Television and media has always been heavily criticized for the type of content and characters they use in their plots. Overtime society has evolved with cultural norms and we have seen TV shows with more and more gay prevalent characters. Some examples include: “The Office, “Will & Grace”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and several more. The TV show I will be focusing on more specifically will be “Pretty Little Liars”. One of the main characters Emily is a lesbian and has several significant others throughout various seasons.
In the article “Nothing Queer about Queer television”, it states that “queer represents a resistant to anything that is socially defined as normal, and in that sense queer may exclude some gay and lesbian practices that have a ‘normative perspective’ or may include other experiences that are not explicitly sexual”. There are a lot of things that the TV character Emily does with her girlfriends, that other main characters do with their significant others that are exactly the same. This confuses me because the TV shows tries to bring in diversity by adding a lesbian couple but they prove just the opposite. They prove that homosexuals engage in activities that are that are the same that heterosexuals do. Perhaps, the point of them bringing in a lesbian character as a main role is to do just that, show the audience that just because people have different sexual orientations doesn’t mean they behave differently. An example of this would be in one episode Emily’s friend Hannah takes her boyfriend out to dinner at a restaurant in their town, then Emily asks her for advice on where to go and suggests the same place. When they show both dates happening, they portray them in the same exact way and film it at the same angels as well.
After our discussion in class regarding whiteness and race in characters, Pretty Little Liars also could be an example of this regarding Emily’s character. Throughout the show and seasons Emily has several different girlfriends and some of them are not white. One of the was black, and another was Hispanic. I never really noticed how whiteness plays a large role in most mainstream TV shows. All of Emily’s girlfriends that were not white ended up having shorter relationships with her than the others did. Obviously this could just be a coincidence or the producers could not being doing it purposely, we will never really know.
Janelle says
I’ve seen bits and pieces of Pretty Little Liars before but haven’t really watched a lot. If I were to watch it, it would be with friends who watch it. You bring up and interesting point and I agree. While I haven’t noticed how much whiteness really does play a big role in TV shows, apparently my friends have. Maybe it is a coincidence, or maybe it’s not. I really feel that it is on purpose, I mean we didn’t realize it until further looking into it.
I think it’s great how you mentioned the part of the article about homosexuals and heterosexuals engaging in the same activities. That was the same thought going through my mind as well. It really is important to show these types of things in television shows because people are molded from these characters and actions whether it’s good or not.