animated transphobia, etc.

[starfrosting]

I just preregistered for a job next semester. Oh man, yea. I would love to be the women's studies research assistant. We'll see. I also applied to work in the post office, because I do so love mail, and categorizing things, so categorizing and distributing mail might actually be a rather chill job. And then I also applied for the positions of philosophy research assistant, art model, and Blegen intern. If/when I get one of these jobs, it will be the first time I've done work that didn't in some way involve food. Hmm. Now I miss Val.

Can I be a huge dork and ask that we talk about the Simpsons episode last night? At first it was great. I was particularly fond of the mayor's pronouncement that, "We support gay money! I mean, gay marriage!" and the wry jabs at the image of upper-middle-class white gays as the most fabulous consumers. It was all going swimmingly, and then Patty brought home her girlfriend. There was this really fucked-up scene where the girlfriend's taking a piss with the door half-open and Marge sees that the seat is up. Then you see the girlfriend shaving her face. Marge, mildly uncomfortable with her sister being a dyke, is freaked out and triumphant. "She's a man!" or something to that effect.

Patty and her golfer girlfriend wrote their own vows, right, and Patty says all this shit about how she respects and loves the fiancée for her honesty, for never deceiving her or hiding anything from her. At this point, I almost lost it. Oh fabulous, the trope of the transsexual as *hiding* their "real" self. Fabulous. And then she was outed in front of the whole wedding congregation---"look at that Adam's apple!" etc--- and Patty flipped shit. The girlfriend had some line about how she had only disguised herself as a woman in order to compete in women's golf, and I'm sorry, but that doesn't seem to excuse what struck me as some really transphobic comments embedded in the story. S/he got down on hir knee and told Patty she still loved her and wanted to get married and Patty was just like, "No, I love women" and like I said, the convenient excuse that the girlfriend's not *really* trans just doesn't excuse the fact that the way it was dealt with was in some very classic, perhaps epistemically-violent ways.

So yeah, after getting really excited about the treatment of the gay marriage brouhaha I ended up pretty fucken upset. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't watch TV.

On a funnier note, when I typed TV I actually typed TB. Oh, consumption.

Comments

Simpsons

[la-nena-ahogada.livejournal.com]

I am in complete agreement with you that "the girlfriend wasn't really trans" is a cop out. Beyond epistemological violence, the scene in the show that saw Veronica outed echoed traditional mob culture. People stood in the marriage chapel (and the bitter humor of the locale is not lost on me) glaring, and shouting at Veronica, "look at that the size of that Adam's apple, etc." The construction of the scene left one to wonder whether or not Veronica could have said anything other than "It's all pretend. I'm a man! What else could i be?" Of course what this scene points out is that trans women are not REAL women. Patty asserts that she can only love a REAL woman, and is applauded by the crowd. Gender and sex are reestablished as inherently dependant on one another, the heteros go home relatively happy that at least only binary-lovin' homos participate in their marriage system, and I am left half bristling, half-crying. (Who knew the Simpsons would ever anger me so....) AAARGGGGG! What would I do, Liv, if I could not watch TV with you....

-Kris