Of Symbolic Annihilation, Entertainment Media, and Queer-lensing STEM.
“When you don’t see people like yourself, the message is: You’re invisible. The message is: You don’t count. And the message is: ‘There’s something wrong with me.’” Professor Michael Morgan, UMass Amherst
Symbolic Annihilation
“Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation.”
With this chilling line, researchers George Gerbner and Larry Gross coined the term Symbolic Annihilation: if you don’t see people like yourself in the media you consume, you must somehow be unimportant- you must somehow, not exist.
Since the inception of modern-day media, audio-visual entertainment has become the fountain of escapism for the masses. It is everywhere- in our TV Sets, mobile screens, and on billboards- in a robust, unacknowledged relationship with our societies, shaping itself according to what we want to see, and in turn, shaping us with what it shows to us.
The more of it we consume, the more the media builds upon us, almost like radiation, breeding in us what Prof. Darnell Hunt describes as the ‘TV View of the World’. For example, if the media you consume tells you that all members of a racial community are violent, you will assume that they are more violent. This view manifests as a knee-jerk reaction that says ‘Oh yes, yes, of course. I know that.’, even if you have never interacted with any individual from the said community.
In 2017, less than 6.5% (GLAAD) of all characters on broadcast television were LGBT+, and many points in this statistic refer to characters serving diversity quotas, fetishised characters, and roles incorporated to be the butt of the joke, and “over and over and over, week after week, month after month, year after year, it sends a very clear message, not only to members of those groups but to members of other groups”- LGBT+ representation does not matter.
Business As Usual
Media is- at the end of the day- a business. Businesses bend towards profits and financial incentives to serve certain demographics over the others. For example, the recent rise in representation of South-Asians in the Hollywood industry can be credited to the boom of internet usage in South-Asian countries, especially India. The content developed to serve the potential clientage is attractive and relatable to the target populations, and may, or may not be repulsive to consumers from a different population.
So, when all you find are empty shells of unrelatable characters and public figures, content openly repulsive to your existence, and when presence, not representation, fills the ranks of the diversity quotas, the message is clear- your existence does not matter.
Projected Gender Roles
The problem with a majority of audio-visual and written media consisting of rare LGBT+ relationships is that they are riddled with projected gender roles, written and produced from a heteronormative perspective which has no room for a relationship without forced gender performance, requiring conformation to “normative” societal standards, so much so that LGBT relationships are featured not out of support, but the monetary and increased viewership incentives borne out of queer fetishisation and misrepresentation.
Barely People: The Caricaturisation of a Minority
The few times you see gay characters on TV, they are always a punchline in a comedy, and while for most cis/het individuals, the joke ends with the episode or the movie, this phenomenon of hyper-caricaturisation of characters in popular media disallows the LGBT+ community from being taken seriously in real-life. This misguided portrayal is the only interaction many people will have with anything LGBT+, and in a long chain of causation, leads to non-cis/het people beings turned away from educational, professional, and leadership opportunities.
When all you attach to a sexual- or gender-identity is ridicule, hyper-sexuality, and immaturity, you make workspaces, colleges, and boardrooms non-accepting and biased.
When the soon-to-be hit movie Bol Bachchan came out in 2012, it garnered cheers for the character of Abbas, an effeminate, over-the-top gay classical dance teacher, who, within seconds of his entry, performs an uncalled for lap dance for his potential employers (Ajay Devgn’s character) and his staff. The movie theatres burst into bouts of laughter, not because the character was gay, but because the character was an over-sexualised, over-caricatured comic material. This trend in Bollywood powerhouses generalise these characteristics as definitions of everyone who identifies as gay; in addition, “Artsy” careers in dance and theatre seem to be the giving away of a gay man, and the STEM and IT industry and academia turn them away from more “professional and serious” careers in the fields.
Barely People: The Case of Missing Caricaturisation
The first thing we know about Abbas in Bol Bachchan was that he was a teacher of classical dance, and the second, that he was gay. The character arc of Abbas ends just where it begins: nowhere. He is an empty shell, barely a character with goals, wants, and downfalls. His personality is replaced by his minority ruling or his sexuality.
There is no single type of a gay man, but there certainly is a stereotype- one that is copy-pasted from one movie script to another, and never shows the queer community as people you come across in your everyday life- “as people with likes and dislikes, personal habits and whims, hopes and fears”.
As Ana-Christina Ramón describes, when an LGBT+ individual looks at these characters, all they see is one dimension, and wonder if that is all that is expected of them in society.
Once again, there is no one type of gay men, but there is a character trope expected to represent each one of them. For example, a gay man’s role is marked by mandatory cross-dressing and effeminacy. The character trope, and not the background and experiences of these characters is what moulds their dialogue and screen time, and for the underrepresented, seeing a character with the same gender- or sexual-identity being restricted to behave in only certain ways, has its own limiting effects and invalidates the breadth of their life’s experiences.
Identity Formation Cues
The bottom line is that stories matter and they affect how we live our lives and how we see the lives of other people. Many times, these stories, news, and entertainment focus on the perspective of the majority group, making them lighthearted and enjoyable to them, at the cost of a minority’s dignity and reputation.
Growing up queer, when you gather cues from a world of entertainment that treats queerness as its sacrificial lamb, you despise and hide the parts of the self you see ridiculed on screen. In Ramón’s words, “You may wonder, ‘Do I matter? Does society value me as a person?’”
Research in adolescent psychology suggests that when you garner identity formation cues from misrepresented, peripheral roles, you end up with poor behavioural choices that potentially limit your options in life. Seeing the rampant fetishisation and sexualization correlates to a host of negative outcomes in the areas of cognitive and physical functioning, body dissatisfaction and appearance anxiety, mental health (depression, self-esteem), and sexual well-being. LGBT+ individuals internalise the stereotypes and the phobia. Youth underperform when they correspond to stereotypical expectations.
Entertainment media saturates our lives, and a negative representation of any community serves as a proxy for experiences and scenarios audience members have not actually lived, shaping their commentary on the identity of the LGBT+ community without any first-hand, real-life interactions, and shaping the way the community views itself.
What is needed of minority representation is an empowering and normalising voice, one not solely based on gender, sexuality, or sex, but the broader aspects of individual identity that makes them human beings. With that, we come to the end of the first part of this article, about why normalised visibility matters for all minorities, and how it shapes people’s perception of themselves and others. The following piece will discuss the long-term ripples in space and time, sourcing from these simple consequences of misrepresentation of the LGBT+ community in popular media, and in the stories that shape us everywhere, every day.
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