“Challenging and Alternative”: Screening Queer Girls on Channel 4

Abstract

While in the early history of television, lesbians, when present at all, “were only seen as an ‘issue’ — a ‘subject’ up for analysis”, the growth of digital media culture has greatly increased the quantity of televised representations of lesbians, often as recurring characters, or even as series protagonists (Collis 120–21). This mainstreaming of lesbian representations has significant implications for the discourse around lesbian visibility, which has been a major staple of feminist and queer critiques of television over the last several decades. In particular, such mainstreaming offers us the opportunity to explore some of the complex entanglements that surround lesbian visibility, many of which are neglected in critical analyses that imply the polarization of visibility and invisibility, and transgression and containment. Rather than investigating the effects of lesbian visibility “in the media” or “on television”, it is imperative to examine particular trends in representation and to situate these within the wider mediated culture. For example, visibility on a subscription, quality television programme like Showtime’s The L Word (2004–09) surely comes with different costs, and different representational freedoms, than visibility on a network sitcom like Ellen (1994–98). While some of these pressures will be registered in the text, others demand to be theorized on their own terms. Thus, current studies of lesbian visibility need to provide contextualized examinations of texts, which ask what costs, and what freedoms, might be incurred through representation on different media platforms.