obstinatecondolement: Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation shown from the shoulders up, standing in front of a painting of a planet (0)
Art ([personal profile] obstinatecondolement) wrote 2023-01-14 04:51 am (UTC)

It really sucks that some bodies are seen are inherently political! We're all just people and we all exist in the real world. Why is it not political for an episode of Friends to show a subway car that's entirely, or almost entirely populated with white people in a show set in New York City, but there is no non-political reason to include realistic number of background actors of color in crowds shots in a silly sit-com and the latter is inherently pandering?

I was researching weight lifting competitions for little people once, for fiction writing research, and I stumbled across a fluff piece from a local news station about a guy who was a power lifter and whose girlfriend was a Black trans woman. If that couple existed in a story people would kvetch at length about how unrealistic and political it was, but they are just two people who exist in the real world. Belonging to multiple marginalised populations is statistically a lot more likely than it is to be non-disabled, white, gender conforming, cishet Christian man of average height with class privilege who is a native speaker of English, monolingual and lives in the country of his birth where he is a citizen. Like... that's a minority! And the people within that minority who are blockbuster actors are a minority of a minority who also are disproportionately tall, thin, muscular, symmetrically featured, etc., etc. It is absolutely political that we think that's what all men should look like.

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