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The Paradox of "Representation"
Someone recently asked me what I thought about She-Ra's transformation sequence, and how it might function as a subversion of the transformation sequence in Sailor Moon. My hot take on this is that it's an homage, not a subversion. It would only be a "subversion" if you consider the original to have problematic elements worth subverting. To be honest, the She-Ra henshin feels like a somewhat bowdlerized downgrade of the original.
The process of "straightening" a piece of media involves sanitizing its queer and messy and sexy elements in order to gain the approval of an audience concerned with morals and purity. Despite having strong LGBTQ+ representation, She-Ra works hard to straighten its influences and source texts, and I've never been able to get into it because it's just not that interesting to me. It's not weird, it's not funny, and I don't need a group of cartoon teenagers to teach me lessons about friendship. I'm not saying that She-Ra is a "bad" show and doesn't have cultural value, but rather that someone like me is not the target audience.
I think the problem with "representation" is that, if you contentiously bear the burden of representing minority identities, then you have to be careful to be as neat and clean as possible. People will take it personally and come after you if you slip up, so you have to be "wholesome" and "inclusive." This expectation is exponentially more pronounced in children's media (and young adult fiction), in which you have to presume that your audience will not be able to understand nuance or complicated positionalities.
(By "complicated positionality," I'm primarily referring to someone whose experience of prejudice has left them with prejudices of their own. An example would be a Lithuanian who fled the Holocaust to Kazakhstan, was treated poorly by a local population that wasn't prepared to accept refugees, and now lives in Israel and refuses to speak to Filipina caretakers because she hates everyone she considers to be "Asian.")
In other words, in order to create "good representation," your depiction can't offend anyone, which means it has to be boring.
And honestly, I don't think boring representation is actually that useful. In fact, I think it smells a little like tokenism. This is why, to me, the weirdness and messiness and "problematic" sexuality of Sailor Moon is a lot more compelling to queer identity formation than She-Ra, which often reads like it's coming directly out of Tumblr purity politics.
The process of "straightening" a piece of media involves sanitizing its queer and messy and sexy elements in order to gain the approval of an audience concerned with morals and purity. Despite having strong LGBTQ+ representation, She-Ra works hard to straighten its influences and source texts, and I've never been able to get into it because it's just not that interesting to me. It's not weird, it's not funny, and I don't need a group of cartoon teenagers to teach me lessons about friendship. I'm not saying that She-Ra is a "bad" show and doesn't have cultural value, but rather that someone like me is not the target audience.
I think the problem with "representation" is that, if you contentiously bear the burden of representing minority identities, then you have to be careful to be as neat and clean as possible. People will take it personally and come after you if you slip up, so you have to be "wholesome" and "inclusive." This expectation is exponentially more pronounced in children's media (and young adult fiction), in which you have to presume that your audience will not be able to understand nuance or complicated positionalities.
(By "complicated positionality," I'm primarily referring to someone whose experience of prejudice has left them with prejudices of their own. An example would be a Lithuanian who fled the Holocaust to Kazakhstan, was treated poorly by a local population that wasn't prepared to accept refugees, and now lives in Israel and refuses to speak to Filipina caretakers because she hates everyone she considers to be "Asian.")
In other words, in order to create "good representation," your depiction can't offend anyone, which means it has to be boring.
And honestly, I don't think boring representation is actually that useful. In fact, I think it smells a little like tokenism. This is why, to me, the weirdness and messiness and "problematic" sexuality of Sailor Moon is a lot more compelling to queer identity formation than She-Ra, which often reads like it's coming directly out of Tumblr purity politics.