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thecinephale · 7 years ago

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Redefining Romance with The Shape of Water and On Body and Soul

By the time Katharine and I met in November of 2015 I didn’t care about romance. This word that had consumed me since I was a child no longer made any sense. My celibate adolescence was spent scribbling love poems and consuming movies like (500) Days of Summer, Beginners, and Annie Hall. But I’d since realized my poetry sucked and that Woody Allen’s body of work was nothing to admire. I was casually sleeping with a close friend and grappling with the absence of a core part of my identity. Ever since I was four and told my sister’s best friend I had a crush on her, liking girls and turning that like into a personal narrative was part of me. It was my way of being close to women and how I’d come to terms with what kind of man I could be. I wasn’t effeminate, I was sensitive. I wasn’t girly, I was romantic.

And yet after years of crafting yarns from ordinary, or even non-existent, experiences, I was about to have my first truly cinematic meet-cute. Katharine and I met at Sleep No More during her very first performance. A friend of mine who worked there had been trying to get me to go for nearly a year and finally this night, for some reason, I caved. During the show I had four one-on-ones, immersive show lingo for private moments with performers, and I was more than satisfied with my experience. The show was just about over when I saw her, sitting on a suitcase at the end of an empty hall. Unsure if she was a performer or a tired audience member I slowly crept toward her. She stood up, took my hand, and we had a one-on-one. Later at the bar, my friend introduced us and we spent the rest of the night talking. A week later we were on a train together headed upstate.

This story is romantic in every way I could’ve hoped for as a teenager. And yet what I remember most from these weeks is the joy I felt getting to know Katharine. I was honestly a bit embarrassed having met her at Sleep No More since that place thrives off of people’s sometimes toxic fantasies. Especially because none of it felt that grand. I didn’t even think our first conversation could possibly be romantic until my friend asked me why I didn’t get her number. Our first date was upstate because she mentioned wanting to get out of the city before it got too cold and it seemed like a good idea. I didn’t know that she was the one. It was a date. I’d been on many first dates and planned to go on more. And while I did like her, I wasn’t obsessive. I liked her more on our second date than our first, and on our third date than our second, and today I’m more obsessed with her than I’ve ever been before.

There is a really simple explanation for this. Something about maturity and real, adult relationships. But this alone assumes that what I’d grown out of was romance, when in fact what I was really grappling with was male, heteronormative romance. I’d confronted the behaviors I’d copied for so long and realized they didn’t fit with who I was. But now what? A year and a half after Katharine and I met I came out to her and began transitioning.

***

It’s been a relief coming out, like I was holding my breath my entire life and can finally inhale and exhale like everyone else. So much of my life makes sense now in a way that it never did and I never thought it would. And one of the most rewarding aspects of my personal transition has been transitioning Katharine and I’s relationship as well, going from a seemingly heterosexual relationship to an openly lesbian one. There’s both liberation and emptiness in a relationship that is free from the vast majority of messaging received. Everything from fairy tales to Cosmo to the oeuvre of a known child molester has a lot less power when none of that stuff was ever meant to represent you. But there’s a reason why people enjoy that stuff. It feels good to be seen and it’s a relief to sink into fantasy. And while I’ve embraced the general umbrella by binge watching The L Word with Katharine and finally understanding my deep connection to Fun Home, Carol, and The Watermelon Woman, there’s still a searching for a love story like ours. A love story that feels outside of normalcy, that feels confusing and difficult and complicated yet ultimately just as fantastical and lovely. And it can’t just be solved by, say, a trans love story. I’d certainly welcome more of those (for now shout out to Sense8 and Her Story), but it’s deeper than that.

***

Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a ridiculous movie. That it’s currently the Oscar frontrunner is honestly astounding. Yes, it’s impeccably shot, designed, scored, written, and acted, but it’s also a movie that I’m at a loss to defend. On his podcast Keep It wonderful culture writer Ira Madison III was making fun of the movie and impersonated Octavia Spencer’s character with a simple “You fucking that fish?” I burst out laughing. Because it’s hilarious and because the scene in the movie isn’t actually that far off!

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the film is about a mute woman named Eliza (the always great Sally Hawkins) who works as a cleaner at a government facility during the Cold War. The US attains a creature simply called “Amphibian Man” and Eliza falls in love with him (them?). So it’s sort of like Beauty and the Beast if Beast never really spoke, there was explicit sex, and Belle had a black best friend and a gay neighbor. There’s also a subplot with some Russians. And a musical number.

It’s goofy as hell and yet I spent a large portion of the movie in tears. It reached its scaly arm down my throat and grabbed my heart. Any moment where the Amphibian Man was on screen I had a voice in my head that just kept repeating, “That’s me. That’s me.” Now I don’t know what it says about where I’m at in my transition that I have an easier time relating to a fish man than Jamie Clayton’s awesome trans hacker on Sense8, but alas it’s the truth. Because if I’m being honest, I usually don’t feel like I’m being perceived as a woman, I rarely even feel like I’m being perceived as trans, but I do feel like I’m being perceived as a creature.

Watching Eliza not only fall in love with Amphibian Man but be the instigator of the relationship felt revolutionary and comforting in equal measure. Returning to Beauty and the Beast (also King Kong, also everything like this), it’s usually the creature that kidnaps or captures the virginal lady and has to convince her to love him. This always feels a little gross and undercuts the message of acceptance. But here Eliza is a sexual woman. From the beginning it’s shown that masturbation is a part of her daily routine. She doesn’t fall for the Amphibian Man because of a repressed desire. She falls for the creature because she feels a connection. She wants to help them live a life of freedom alongside her. She wants to teach the Amphibian Man how to live in her world because it would bring her happiness.

Katharine didn’t rescue me from a lab. But she has helped me escape… something. She has helped introduce me to a confusing world of feminine expectations and desires that feel comfortable and natural and also confusing and impossible. And above all else she has done this because she loves me. She isn’t still dating me because she’s a good person (no matter what other cis-es like to suggest). She’s still dating me because she sees me for who I am and loves me. I’m insecure about a lot of things, but I know this to be true and it means everything to me.

***

Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul, another Oscar nominee (a longshot in the Foreign Film category) has faced a similar reaction to Del Toro’s film. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, yet almost every review even when positive points out the film’s silly weirdness. Also a love story, this time between two humans, Enyedi’s first film in 18 years is about a pair of employees at a slaughterhouse who realize that they’re somehow having the exact same dream about two deer. The people are Endre, the emotionally detached manager with a disabled left arm, and Mária, the new quality control inspector who is autistic and quickly becomes the butt of her coworkers’ jokes.

Again, I understand the reaction. The very concept of a love story at a slaughterhouse (featuring graphic scenes of slaughter) is already a stretch. Add the hokiness of nocturnal destiny, a subplot involving stolen bull Viagra, some deeply unpleasant narrative turns, and a formal approach as reserved as its leads, it’s unsurprising that many don’t know how to receive this film. It’s too open-hearted for the arthouse yet it’s not exactly fine-tuned for Nicholas Sparks. But for me, this film lived up to its title and infiltrated my body and soul, I connected deeply, and wept softly. And I’ve been unable to shake it, that initial feeling only growing since the first viewing.

There is an obvious contrast between the dream sequences with Endre and Mária as deer and the real life sequences of animals in cages having their guts torn out. It’s easy to read this simply as a statement between the purity of their love and the harshness of the rest of the world. But this ignores the unreality of the deer scenes and the specificity of animal imagery. Because a main thread through the film is that Mária and Endre don’t know how to be animals. Or in other words: Endre does not know how to be a man and Mária does not know how to be a woman.

The two male foils to Endre are his best friend, Jenö, and a new hire, Sanyi. Jenö is married and despite proselytizing the merits of keeping women in their place he does whatever his wife wants. Endre watches with the remove of a scientist as Jenö carries out a charade where he is able to assert his supposed masculinity while filling his more passive role. Sanyi, on the other hand, is naturally alpha, flirting with every female co-worker and ignoring his male superiors. Endre seems to pity Jenö and resent Sanyi, but it quickly becomes clear that who he has the most disgust for is himself. He grows wildly defensive when he is caught ogling a woman, insisting that he simply looked like all men would. The woman didn’t even seem to notice and doesn’t seem to care. He then declares multiple times later in the film that he would prefer to remove love and sex from his life rather than deal with the impossibility of filling the role of “man” in these encounters. He’s given up on it all until he meets Mária.

Mária also has two foils, Klára, a voluptuous psychologist who interviews everyone after the bull Viagra incident, and Zsóka, the oldest employee at the slaughterhouse. Klára is everything Mária is not. She’s comfortable in her body and comfortable around men. She expresses her feelings, sometimes even to the point of aggression. When Mária retells Endre’s dream, she is unable to push back against Klára’s anger or defend herself. Zsóka, who is even more comfortable with her sexuality than Klára, is much kinder to Mária. Instead of judging, she attempts to coach her in the ways of womanhood. This, of course, means posture, how to walk and talk, and, most importantly, what clothes to wear. Mária attempts to master these skills, like she does later with sex, with an obsessive precision.

Mária’s experience of gender is intrinsically tied to her autism. Her lack of awareness in how to act as a woman is similar to her struggle to generally fit in as a person. I’m hesitant to find symbolism in her character or draw parallels between our lives since her experience is so different from my own. But in my unqualified opinion the film treats Mária with a respect and fullness that leaves her as open to analysis and connection as any other character. It’s not autism that becomes ingrained in the semiotics of the film but rather the world around this one autistic character, the world around Mária. And I couldn’t help but feel parallels both to Endre’s attempts at manhood and Mária’s learning of womanhood. I couldn’t help but watch this relationship unfolding in a harsh world and think of my own. Mária and Endre’s budding romance faces plenty of conflict throughout the film but there’s an overwhelming feeling of destiny between them. The conflicts are not a result of their incongruity but rather the difficulties and pressures of their surroundings. Any conflicts within themselves are related to their individual difficulties with the world at large.

The dream sequences aren’t just beautiful and serene. They are otherworldly. Literally. The plane on which Mária and Endre connect is outside of real life. Their connection is dependent on both of them finding it within themselves to detach from their discomfort with society. In their dreams it is easy, but in life that’s really hard. Because it’s not healthy to completely detach (as fun as rainy days cuddling can be). The necessity is being able to carry on normal life with your partner and face a mutual unbelonging from our world. From our ableist world. From our gendered world. From our heteronormative world. From our transphobic world.

My connection to this film is reliant both on its silly romanticism and its severe honesty. Because that’s how I feel. Being with Katharine feels like it’s on another plane of being, in how I feel about her, in how happy it makes me to be near her, and yet real life can be really hard. This film shows the beauty in getting through that hardship with another person, the pressures it can place on a relationship, and the ultimate reward of working through it all together.

***

The Shape of Water and On Body and Soul have allowed me to articulate something about myself and my relationship that I’d previously failed to do. They taught me that romance, not just love but gooey-eyed, goofy capital R Romance, can be for all of us. That romantic doesn’t have to mean arrogant poems or chasing after girls in the rain. It can mean connecting with somebody when you feel less than human, it can mean facing a society that doesn’t want you with the help of another. And, most importantly, that this can all be silly and over-the-top in a way that will make half the audience laugh and half the audience cry. These films destroyed a line between romance and mature relationship that I’d taken as fact even though my own relationship is such an obvious combination of the two. They allowed me to see myself in a new way, to see Katharine in a new way, and to appreciate our relationship even more than I already did.

So I’ll say it here. On social media, like an adolescent that will someday regret such an embarrassing overshare. I’m deeply, madly, overwhelmingly in love.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

#Valentine's Day #The Shape of Water #On Body and Soul #love stories #queer love #Guillermo Del Toro #Ildikó Enyedi #LGBTQIA #trans #transgender

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nebris · 7 years ago

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The Rage of the Incels

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of the people I talked to were virgins by choice. Some were not, sometimes for complicated, overlapping reasons: disability, trauma, issues related to appearance, temperament, chance. “Embarrassed doesn’t even cover it,” a thirty-two-year-old woman who chose the pseudonym Bette told me. “Not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace . . . that’s a serious thing in our world! I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what’s wrong with me?” A twenty-six-year-old man who was on the autism spectrum and had been molested as a child wondered, “If I get naked with someone, am I going to take to it like a duck to water, or am I going to start crying and lock myself in the bathroom?” He hoped to meet someone who saw life clearly, who was gentle and independent. “Sometimes I think, why would a woman like that ever want me?” he said. But he had worked hard, he told me, to start thinking of himself as a person who was capable of a relationship—a person who was worthy of, and could accept, love.

It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace. None of the people I interviewed believed that they were owed the sex that they wished to have. In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness. Structural power is the best protection against it: a rich straight white man, no matter how unpleasant, will always receive enthusiastic handshakes and good treatment at banking institutions; he will find ways to get laid.

These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.

Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.

Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.

Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world? Douthat noted a recent blog post by the economist Robin Hanson, who suggested, after Minassian’s mass murder, that the incel plight was legitimate, and that redistributing sex could be as worthy a cause as redistributing wealth. (The quality of Hanson’s thought here may be suggested by his need to clarify, in an addendum, “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!”) Douthat drew a straight line between Hanson’s piece and one by Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan began with Elliot Rodger, then explored the tension between a sexual ideology built on free choice and personal preference and the forms of oppression that manifest in these preferences. The question, she wrote, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.”

Srinivasan’s rigorous essay and Hanson’s flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment had little in common. And incels, in any case, are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. I still think about Bette telling me, in 2013, how being lonely can make your brain feel like it’s under attack. Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in us.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels

#The Sisterhood

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itsjusticestuff-blog · 7 years ago

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Trevor and Ian.

Queer is queer.

Shameless has been a show that I have found very raw and real. It tells you the stories of characters as the people they are. Each person has flaws, quirks, and things about them that make them unique and special. The media can often be used as a place to sugarcoat the representation of characters that they choose to portray. Shameless is a refreshing change to the commonalities that are seen in the heteronormative society we live in. There are little representations of queer characters, but Shameless shows these relationships between people who aren’t like everyone else, but are so important and such a big part of our society. The two characters that I will be talking about are Ian and Trevor, and analyzing their relationship together.

Ian is found out to be gay from the very first episode of shameless and has numerous sexual and emotional relationships with people. He is very strictly gay, but does not really have a “type” as he goes from “Cash” to old men and “Mickey”. Prior to season 7, Ian has been very sexual and had a lot of things happen in his life, and then Trevor comes along. As far as Ian knows, when they meet Trevor is a man to him. What Ian does not find out until they begin dancing and touching each other is that Trevor is a trans man. Ian happens to grab “Trevor’s” fake penis that he is wearing, and compliments it, Trevor responds with, “It should, It cost me 80 bucks”.

At this point Ian is shocked and does not know how to respond so he says some very rude and hurtful things about Trevor. At first Trevor is pissed off and starts to storm away until Ian apologizes and claims that “He really didn’t know better” and was unaware of how to address a trans person. They come to an understanding and Ian slowly starts to learn more and more about Trevor’s life and what it means for him to be a man.This relationship is such a great thing to see in the media and on a show with such high ratings and prowess. There are often two sides to when it comes to trans people. There are those who are hateful and rude whether it be from ignorance, stupidity or just hate, and there are those who are loving and supporting; most importantly willing to learn.

A lot of people who do not encounter trans men and women or see them represented have no idea how to act when they see them. Showing this progressive relationship start slightly rough and then to blossom out was great to watch. Trevor and Ian get very close and only have one hang up, the bedroom. Ian had always been a “pitcher” and not a “catcher” when it came to sex, and Trevor was the same way. They were both very hesitant to try it with each other because it was out of their comfort zone and what they had experienced before. Eventually they both are willing to try and they actually enjoy it very much. This is another positive that I find within the relationship portrayal between Ian and Trevor. Shameless shows a lot of sex, whether it be straight and/or gay, so it was so nice to see an inclusion of a trans person in that same sexual light. Transgender people are very much of the time seen as “disgusting” or “freaks” but they are humans and experience the same actions and emotions that everyone else does. It is very important for everyone to see trans people as the same as the rest of us, so including the sex life of Trevor and Ian was well done to normalize and familiarize the experiences of trans people to the rest of the world.

Kyle Buchanan talks in one of his articles about trans characters having movies made about them, but in reality the story is still connotated with the straight people in the movie. How the movie can have trans or gay people in it, but it is not centered around them. Instead those characters are used as a sort of “tool” for the straight characters. These trans people are seen as fascinating and different in the eyes of straight people, but not given the stardom and respect they deserve. This is one thing that I think Shameless did a fairly good job with. By having Ian meet and have a love interest with transgender Trevor, it allows the relationship to feel more raw and natural. The truth isn’t out at first and honestly it is impossible to tell that Trevor is transgender from one glance. They made their little relationship it’s own part of the show by feeling intimate and cute, and then they opened it up to other plots and story lines to have inclusion.

It is interesting to compare the other mediums that include trans characters and how they compare with relation to class and race. In Shameless, Trevor and Ian live in southside Chicago, which isn’t the nicest area. In Tangerine, a movie about two black trans men who are sex workers in L.A., they are also portrayed to live and work in a shaky area. In each of these outlets of media, the trans life is associated with some level “dirtiness” and sense of lower class standing. Whether this is done on purpose in each case or not shows in what light that society sees these people. Very rarely will there be a movie or show about a powerful and successful trans man or woman, and when it is they are most of the time white. But there are sights of change taking place in the world today. Everyday people are becoming more and more supportive of the trans community. In a short TV series titled, “Her Story”, about a trans female who is living life in fear of her “lover”, there are more sights of trans people with success. One of the trans characters is also a black woman who has quite a reputable career as a lawyer for the rights of trans people. It is shows like that, and like Shameless that make the stories of trans people and queer people more public and more normal to be seen.

Queer has been a term used to describe a number of things that don’t fit into the “normalized” and frankly “stereotyped” societal views of society. Yet, queer is queer. If someone wants to label themselves as queer then there is nothing wrong with them doing just that. A gay, lesbian or transgender person can be anything that a straight person can be. A queer person is just as emotional, real, and a part of society as the next. If anything from my analysis of Trevor and Ian’s relationship can be taken away it is this: learn to love at first sight, and welcome all who present themselves to you. There is no need to judge someone for wanting to be who they truly are, and that goes for any person, race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability or anything else you could think of. There are Trevor’s and Ian’s all over the world, this show just gave us an example as to how they can look and live. Normally queer.

#QueerAnalysis

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