Despite the rise in visible queer characters on popular television shows, working-class queer women, situated as they are at the borders of intersecting identities, have found themselves doubly dispossessed by cultural representations that too often reduce the LGBTQ community to wealthy white gay men and the working class to white men who are not only heterosexual but also violently homophobic. The resurgence of grassroots activism in recent years, epitomized by Black Lives Matter and a vocal backlash against corporatized Pride parades, has brought about demands for a recognition of a multiplicity of queer identities—the classed, gendered, and raced bodies regularly erased in the name of neoliberal political gain. With the backdrop of this changing political climate, I turn to media representation of working-class queer women, close-reading scenes featuring working-class butch lesbians from The L Word, Orange Is the New Black, and East Los High to analyze the shift in visibility politics that has occurred over the past two decades. I argue that the increased acceptance of (certain) LGBTQ rights and the ongoing discussion about class and race in America has allowed for a more nuanced depiction of queer life. I consider this evolution through the framework of butch identity, which has been dismissed as outdated by scholars like Lillian Faderman yet remains significant in working-class lesbian communities. Alongside analysis of the small number of existing characters, I consider the stakes of working-class lesbians’ erasure through the paradigms presented by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (Dispossession), Dorothy Allison (Skin), and José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications). Ultimately I argue that Muñoz’s paradigm provides a possible solution to the problem of dispossession without falling into the utopian rhetoric of groups like Queer Nation that inadvertently privileges those who enjoy the class, race, and gender privileges to challenge the existing order.
About the presenterEmily Coccia
Emily Coccia works at The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress where she organizes the nomination and selection process for the Kluge Prize, a $1 million award for achievement in the study of humanity. She writes on topics ranging from nineteenth-century American literature to contemporary media, often considering these topics through the lenses of queer, feminist, and working-class studies. She completed her undergraduate and graduate work in English at Georgetown University.