Having it all ways: The tourist, the traveler, and the local in The L Word

Cinema Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 3-23

  Moore, Candace ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950086369     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2007.0045     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. Showtime Press Release, "Showtime Renews Critically-Acclaimed Series The L Word for Second Season," January 29, 2004
2. The cable show's creator, Ilene Chaiken, called L.A.'s lesbian community "anthropologically specific" in an April 5, 2004, interview with PlanetOut.com. Beth Callaghan and Jenny Stewart, "Ilene Chaiken Talks," PlanetOut.com, April 5, 2004 (http://www.planetout.com/ entertainment/interview.html?sernum=693&navpath=/ entertainment/lword)
3. Showtime's Entertainment President Robert Greenblatt told the New York Times: "we want people everywhere to buy it [The L Word]." Alison Glock, "She Likes to Watch," The New York Times, February 6, 2005, 26
4. The "invisibility" of lesbianism has been theorized by multiple thinkers, most famously Adrienne Rich in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980): 631-60
5. Patricia White examines the thematization of the "ghostly" lesbian figure in her book on code-era instances of lesbian representablity, UnInvited, in a chapter aptly entitled "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter." UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
6. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 106
7. Ellen Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003)
8. The touristic gaze is a useful model for TV in general. The television set, traditionally nested in the domestic sphere, is conceived of as a "window" to a bigger world, as Lynn Spigel has pointed out. Spigel argues that "television - at its most ideal - promised to bring to audiences not merely an illusion of reality as in the cinema, but a sense of 'being there,' a kind of hyper-realism." Lynn Spigel, "Installing the Television Set," in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 7, 14. Television's hyper-real portrayal of other people and other places remains in ever-present flow, to be accessed by the viewers at their leisure, yet what is depicted remains comfortably remote in real space - allowing, for instance, millions of Americans to watch the burning buildings of the Rodney King riots from the comfort of their intact living rooms. Television provides the ultimate in armchair travel. Televisual tourism offers the very best insurance policy. Allowing a gaze without a look back, as with cinema, television offers the refuge of partaking in this gaze within the privacy of one's own home, putting the control of the projectionist and the theater owner into the hands of the remote control user. With this agency, the TV viewer can, within a single sitting, "travel" channels as faraway locales, offering a vacation package chock full of choices. Since the emergence of television, the technology has offered home viewers "out of body" experiences. Travelogues from the late forties such as Window on the World encouraged new TV consumers to stay home and travel, exploring foreign environments without breaking a sweat or enrolling in a single language class. Such shows, the forerunners of televisual tourism, banked on an American schizophrenia - the dual urge to conquer the "open frontier" and to hunker down, stay homebound
9. Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys, 3
10. See Abroad: British Traveling between the Wars, ed. Paul Fussell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)
11. or Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. (1961; New York: Atheneum, 1985)
12. Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys, 5
13. For the purposes of this essay, I will use "local" to designate the phantasmic space of the "authentic lesbian," both as she is imaged and articulated within the show's mise-en-scène and implicitly idealized as the "expert" viewer
14. Ellen's "Puppy Episode" (1997) brought American television's first lesbian main character, Ellen Morgan (Ellen DeGeneres), out of the closet. In 2000, Showtime's dramatic series Queer as Folk introduced cable subscribers to lesbian couple Melanie (Michelle Clunie) and Lindsay (Thea Gill) among the show's ensemble of mostly male queer characters. However, The L Word was significantly the first television series to revolve around a group of queer female characters
15. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62
16. Nicholas Fonseca, "Return of the Pink Ladies," Entertainment Weekly, February 18, 2005, 38
17. Candace Moore, Interview with Guinevere Turner, April 10, 2005
18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 96
19. Christian Hansen, Catherine Needham, and Bill Nichols, "Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power" in Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 209-10
20. See Earl Jackson Jr., "Graphic Specularity: Pornography, Almodovar and the Gay Male Subject of Cinema," in Translations/Transformations: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature, East and West: Volume Seven (Hawaii: University of Hawaii, 1993), 63-81
21. Wendy O'Brien, "Qu(e)erying Pornography: Contesting Identity Politics in Feminism," in Third Wave Feminism, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004)
22. and Patricia White, UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
23. Jeffery Epstein, "Gay Themes in Television," The Hollywood Reporter, March 26, 2004
24. James Wolcott, "The Gay Divide," Vanity Fair (February 2005): 82
25. Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 12-13