The Power of an Image

Debates over positive and negative representation are probably relatively familiar to most of you, in particular over positive and negative representations of marginal and/or disempowered social groups, such as racial-ethnic minorities and representations of the LGBT community, especially in film and on television. Visual Studies work over the past 40 years has attempted, however, to take apart this simplistic dyad between positive (good) and negative (bad) images. We, of course, are versed in bad representation, from Stepin Fetchit to the five paragons of black negative stereotype examined in Marlon Rigg’s Ethnic Notions (The Mammy, Zip Coon, Uncle Toms, Pickaninnies, and the Sambo). In our current age of sensitivity, however, the power of good and bad representations remains, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder.

Controversies in the LGBT community over the relative value of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will and Grace, and the L Word pit a rigid dyad (positive v. negative images) against the complex interplay that images have for us (and speak to older controversies, over the film Cruising, the novel Faggots, and the play/film Boys in the Band). All of which is to say that there is very rarely a purely negative or positive image. Rather, all images enter into a relationship, a dialogue, with who we are, what we see and at what moment, and the circulation of those images within and outside of any given community.

The trio of shorts we viewed this week, Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied, Etang Inyang’s Bad Ass SuperMama, and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, all attempt to, as we mentioned in class, add flesh to the body of Black LGBT culture, history, and identity. Partially, this is a matter of addressing the very fact of Black LGBT culture in an open manner. What often gets left out of discussions of positive and negative representation is the element of the fantastical or illusory in those representations, the understanding that a representation is just that: a presentation of reality, a version of the multiple layers of reality that in itself is not real, but always already a fantasy projection (all film, even Cinéma vérité, is constructed, and therefore a representation).

Another way of understanding this is the act of witnessing. It is a known fact that witnesses to a crime or event will often remember the facts, progression of events, and what happened differently. If you think about some shared event in your life, say in your family, often different people will have different memories that are grounded in their interpretive position, values, emotions, and perspectives above and beyond any one incident itself. Representation tends to work this was as well: what is good for the goose is seldom good for the gander.

Simplistic methodologies towards representation tend to obscure this complicated nexus of feeling, memory, and interpretation. Instead, these questions are reduced to the dyad: is it good or bad? This is why, in Film Studies, often the initial student response to representation (“I liked it,” or alternatively, “I didn’t like it”) is superfluous. How one feels about something does not get down to the intellectual work: what makes it work? What is the film’s project? How does that project communicate itself? What tools does it use?

Feminist film scholar Linda Williams detailed some of this work many years ago in a famous essay titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she argued it was important for viewers to divorce themselves from simple questions over like or dislike, in other words over enjoyment, because such questions obscured ideology, and the sense in which ideology washes over us when we watch cinema and television in invisible ways. In some senses, disempowered or marginal communities such as the LGBT community have a more complicated relationship to visual culture because of the identity and representational issues connected to the circulation of images in popular culture. For the most part, discussions over representation are predicated on the circulation and political value of the image, although this is not always true. And because feeling does, obviously, play a part in interpretation, sometimes these discussions are slippery.

In the case of our trio of filmmakers, their projects to give body to Black LGBT experience is explicitly political, particular filmic moments that are meant to address the larger invisibility of Black LGBT experience both in mainstream culture and Black cultures. A famous anthology of Black feminist writings was called, “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” And in some senses, this sums up some of the feelings of Inyang, Riggs, and Julien, in terms of staking out a territory that is explicitly and proudly Black and Gay.

As we have mentioned in class, we don’t live within dyads, although we use them to categorize the world. Are the works by Riggs, Inyang, and Julien positive or negative representations? Of course, for the purposes of the class, they are positive in the manner in which they address their subjects, although this does not mean they are perfect. For Black traditionalists, however, sensitive to the stain of homosexuality on identity in a heterodominant society, these would not be positive representations, but rather negative ones, in the sense in which they present the community in “a bad light.” And as we have discussed vis-à-vis Trujillo, the representation of racialized sexuality is always in conversation with race and sexuality simultaneously.

The interesting thing, for me, about Julien, Riggs, and Inyang is the task of creating a visual language for Black LGBT identity. Again, these projects I would argue are far from perfect, but I suppose the point, the larger point, is that there really is no perfect representation, although that does not stop us from wanting one, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.