Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Teenage Lesbians in the Media

Our topic was teenage lesbian representation in the media. For this project we decided to watch various tv shows and movies. Melissa watched Buffy the Vampire, Pretty Little Liars, Degrassi and GLEE relevant episodes and I watched Girl Interrupted, Wild Things and Cruel Intentions. After watching the movies I came to the conclusion that the lesbian scenes in the movies were initiated or due to a white male. Because of this reason we are choosing to link our media to Learning about Good Girls and SCWAMP.



When using the SCWAMP ideological theory I learned that even though they are exhibiting ‘lesbian’ experiences, they is a straight white male behind it. In Wild Things the white male able-body character directs the girls to kiss each other. While in Cruel Intentions a white girl is having another white girl kiss her, the reason is for her to learn how to kiss a man. So even though we attempted to find lesbian representation, it was more like bisexual or male driven fantasy representations. This brings me to Learning about Good Girls. They discuss male aggression and female responsibility. Though there are no rapes in the scenes I have selected, like the examples they use for the article – Men are the aggressors whether directly or indirectly and the women are responsible to respond sexually to these men. It’s the heterosexual expectation with a lesbian/bi-sexual road. What I learned via these movies is that lesbian representation isn’t real. It’s a straight, white, property owning male’s story.



An interesting observation I also made from the movie Wild Things, which is not shown in my selected clips, proves and backs up Tolman and Higgins. In the end of the movie one comes to find out that one of the girls who was involved in the threesome scene, who was shown as the troubled youth with a reputation outsmarts all the main characters in the film. In the end they are all dead due to her careful planning and she stays with millions of dollars. This conclusion demonstrates how bad behavior is rewarded and that bad girls have power.

2 comments:

  1. Great job! It really does seem like the bad girls have power in these films and get the attention.

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  2. Very reinforcing point that "women are responsible to respond sexually...". Thought provoking presentation! Mary

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