cultural appropriation
so as much as the stagegay/bandom debate (*cough*kerfluffle*cough*) raised as much ire and interest in me as a slice of unbuttered toast, I really enjoyed reading this post on appropriation of "the gay lifestyle" in the media. it's good food for thought on a subject that my mind has been circling distantly for some time now. especially since I
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i just got home and so am a little bit mashed, but, yeah. the bandom posts were fascinating. i sent that one that you linked and another one to one of my teachers. haha.
i think i'd go with (or, i do go with) the idea that stuff like will and grace is a compromise. it sucks, but the reality is that things like that are kind of necessary. i always forget this is so, until i see some stupid program on tv that reminds me how isolated and willfully ignorant a large percentage of the american population can be. 15 years ago our cultural climate would have been in no way ready for something as explicit as queer as folk.
it's lame, but it's true. and it sucks that the ignorant people are the ones who get coddled, but the upshot, imo, is that these compromises do advance equal rights, and as long as no one is ready to rest on their laurels with the half-measures, but everyone keeps pushing toward true civil rights, then eventually the compromises will add up. you know?
but this is something we argue about in class all the time. the neutered gay, the invisible minorities, media representation, and the sanitization of queers from within the community (i.e., HRC)
i don't think that this argument is solvable, but it's still necessary to have.
in so far as the 'gay lifestyle'... man. i'll come back to that one some other time. :) there's a lot there.
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I guess that's the conclusion I'd go with too. funny thing is, I'm fairly willing to accept that kind of baby-step for media representation, but the same logic can be applied to civil unions, and I am like...viscerally against that compromise, because I think it's so fucking homophobic. and stupid. it makes my head spin off my body. sanctity of marriage, my asscrack.
there are plenty of arguments like that. another one being, wth do we do in Iraq at this point. though there, the fact that there *is* no good solution is...problematic. heh.
in so far as the 'gay lifestyle'... man. i'll come back to that one some other time. :) there's a lot there.
exactly.
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anyway, they were all, "i don't know about marriage though. it should be for a man and a woman. they can have civil unions."
and i kinda blew up at them. i did the 'water fountain speech' as i call it now. separate but equal, you know, that whole thing. i said that in twenty years most people are going to be as embarrassed about their stance on this issue as they are now about where they stood on lunch counters and bus segregation. etc.
poor things, their eyes kind of bugged out of their heads a little. haha, it was a long, awkward car ride.
so yeah. they do kinda seem to be different things, and i wonder if that's appropriate or not.
and maybe it's because i'm a liberal or a pragmatist or something, that i agree that there need to be small victiories that add up in most issues. like Iraq as well. Or maybe it's just empathy. if i can imagine what it must be like for the average person in Iraq right now, and i can imagine that the US leaving all at once would be as much of a catastrophe as the army showing up in the first place, then i think that's why small steps are a good thing.
i think the right wing disagrees with half measures (they want no measures usually) and it's interesting that some radical parts of the left have a similar ideology. i think that's what's fracturing the left at the moment.
uh. and here i just went on a ramble, huh? ;) oops.
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