yes you’re allowed to like problematic things but the majority of white wlw fandom migrating to sanvers is one example of us as white wlw needing to do better
I have read your post at least 5 times I still don’t get what you are trying to say.
I’m talking about white fans ignoring latinx fans concerns that the role of maggie is white washed (floriana is italian not latina as advertised), I’m talking about 1000s of white fans supporting SG and nearly none supporting shows with black wlw like queen sugar, I’m talking about white SG fans ignoring black fans discussing the racism inherent in sidelining james as a love interest without explanation after a season of buildup, I’m talking about praising the representation of a blindingly white show that has only two MOC and no major WOC. We need to do better than uncritically jumping on every show that has two thin, young, attractive, white women kiss no matter how racist the show is. And I’m not saying people are inherently wrong for liking sanvers or watching SG, but too many fans are remaining uncritical and responding to latinx fans discussing why the white washing is awful with “anyway i love floriana lima” or even arguing italian people are latinx or poc.
I just hit reblog so hard it could have cracked a key. Of course, we are starved for wlw representation and will flock to any show where it appears (and usually be met with immanent death), but there’s more going on in these shows (and often that actually TELLS us they’re immanently going to fuck up wlw storylines, but we miss it). Right now, the show is trying to nab progressive points based mainly on fake stuff. What could be whiter than that?
I had not even recognized Maggie’s character as white-washed, because I bought that she was latinx like a jackass without looking it up. (I’d have found that if I had tried to find out whether she was a wlw in real life, but I didn’t even have the will to look, it was so unlikely). That’s classic white racism. What was obvious still was that instead of Maggie’s presence bringing in other queer, latinx, and poc friends, she brought in more aliens who are symbolic parallels for marginalized people. But only humanoid aliens centered at the forefront are even genuinely humanized in the show. I thought about her being supplanted from her own community and into the white world of the show even just within the fake world of the narrative.
They’re also literally trying to play Mon-El as a character whose people abstractly suffered from Kara’s people’s prejudices and the underdog as Kara’s love interest, because apparently on her planet, there was a prejudice against men who happen to be basically the equivalent of earth’s frat boys. He is really a Ken doll to replace Jimmy, who I guess was supposed to be read as a “bad match” for Kara. There’s a lot of racist slight of hand, and it’s frankly not all that slight.
It’s not that folks shouldn’t care this much about wlw representations when they’re white or even when they’re subtext. That’s where people’s minds go when they read stuff like this. Like, please, ship the hell out of Supercat and Supercorp. It is that a lack of intersectional awareness that creates a lopsided critique of these shows severely weakens our capacity for solidarity and hope to demand genuine change in cultural representation in our lifetimes. That’s what we want, right? To disrupt hegemony and existing power relationships through media representation? Right? So that people generally erased and demeaned can see themselves reflected and honored in stories? And you can’t disrupt one thread of hegemony and ignore all the others. The systems of power are interwoven, so the solutions have to be interwoven, as well.
Read^^^^
The Doctor Is Out 