Reflect on the following questions in your online portfolio:
- What examples from the past or recent history of queer representation can you find in your artform? How is queerness represented? Would you say it is authentic representation? How does intersectionality complicate the representation?
- In many of the examples listed this week, comedy and a light-hearted approach was used in both positive and negative ways. Think about all of the examples we’ve looked at from the past few weeks. What role do you think comedy will play in your particular creative practice? How do you approach things that are worth laughing at? Do you think comedy can be used as a weapon in your work to push a political agenda?
- Finally, we’ve reached the end of another module. Take a look at your definition of cultural responsibility from week one and week four. How would you revise it now? You can extend it to a paragraph if you wish.
Well done. We’ll be back for our third and final module next week.
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Person of Interest features towards the end of the show a complicated lesbian relationship between Shaw and Root (Person of Interest 2011).
Whether or not it’s authentic I’ll leave it to the cast since it’s their experience and not mine.
Or are we to infer that there is a categorically “authentic” queerness?
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Comedy has always been a weapon, in the sense that it is designed to cut, to interject, often (as in the case of satire) as an indirect attack. At a mechanical level of analysis, it is more or less a simulacrum of events that activates arousing (as opposed to participatory) emotion seemingly to an anticipated or predictable climax, only to interject with a benign (that is, causing no physical harm) and incompatible conclusion that shatters expectations and causes the audience to violently eject the mounting tension created in the process (Koestler 1964).
There is a way of laughing that promotes health and is sincere. There is a way of laughing that is cruel and promotes death. I try to find a light way of laughing in every situation, so I think some version of that will feature in the films and other projects I help to create.
Cultural safety (responsibility) revised (from weeks 1 and 4):
An intercultural platform
Cultural responsibility is a technical way of saying, “be kind and respectful”. Do not offend. Make room for others. What it does not incorporate, simply because its aim is conservative, is the creation of an intercultural platform. In writing, it seems honest, and it may still be honest in practice. However, its logic is the unsatisfactory compromise of “let’s agree to disagree”, a ways away from inspiring unity and accord.
What is needed is a new practice of agreement. More than respectfully leaving each other to our own devices, sharing a stage without ever sharing a story, we can build an intercultural platform where the intrinsic sameness of our ideas, interests and desires can converge and elevate life to a new horizon.
References
Person of Interest 2011, TV series, CBS, New York City, 22 September 2011.
Koestler, A 1964, The Act of Creation, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, Tiptree, Essex, Great Britain.
