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Gender
Expression and The Art of Preserving Women in Political
Entertainment
Kyle
Ashby
Florida
Atlantic University
(Estados
Unidos)
While MTF
transgendered individuals and minority women’s issues
are increasingly represented in the popular media, this
very representation nevertheless further marginalizes and
alienates certain women’s communities by playing into
hetero- and homo-normative notions of gender expression
and sexual desire. Such discrimination is the result
of socially determined attributes labeled as “media
acceptable”: ideas premeditated and implemented by
heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, and members of the GLBTQ
communities attempting to minimize gender and sexually
“queer” attributes so as not to compromise
socio-political leverage through positive representation.
This determination of who minimizes these transgender and
female queer voices to appear more credible in a
socio-political environment becomes important to activists
and scholars working in mainstream organizations while
trying to integrate more perspectives of difference.
To this
point, the use of the word “queer” to suggest
diversity and similar intentions rather than discrete
categories through the GLBTQ [etc…] acronym meets with
harsh criticism from those minority groups (women, gays,
lesbians, and transgenders) working in the media and
politics. Two continuing media phenomenon, “Nip/Tuck”
on the FX network and the play “The Vagina Monologues”
by Eve Ensler, create entertaining political statements
about transgender individuals and women, respectively.
Though hailed as spectacular in their representation and
clearly radical in their intent by mainstream media, few
critiques about the accuracy or consequence of the
specific representation occurs among the communities
represented. Both portrayals fail to re-invent or
represent complex or accurate portrayals of their
respective gender performance/ viewed object choice/minority
issue. Indeed, the representation of Famke Jannsen’s
transgender character relies heavily on gay identity
issues and not gender complexities, making the differences
between the two very general groups of Gay and Transgender
more difficult for an audience to decipher. Phyllis
Randolph Frye ESQ, criticizes this grouping together of
transgenders and gays/lesbians in politics and the media,
writing:
…the
question turns on its head the common misperception that
transgender are kind of a hang-on or add-on group to the [GLB]
civil rights movement and, but for society lumping us all
together as queer, there would be nothing in common. (Frye,
1998)
In the
Vagina Monologues, Ensler refuses to concede creative
control of representation to grassroots women. Working
against Ensler’s admirable fund-raising efforts are her
ideas of women that rely far too heavily on biological
determinism and heterosexual ideas of femininity and
gender difference. It seems obvious given the Intersex and
Disabled Women’s communities active criticism of her
play that change is necessary to ensure different and
legitimate perspectives on the body politic, specifically
problematizing the equation that woman=vagina is innately
tied to empowerment.
Ignored
by mainstream media, the lack of complex and constantly
evolving representation of all types of women cause many
in the transgender, disabled, and encompassing queer
category not to recognize the need to criticize the
mainstream applications of their representation since many
of these initiatives speak about issues that concern but
do not directly represent these women. Furthermore,
minimal internal criticism of Queer politics in relation
to mainstream initiatives impairs the success of accepting
minority women through community education.
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