representation

This essay was originally published at SpliceToday: comment there! UPDATE 12/13/10: With gay characters on Tara and Jackie, the premiere of The Real L Word and the new show Shameless, it appears Showtime has re-committed to showing and spotlighting gay characters. UPDATE 3/23/10: On last night’s premieres of Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara, [...]

I’m assisting my advisor, Katherine Sender, on an undergraduate gay media course here at Penn, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of gay representations, particularly on television, for decades the chief battleground for gay media advocates. Right now, gay characters are in abundance, but series focusing on sexual minorities are a dying [...]

V airs its winter finale tonight before resuming episodes in March 2010. If you haven’t seen ABC’s V yet, I’ll spoil it for you: the Vs symbolize President Obama. Countless articles have spelled it out: io9, Chicago Tribune, BreitBart, and Entertainment Weekly, among many others, have already foregrounded the debate. It’s very obvious. In the [...]

I’d originally planned to do reams and reams of reading on this, and an extensive literature review, but I’m so busy writing, curating, filming, editing and researching other things I won’t get to it for another year, and I don’t want to cite some theories and miss others. Eventually I will have to do a [...]

Originally published at Splice Today. My first post about Precious here. Precious has arrived! For anyone following the film world, the push for Precious, at first titled Push, began months ago, in the beginning of the year. It has been a long haul. Some of us are tired. Now it is here and is bound for [...]

In the academy and in the humanities, we’re trained to be skeptics. It’s almost part of the job. When it comes to representation, the idea that what we see in the media is a reflection on the real world, the academy is still way behind the times, something I’ve written about before. Skepticism has turned [...]

I saw Precious Wednesday (it’s accomplished, bound for Oscar greatness), but I’ll hold off on film criticism and instead talk about what I think the film means, and what I think it does for black cinema, a field I’m still learning about, so I would love comments and suggestions. My thrust is simple: Precious is [...]