The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production by Julia Himberg

Author:Julia Himberg [Himberg, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2. When Jenner announced her transition from male to female, she gave Vanity Fair an exclusive interview in which she revealed her name, Caitlyn, publicly.

The media frenzy over Jenner’s transition was predated by several transgender television characters, which had taken many critics, audiences, and LGBT community leaders by storm. In 2014, for example, Amazon debuted Transparent, a story about a culturally sophisticated and well-to-do Los Angeles family’s dysfunctional and dramatic lives following the discovery that the family patriarch (played by cisgender and straight actor Jeffrey Tambor) is transgender.39 With a critically acclaimed cast, including a number of transgender actresses, the show received glowing reviews from even the harshest of critics, and found its place as an equally popular show among Amazon Prime members.40

A year after its debut, Tambor won an Emmy Award, television’s highest honor, for his portrayal of Maura Pfefferman. In his acceptance speech he said, “I’ve been given the opportunity to act because people’s lives depend on it,” referring to the tragic numbers of transgender people who lose their lives, especially transgender women of color. He goes on to say that playing Maura is a role that is both a “responsibility” and a “privilege.” With great sincerity, he closes by saying, “Not to repeat myself but to specifically repeat myself: I’d like to dedicate my performance and this award to the transgender community. Thank you for your patience, thank you for your courage, thank you for your stories, thank you for your inspiration. Thank you for letting us be part of the change. God bless you.” Tambor’s speech, televised in front of 11.9 million viewers, offers a mixture of recognition and respect for transgender Americans and the need to tell their stories; he, like many others quoted in this book, believes characters like Maura Pfefferman have an effect on public perceptions about social minorities. His comments also reflect an awareness that many critics believe transgender actors should play transgender roles. As a cisgender man playing a transgender woman, Tambor gives a subtle nod to this issue as if offering reassurance that he takes the responsibility of playing Maura all the more seriously.

In 2013, Netflix, one of the most successful online media distributors to produce original content, premiered Orange Is the New Black. The show, adapted from a memoir, is the story of Piper Chapman (played by Taylor Schilling), a woman sentenced to fifteen months in prison after being convicted of the decade-old crime of transporting money to her drug-dealing girlfriend.41 One of the show’s breakout stars, Laverne Cox, is a black transgender actress who portrays an out transgender character. The cover of a 2014 issue of Time magazine featured Cox with a tag line that read: “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.”42 Reporter Katy Steinmetz writes that with the popularity of Orange Is the New Black, “she has emerged as a public leader of the trans movement, using her increasingly prominent perch to make the case for equal rights and touring the country giving a stump speech titled ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ When Cox says it, that refrain is not a question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.