fashioning the stronglstrong word - nobleworld.biz.pdf

Nebula3.4, December 2006 Fashioning The L Word. By Rebecca Beirne Abstract This essay discusses the first and second seasons of Showtime’s cable television series The L Word (2004-). The L Word is remarkable in that it is the first major drama series to focus its narrative on the lives of lesbian and bisexual women. This article critically analyses the first two seasons, together with initial responses to the series, in terms of lesbian femininity, masculinity 1 and desire. Introduction 2 Much has been made of how ‘differently’ the television series The L Word represents lesbianism. The hype surrounding The L Word purports that the series ushers in a new era of lesbian visibility and representation to the mainstream, which presents a fashionable and glamorous image of lesbianism to counter ‘the stereotype,’ in a curious repetition of the popularised notion of early to mid 1990s ‘lesbian chic.’ During this period, the visible lesbian subject is claimed to have shifted from the ‘mannish lesbian’ of modernity, to the decidedly more marketable ‘lipstick lesbian.’ As Martha Gever remarks in her monograph on lesbian celebrity: [i]f understated mannish garments and bearing could be said to constitute lesbian visibility in the past, the 1990s witnessed the arrival of a lesbian style that is decidedly more spectacular and, as a result, feminized if not always conventionally feminine – flashy but not necessarily frilly.3 This vision of lesbian style is displayed in The L Word, and the marked lesbian body is given significantly less representational prominence. It is even at times explicitly disavowed, most obviously in Alice’s (Leisha Hailey) disparaging reference to what she terms a ‘hundred footer’: “[i]s it her hair? Is it her jog bra? Is it her