Lesbian Television Personalities - A Queer New Subject

The lesbian offers us new and vital information about what it is to be human. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian Lesbian identity continues to become ever more visible in mainstream American popular culture. Connected in part to "lesbian chic" of the early 1 990s, women who were already famous began to "come out" publicly: from k.d. lang in 1992 to Melissa Etheridge in 1993, to Ellen DeGeneres famously as both a sit-com character and public persona in 1997, the number of women who established themselves as public people first and as lesbian after that, has continued to grow. Actors Portia de Rossi, Cynthia Nixon, and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell are among those whom we have learned just-happen-to-be-lesbian since the turn of this century. Comic Rosie O'Donnell, actor Jodie Foster, financial adviser, best-selling author, and television personality Suze Orman, and star of Bravo 's reality series Work Out Jackie Warner are perhaps better known, more highly exposed celebrities who have come out in recent years. Comic Wanda Sykes came out after Proposition 8 passed in California in November 2008, and actor Kelly McGillis did in early 2009. Rachel Maddow, the youngest of the group, started her career as an out lesbian pundit, first on the radio and currently in a top-rated daily political commentary show on MSNBC. Most of these women are white, conventionally attractive, gender conforming in appearance, and thus fit pretty closely the "mythical norm"1 in US society. Their ongoing popular success is hecause they so easily fit the mythical norm. They are all women who possess enough markers of normative femininity to look and feel familiar enough for a wide variety of women to identify with in different ways- they just-happen-to-beIesbian. They are a new subject in American culture: out lesbians integrated into their respective media, not defined primarily as lesbians. The representation of lesbians and gays in mass media over the past two decades has marked complex and perilous ground. There is nothing straightforward about public representation of this marginalized identity, loaded as it is with so many (mostly negative) conflicting meanings. Questions of address and reception are crucial to the creation of the meaning imade by these representations and are at play all the time. In her book, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America, Suzanna Danuta Walters argues that the binary choice as to whether lesbian and gay presence is or should be framed in terms of either assimilation into the dominant or a politicized challenge to the dominant is "an older question for a time eclipsed." She continues, "The new visibility is not a good thing or a bad thing, although some of it is very good and very bad" (292). The outlines of the arguments regarding the possible costs and benefits of higher visibility within popular culture are as follows: On the one hand it is seen as progress. Increasing visibility of lesbians, especially as the lesbian part of the identity is not definitive, is certainly progressive on one level. These public figures are joined by fictional characters on cable television shows like The L Word, Exes and Ohs, and a number of lesbian stars of reality shows as well. All this visibility has gone a long way to erase much of the shame that accompanied a public- what was once an accusation and now might be better calledacknowledgement of lesbian identity. This is no small cultural change. The creation of a public lesbian presence has untold effects in that lesbian subjectivity becomes a possibility that did not exist in the same way before. If it exists as a publicly acknowledged reality, people have the opportunity to identify with it. The obvious material consequences include the fact that women come out younger, see other lesbians to identify with, and find a more comfortable and roomy place in which to build a self, and community. On the other hand, this visibility can come at the cost of political edge and impact. …