TV Tuesday: Being Seen

[yourlibrarian]

What does representation in television mean to you? Do you find representation important? When did you feel represented in a TV show?

Comments

[tinny]

Weirdly, the only time I ever went *wow, my people* at a tv screen was this:

Hannah Gadsby's Gender Agenda on Netflix.

And not even because I'm queer (my friends call me queer-adjacent, I guess I'm an ally), but simply because so many of the comedians there are butch women, and seeing a group of them backstage just made something open up in my heart. I felt like I belonged.

There's often one token person on tv who looks like me, but more often than not, they're the comic relief, or maybe they're the tech specialist (implying "not really a woman", which hits twice as hard), or maybe the lone super hero who everyone admires but nobody wants to be. Women who look like me are few and far between.

Do I find that important? Before last year, I didn't realize that I wanted a different representation than the one I was getting. There are good female characters everywhere these days, you don't have to look very hard. But apparently that hadn't been all I was craving. Huh.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, it's a good point about how having a character on screen is only half the problem, the other is what they get to do and what happens to them.

Glad you had that moment of recognition!