The L Word

Introduction: Histories of Representation and Misrepresentation

1 Introduction Histories of Representation and misrepresentation In January 2004, Showtime launched The L Word, the first prime-time commercial television drama to focus on the lives of lesbian and bisexual women. Over the course of six seasons, the program explored the deep bonds that linked the members of an evolving lesbian friendship circle, whose members live in affluent West Hollywood, California, and congregate at a café called the Planet. Given its path-breaking subject matter, The L Word was greeted with an extensive and diverse critical reception, and was reviewed and analyzed in a wide range of media outlets, from newspapers and magazines to radio and television talk shows. Building on this generally positive critical attention, the program quickly developed a large and enthusiastic audience , reigning as Showtime’s most popular show for its first three seasons. The L Word also attracted considerable attention from scholars, who have created an ever-expanding body of articles and books that analyze and interpret the show and its cultural significance. The conversation about the program has been continued online, where an enormous and active fan community has gathered at a broad array of websites to discuss and debate every aspect of the show, to create and share fan art, 2 Introduction videos, and fiction, and to explore what The L Word might tell us about the lives of queer women in contemporary society. If, as Stuart Hall (1992) has argued, popular culture is a central site for the struggle to establish cultural meanings, then The L Word is important because it has had an enormous impact on the conversation about what it means to be a lesbian and on questions of lesbian visibility and representation in a highly mediated and heteronormative world. To understand the power of The L Word’s intervention in our national cultural discourse, it is necessary to begin with cultural history. Like most other minority groups, lesbians have either not been represented in popular culture at all, or they have been represented in stereotypical, dishonest, and demeaning ways that, for lack of a better word, I will characterize as “misrepresentation.” Invisibility and misrepresentation have had profound personal and political consequences for many queer women because they help to sustain and reinforce a culture in which discrimination and inequality are still common. The creators of The L Word were well aware of this history and its effects. As they developed the program, they had to navigate between the legitimate desires of a diverse group for honest and appealing representations of their lives, and the need to attract a large enough mainstream audience to keep the show commercially viable. In other words, the show’s creators understood the expectations and assumptions—shaped by a history of stereotypical representations—that different viewers would bring to the program. In this book, I argue that the program’s creators, led by executive producer Ilene Chaiken, responded to this cultural context by making the question of lesbian representation a central theme throughout The L Word’s six-year run. Indeed, the show is obsessed with representation, and over the course of the series, we see many examples of image making of all sorts, including the production of documentary, art, pornographic, and Hollywood feature films; music videos; television programs; radio 3 Introduction shows; advertising campaigns; websites; podcasts; and works of art like paintings, sculptures, and photographs. In virtually every case, the production process is exposed and demystified, and the myriad ways that lesbians are misrepresented are made explicit. By making visible the process of creating images and by deploying a variety of reflexive strategies, the program offers a sophisticated feminist critique of the history of misrepresentations of lesbians, and encourages viewers to attend critically to what they are watching. At the same time, it offers new modes of storytelling and new ways of seeing to its viewers, thereby rewriting many forms of misrepresentation and providing a compelling alternative vision of lesbian lives and cultures. In order to offer this new vision to a broad audience, however, The L Word had to participate in precisely the Hollywood production system that it criticizes so effectively. It offers a damning account of Hollywood and the people who have power in media industries, and provides a detailed analysis of why it is so difficult to change problematic and biased representations of queer women within the structures of commercial media. At the same time, however, the program confronted...