A lot gets said these days about “representation” in popular media, by which people mean that it’s a good thing for children or adolescents to see people like themselves among their heroes in TV or movies. Usually, this is used to mean obvious characteristics like gender, skin color, or disability, and sometimes less-obvious traits like queerness. But for me, none of those traits meant anything if the characters displaying them were law-obeying, apartment-dwelling, boring-job-having authoritarian squares of the type television has always been infested with, and whose lives mine was never, ever going to resemble even if the character could’ve been my doppelganger in every superficial “representative” way. By 1980 I couldn’t find a single network TV program which interested me in any way, and even before that the characters who interested me most were always outsiders, weirdos, and outlaws such as vigilantes, monster-hunters, and fugitives, or else characters who had figured out how to fit in while still doing things in their own idiosyncratic fashion. Anyone more perceptive than I was at the time could probably have figured out that I was going to end up living outside of the law and at odds with the Establishment, so it’s no surprise that one of my favorite shows since my mid-teens has followed the adventures of an eccentric, anti-authoritarian outlaw who stole a spacetime ship from his people and proceeded to wander about the universe, following his conscience rather than some set of arbitrary rules, and teaming up with a long succession of other misfits to ruin the schemes of tyrants, bureaucrats, psychopaths and other violent busybodies while freely associating with weirdos and freethinkers who rarely get along with their local “authorities”. Yes, representation is important, and never more so than when the type being represented is those who refuse to allow themselves to be sorted into herds and driven to build up power for those who would rule others.
Representation
July 26, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
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This is why I don’t have a TV. The “mainstream” media exist to define a “mainstream” in authoritarian ways. These days that means “woke” ways.
Some always timely advice from the late John Prine:
Speaking of cancel culture, PayPal is now starting to purge “extremists” as in anyone who leans Trump-ward. Any chance you might accept subs on SubscribeStar or some other site that isn’t PayPal?
I’m not concerned with how money gets to me, as long as it does. But I can’t set up separate accounts on every single site out there, all of whom reserve the “right” to cancel accounts and steal the funds in them at will. The easiest way for anyone to send me money is via Zelle, which has a recurring bill function, and all I need to provide is my routing & account #.
Interesting, at least in the psychological aspect. I never did get the ”representational” issue, not because I was represented, Im not American so none of the people on my TV; Americans, Canadians, or English could ever be me. I just never saw myself in their places. I guess it matters how one consumes fiction, from first person view or just watching the characters. I was never connected to any fictional character as them being me or like me, only as a character in their own stories I got to watch in 3rd person view. I believe this a divided issue, I saw a statistic once where half of the people playing games could only see themselves as the characters and couldn’t or didn’t want to do things they wouldn’t in real life, which is strange to me, I guess they also saw themselves as pacman or an Italian plumber? really odd that so many have issues separating fictional characters from themselves or separating fiction in general.