Gender101@Bowdoin

Gender101@Bowdoin: Gender Identity and LGBT Characters on TV

In reading this article about the decision to downplay the the sexual relationship between the two female characters in The Color Purple, I was reminded of an essay that I wrote about the depiction of LGBTQ characters in the media, especially on television. Even today, more than twenty-five years since The Color Purple was produced, LGBTQ characters and their sexual relationships are rarely depicted in mainstream media such as film and television. When LGBTQ characters are depicted, often they are shown as platonic (certainly it is unusual to see a homosexual encounter depicted as graphically as heterosexual encounters routinely are). This echoes the decision to depict the relationship between the two female characters in The Color Purple in a relatively non-sexual way.

Even when LGBTQ characters are depicted in mainstream media, this depiction is gendered. In mainstream media, lesbians and gender non-conforming characters remain a minority within the LGBTQ minority itself. GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) reports annually on the quantity and quality of LGBTQ depictions on television. I have posted several graphs to Gender101@Bowdoin from their 2010-2011 report that demonstrate the gendered aspect of television depictions (LGBTQ or not)

gws101-2011:

One thing we didn’t discuss in our presentation on The Color Purple is the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug. We decided to leave this out due to time-constraints and the fact that the film barely even touches on their relationship. The movie diminishes this relationship to a single…