple being the unspeakable to the moral lesson for the whole family that friendship is above all. There is a rhetoric about difference, when Kate and Allie, after it has been exposed that they are not a lesbian couple, claim that family is a flexible notion and the ‘you above all people should know better’. Here the lesbian couple are desperate to be around kids, the one herself deprived of her kids, the other never in need of kids at all-she is the real lesbian after all. Their need to care for children that are not theirs de-eroticises them even more while showing them incomplete. Motherhood is the element that makes a real woman and family. The straight women have a notion of family that includes children, the landlady calls partnership family. The striking difference between their understanding of family makes an issue of what homosexuality connotes:deprivation of the right and joy of reproduction. it all comes down to that.

After all however, the landlady and her friend, the lesbian guest (who has been to college) are above all
like the rest of the heterosexual world, they are nice and tidy, kind and caring, the loyal friends that will be there for you who, as Andy Medhurst explains (in ‘One Queen and His Screen:Lesbian and Gay Television’, 1994), they ‘just happen to be gay’.