Lesbian Images in International Popular Culture

Sara E. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317992127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Lesbian images are everywhere these days–cable television, film, popular magazines, advertising, Internet and the news–creating desire in men and women alike, selling commercial products and services, and stirring up controversy on many levels. But do these images truly represent the diverse identities of women-centered women worldwide? This book addresses the limited access to images of diverse and international lesbian identities and experiences, in order to provide the reader with a more complete understanding of what it means to be lesbian in a global context. It investigates how lesbians portray themselves as well as how they are portrayed by others in several areas of popular culture, including television, film, the arts, Internet, advertising and the news. It features articles on U.S. lesbian cartoonists, Canadian viewer perceptions of lesbians on the cable show Queer as Folk, panoramic looks at lesbians' representation in Australian and Spanish television programming, and in-depth explorations of films by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, leading Indian film producers, and independent Chinese-American filmmakers.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Lesbian Weddings and the Revenge of the Clones

JEN BACON

Women’s Studies Program, West Chester University, West Chester, PA

This article explores mainstream images of same-sex marriage, and in particular lesbian weddings, arguing that patterns of representation may have consequences for the ways that the same-sex marriage debate evolves, and for the ways that same-sex marriages are experienced by the couples who choose them. I elaborate on three patterns in images that have proliferated since 1996 and describe the implications for each. I argue that the marketing of same-sex marriage to mainstream audiences has consequences that demand careful analysis, and potentially call for a counter-marketing effort.

The first lesbian wedding that most U.S. citizens attended was the wedding of Carol Willick and Susan Bunch, fictional characters on the hit TV series Friends (“The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” 2002). Given the current tempest in the United States—and around the world—over same-sex marriage, this 1996 fictional wedding is particularly interesting. Before Massachusetts engaged in its three-year battle to obtain marriage rights for gays and lesbians, before the Netherlands, Spain, Canada, Belgium, and South Africa did the same, a lesbian couple was getting married in prime time, and 31.6 million viewers were in attendance. Indeed, it won the ratings war that day (“Here Come the Brides,” 1996). Other television shows have featured same-sex couples, and even same-sex weddings (Roseanne, Northern Exposure, and The Simpsons, for example), but with Friends, I think it’s safe to say that the image went mainstream. Ironically, one of the “jokes” of the episode has a character stating, “Now I’ve seen everything” during the ceremony.

FIGURE 1 Lesbian wedding on Friends.

First, let’s take a look at the happy couple from that 1996 episode of Friends and the image of a lesbian marriage ceremony that is portrayed (Figure 1). They are both wearing wedding gowns, although you cannot see that fully from this image, and the dresses are an off-white color, in a somewhat Victorian style—a mix of both tradition and non-tradition. Both brides have long hair, pinned up, and they both wear hats and hold matching bouquets. They are women who read as stereotypically feminine, although the Susan Willick character (right) is treated, in the show, as more masculine, and the jacket-style wedding dress may be an indication of that status. The two brides stand before a minister—in this case a lesbian minister, played by Candace Gingrich.¹ She begins their ceremony by saying, “Nothing makes God happier than when two people, any two people, come together in love. Friends, family, we’re gathered here today to join Carol and Susan in holy matrimony” (“The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” 2002).

Since that episode aired much of the world has changed. As of this writing, in the summer of 2007, five countries² have extended marriage rights to their gay and lesbian citizens (Barrett, 2006: 133). Denmark, which could perhaps be touted as starting the trend, has provided “registered partnerships” for gay and lesbian couples since 1989, and countries like the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, and the Czech Republic have made civil unions and/or domestic partnerships³ the law of the land (133 and “Gay Marriage,” 2007). In fact, one of the omnipresent images of gay marriage on the Internet is a world map that lives on the Wikipedia site and identifies the current status of laws regarding homosexuality around the globe (“World Homosexuality Laws,” 2007). And while all of that has been happening, dozens of books and scores of articles have been written about same-sex marriage, and thousands of ceremonies have been held by same-sex couples who want to formalize their bonds.

Today, we can easily imagine the lesbian wedding, likely because we have encountered widely available images of such weddings, or because we have attended such weddings firsthand. So what are the images that dominate this verdant terrain? I have identified three trends that I think are worth paying attention to with regard to same-sex marriage, two of them present in the Friends wedding image (Figure 1). My intent here is to explore these patterns of representation and suggest that they may have very real consequences for the ways that the same-sex marriage debate evolves, and even for the ways that same-sex marriages are experienced by the couples who choose them. I will elaborate on the images that have proliferated since 1996 and describe the patterns that have emerged, particularly in the last five years, when same-sex marriage has become a high profile political issue around the globe. I argue that the marketing of same-sex marriage to mainstream audiences has had consequences that are both extraordinary and worrisome.

FORENSIC LESBIANS

The first pattern of images I would like to discuss in this article includes images that frame same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue. Figure 2 shows Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon embracing after their city hall marriage ceremony in San Francisco, surrounded by witnesses and county clerks (One Wedding and a Revolution, 2004). Although there is certainly a romantic effect to the image, the Martin and Lyon image is illustrative of forensic images of same-sex marriage in that similar images of same-sex weddings have been front page news for much of the past five years. Notice that the couple’s embrace happens amid a sea of lawyers, wall plaques, public documents, and the ubiquitous American Flag. As countries like the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada legalized same-sex marriage, headlines in newspapers around the world featured happy couples in courtrooms, or on court house steps, celebrating their now-legal status. These images have been very effective in swaying the populace that this is a civil rights issue, by visually linking the couple’s “special day” to the images of justice that are called to mind by the placement of national flags, towering government buildings, and sweeping classical staircases.

FIGURE 2 Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin.

The pattern that reverberates is the image of the embattled citizen, fighting for her rights in the legal system, often in the court room. Newspapers, and in particular news stories, tend to fall into this pattern more often than not, photographing protest events, courthouse steps, and picketers as they engage in the process of fighting for (or against) the right to marry. When Massachusetts allowed same-sex couples to apply for marriage licenses on May 17, 2004, the Boston Globe featured photos of the “litigants” Susan Shepherd and Marcia Hams as they pressed through the crowd of 10,000 gathered on the steps of City Hall after receiving the document (Weiss and Kocian, 2004). In Madrid, El País ran a multi-page spread on the day after same-sex marriages were legalized in Spain, July 2, 2005, complete with celebrating couples in rainbow colors and activists sporting mass-produced posters reading “Si! Mi libertad guarda la tuya” (“My freedom protects yours”) (“El Matrimonio,” 2005: 32). This is a longstanding image tradition in gay and lesbian politics. Images of court houses and legal proceedings, like those that hit the front pages of newspapers in Europe and the United States, are typical of civil rights battles, whether they involve marriage or not.

Clearly, such images emphasize the legal status of same-sex marriage and link that status to ongoing civil rights battles. Although political imagery like that pictured in Figure 2 does sometimes feature couples holding hands or even kissing, the main emphasis, in images from around the world, seems to be on large crowds celebrating and protesting the decisions made by their countries, states, and cities. The effect of such images is palpable. Crowds demonstrate something that we might think of as a groundswell effect. Regardless of someone’s personal feelings about same-sex marriage, seeing a crowd of 10,000 people gathered to celebrate such unions certainly indicates to them that support for such marriages is not unusual. It seems reasonable to speculate, in fact, that the images are contributing to the change in public opinion, given that the tendency in cover stories has been to photograph masses in support, with a few protestors mingling among them. Mass support for civil unions has become a mainstream image, if not yet a political reality.

LESBIAN COUPLES IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Another pattern that emerges in images of same-sex marriage reflects the phenomenon named by Urvashi Vaid in her recent book, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995). The pattern situates same-sex marriages in analogy to heterosexual marriages to force a comparison, if not an equation. And while the pattern of images I am about to describe holds true for both lesbians and gay men, the images of women are more pervasive, as are lesbian weddings themselves (Chauncey, 2004: 140). The New York Times, for example, folds the announcements for same-sex unions in with its wedding announcements in the Sunday Style section. The Internet abounds with a new spate of wedding and honeymoon planners who cater specifically to the same-sex market.⁴ Indeed, Mariana Valverde points out in her 2006 essay entitled “A New Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Respectable Same-Sex Couple” that the pictures used in the media to announce the legalization of same-sex marriage feature “an array of perfect ‘same-sex’ couples” many of them wearing wedding dresses (157). Valverde goes on to note that it was “very difficult to tell whether the wedding dresses were being worn in straight-up imitation of marriage or in playful parody” (158). Whether or not the intent is parodic, the heteronormative viewer certainly receives such images as a simple equation.

Images that capture same-sex couples in very familiar marital “poses” are key to this pattern. Female couples in wedding gowns and male couples in tuxedos dominate, although images of wedding cakes, wedding rings, and decorated honeymoon vehicles also abound. Like the images from the Friends wedding scene that I describe earlier, such images are much less about a legal battle for rights, and much more about presenting same-sex marriages as the same as the marriages we already know. They emphasize the celebratory and romantic elements of a wedding, or even the commercial components, downplaying the sexual or legal elements that might remind viewers that these couples are not actually identical to the heterosexual couples standing before altars around the world. In representative images from around the world, we find Lindiwe Radebe and Bathini Dambuza posing for the camera to show off their matching rings as they plan to become one of the first lesbian couples to marry in South Africa (“SA Couple Want First Gay Wedding,” 2006), or couples from the United Kingdom waving from their can and streamer-covered honeymoon car (“Gay Wedding Day for 14 Suffolk Couples,” 2005). Lesbian couples framed in front of tiered-white wedding cakes, or church altars, also fit this pattern. The emphasis here, of course, is on happy couples, celebrating their love in much the same way that heterosexual couples would do, and the message is clear: lesbian weddings are mirror images of heterosexual weddings, complete with all of the signs; rings, fanfare, and commitments that we expect to accompany all marriages.

QUEER CLONES/STEPFORD LESBIANS

The final pattern of images of lesbian marriage, and possibly the most interesting, involves a “cloning” effect. Here, in addition to the tropes that compare lesbian weddings to straight ones, we have an overlay of sameness that has the two brides (or two grooms) looking almost identical (Figure 3). In this sense, they are both being compared to heterosexual couples, in that they are posed as a romantic dyad, and also differentiated by the type of dyad that they are. On the one hand, images like these work against the more mainstream argument that gay and lesbian couples are just like heterosexual couples. Clearly, they are not. Heterosexual couples are, in fact, marked by difference. But, and on the other hand, these “cloning” images work along with the impulse toward mainstreaming in that they seem innocuous. Beautiful young women holding hands in white dresses—what could be less threatening than that?⁵ Here Valverde’s (2006) argument that respectable same-sex couples are taking over is apt, to the extent that a sanitized set of queer clones restores gender norms, even as it disrupts the idea of the normal couple.

FIGURE 3 Same-sex marriages on ProCon.org.

Taking Figure 3 as the exemplar, I argue that even lesbian and gay audiences are NOT meant to read the couple on the left as lesbians, although we may well know lesbians who wore tuxedos to their own weddings (Procon.org, 2007). Rather, the images assume a gendered reading that has us placing our gay men in tuxedos, and our lesbians in white wedding gowns, despite any gender trouble⁶ that we might have accustomed ourselves to in previous gay rights battles. And whether the images reflect reality or create it, real lesbians are donning real wedding gowns much more often than some might have imagined in this new era of the same-sex wedding.

As Suzanna Danuta Walters (2006)) has pointed out, such moments of “public visibility” can “aid in the process of liberation” while simultaneously producing a “new kind of invisibility, itself supported by a relentless march toward assimilation” (133). Walters argues that while “there is no direct correlation between desire to marry and desire to assimilate, testimonies and anecdotal evidence suggest that many gays who desire marriage ceremonies are precisely those gays who are most interested in exhibiting their sameness to straight America” (140). But in the pattern that I am describing here, sameness doubles back on itself to create a comparison that is problematic at best. The lesbian couple may well appear to be similar to the straight couple in the sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Looking at Lesbians Internationally: An Introduction
• 1 Lesbian Weddings and the Revenge of the Clones
• 2 “It Feels More Like a Parody”: Canadian Queer as Folk Viewers and the Show They Love to Complain About
• 3 Screening the Dykes of Oz: Lesbian Representation on Australian Television
• 4 We Are Family? Spanish Law and Lesbian Normalization in Hospital Central
• 5 Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Dark Habits: Lesbian “Families” in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar
• 6 Articulating “Indianness”: Woman-Centered Desire and the Parameters for Nationalism
• 7 Looking for Asian Butch-Dykes: Exploring Filmic Representations of East Asian Butch-Dykes in Donna Lee’s Enter the Mullet
• 8 Through the Postcolonial Eyes: Images of Gender and Female Sexuality in Contemporary South Africa
• 9 Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics
• 10 “Them Ol’ Nasty Lesbians”—Queer Memory, Place, and Rural Formations of Lesbian
• 11 Fad Lesbianism: Exposing Media’s Posing
• Index