Our politics
were shifting
profoundly,
and culture
moved with it.
Sometimes it
was hard to
determine
which was
responding
to whichAbove: Lena Dunham
(third from left) with her
Girls castmates.
Above right: Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie. Right:
Laura Bates (on right),
the author of Everyday
Sexism, appearing on CNN
to discuss online trollingsinger-songwriter Frank Ocean came out as queer via a letter
on Tumblr in 2012. In line with today’s rejection of rigid
binaries, it has never really been determined whether Ocean
is bisexual or gay. And it doesn’t really matter.
Meanwhile, Beyoncé emerged from the confines of safe
R&B, using her music and visuals to voice support for
feminism and anti-racism. As a result, she turned the novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from a well-known literary
figure into a universal celebrity, by placing her voice front
and centre on the 2013 track “***Flawless”, explicitly defining
feminism. Our politics were shifting profoundly, and culture
moved with it. Sometimes it was hard to determine which
was responding to which.
In 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to
Watch Out For laid out the blueprint for what would later
become known as the Bechdel Test. “I only go to a movie if
it satisfies three basic requirements,” proclaimed one of the
characters. “One, it has to have at least two women in it who,
two, talk to each other about, three, something other than a
man.” The test lay dormant until the early 21st century, when
nascent fourth-wave feminist blogs and internet communities
seized upon it as a tool for media criticism. I am beginning
to imagine a cultural world without a need for the test.
A couple of years ago, the writer and co-creator of genre-
defying Netflix series The OA, Brit Marling, noted in
conversation with Issa Rae: “When women get the
opportunity to write, they feel the need to create these
characters that are strong and flawless, because there’s been
so little representation of that. I thought that Insecure was
taking this risk of showing that women are also sometimes
vulnerable. And sometimes awkward, and sometimes afraid.”
Opportunity is the operative word here. It’s no surprise
that Rae’s black-girl-centred show was made possible through
its creator making her own opportunities, one of the earliest
being her wildly popular web series The Misadventures of
Awkward Black Girl back in 2011. It was laugh-out-loud
funny, short, snappy and charmingly DIY. After creating a
pilot for what would become Insecure, alongside Larry Wilmore
in 2013, HBO commissioned the programme in 2015. “You’re
watching a woman from the beginning become something,
rather than from the outset that she’s this image of perfection
that we always oppress women with,” was the observationMarling made of its narrative arc. She
is right. It felt so rare, and yet so normal,
to watch young black women characters
working out their place in the world.
Women’s rite-of-passage stories felt
like the order of the decade. In 2012,
the deeply unlikeable main characters
of Girls endeared themselves to a
generation of messy women. Yes, the
lead was still objectified by a straight
man, but instead of the audience
leering at her from his point of view, he was a minor
character. We now followed her inner monologue,
watching her feel what it was like to be objectified.
The programme couldn’t have existed without the
previous decade’s polished perfection of Sex and the
City, memorialised on a poster in the pastel-coloured
bedroom of the youngest character in Girls. But the
contrast was clear. Instead of financially independent,
sexually confident, established career women cocktailing
their way around New York City, Girls enthralled its
audience with the flat disappointment experienced by
four young college-educated white women who were
coming of age after the financial crash of 2008. Our
new Carrie Bradshaw was Hannah Horvath, an aspiring
writer recently cut off from her parents’ funds, who can’t
afford her rent, let alone Manolo Blahniks. She was written
unsparingly, her delusion and self-absorption mercilessly on
show. Yet she was strangely likeable. The programme was
transgressive and conversation-changing.
The following year, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black Trojan-
horsed the viewing public by segueing a narrative about a
blonde woman with a Whole Foods fetish into a rich
exploration of the lives of incarcerated women of colour.
Adapted from a memoir of the same name, the plot followed
Piper Chapman surrendering herself from a comfortable
upper-middle-class life into a women’s prison as a consequence
of crimes committed in her early twenties. But her story soon
fades into the background, giving way to some of the fullest
and most humane depictions of women of colour this decade.
Orange Is the New Black’s impact was undeniable. We
wouldn’t have had Natasha Lyonne’s mind-bending Russian
Doll (2019) without it. Orange also elevated transgender
actor Laverne Cox to icon status, landing her a Time
magazine cover in 2014. It moved mainstream representation
of queer and trans women from the margins to the centre.
The characters’ sexualities were as much pedestrian and
commonplace. The series made homophobia and transphobia
the problem of its more bigoted, backward characters,
rather than life-defining crises for those characters who
were queer or trans.
All these shows added up to something: a shift. Click
wasn’t exactly critically acclaimed back in 2006. Rewatching
it was an ordeal. But it also made me grateful for the
blossoming of new works that have carved out a different
kind of subjectivity.
Take Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play
Fairview, which opens at the Young Vic in London this
month. Reviews from its run in New York tell me that it
involves a black family, being watched by a white audience,
who watch themselves watching the black family. Each
review, inevitably written by a white critic, drips with a self-
aware unease. It makes white audiences uncomfortable to
be aware of the discomfort they cause. Pertaining to the
surveillance of racism, it sounds like Berger’s quote in play
form. I am looking forward to seeing it. Q LAURA BATES; GETTY IMAGES; HBO/MARK SELIGERARTS & CULTURE
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