How It Started‚ How It's Going: LGBTQ Televisual Representations and the Horizon of Critique

Representational politics have been coopted by neoliberal elites. Diversity, equity, and inclusion has become a mantra for transnational corporations. Marketers tell us that increased diversity will come quickly, as corporations seek to woo Gen Z. The same techniques of humor that have been developed by marginalized communities have been taken up by the far right. The quantitative measurements of broadcast, cable, and streaming diversity by watchdog organizations reinforce the logic of “plastic representation” (Warner 2017). The era of “peak TV” has rendered audience sizes miniscule, making it harder than ever to justify our critiques in terms of possible effects. Discourses of positive and negative representations still remain supreme in many of our classrooms and popular discourses about media.In this perhaps dispiriting time to analyze representations in an era of co-optation and ubiquity, how do we rethink the horizon of critique? This paper looks at an unlikely source of possible inspiration, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “Where We are on TV” reports from 2006 through the present. I juxtapose these documents generated by an organization that is an industry-civil society hybrid with the ongoing theoretical literature on how and why we “read,” including the utility of “paranoid” and reparative readings (Sedgwick), Lisa Henderson’s construction of queer relay (2013), and Rita Felski’s work in querying the purposes and orientations of textual and discursive analysis in The Limits of Critique (2015). What might be read as GLAAD’s work of plastic representational advocacy might also be read collectively across the 17 years as work to address a growing number of particularities in terms of the language and categories of gender and sexual identity, grapple with and assert the ongoing relevance of representational critique, and find and explore the aporias in representations and the narratives that still need to be told.