femme focus by genevieve berrik Finding An Audience
Think about the last time, you and a friend might have decided spontaneously to do some things that you couldn’t have seen yourself doing before.
With the right instigator, suddenly you’re packing
up to go camping just out of town, trying Acro yoga, making your own zine, throwing together a horror-themed photo shoot. There are ways to be part of a community that make their own kind of creativity. And, the queer community in all its forms is particularly good at that kind of thing. A community that used the camp term, “Friend of Dorothy” and other similar quips, created their own fabulous inside-joke references in order to find one another. A community that produces provocative, queer, music icons like Peaches and artists like Tom of Finland, Heather Cassils and Zackary Drucker, understands this creativity and art. Just about anything might be possible with the right people around you, both as the instigators and as the audience you want to give to, to represent and to construct and foster. It was in this kind of space that the makers of Her
Story, a six-part web series about queer women loving and learning from one another came about (
herstoryshow.com). Co-writer of the series and its starring actor, Jen Richards, has previously spoken out in a well-crafted piece for The Advocate, about
the ways in which “calling out and in,” can be both poisonous, destructive and alienating, especially for the transfeminine community. However, she also engaged on how there are ways to hold humor and affection and further produce community support, through warmth and care for those of us who are in need. Because, for so many of us, those communities can be all we’ve got. One of the ways, is to make the kind of sliver of representation and creative community that you wish to see in the world, is perhaps, through a web series! I was first introduced to Her Story through a diverse group of friends of mine, primarily femme- identified people, who openly embraced the series. Doing so, because of the kind of representation they’d been longing for, of their lives and loves. They chatted across social media about the world of the series and added to their own links around and through it. It is not to say they didn’t have quibbles with the representations, which is always a likely thing, when there are only so many stories and personalities who can be represented in any space. One of the characters is aggressively anti-trans in the series. A fact that contains some harsh and
confusing moments around why it might be, the community she lives in keeps her in its fold. But, it’s also read against her work as a worker at a shelter. A space in which the harm people can do to one another, must be so vividly and tangibly present that fear and hatred must sometimes seem like the only response. Unfortunately, it’s these same kinds of experiences that all kinds of queer community have in common too often. When I spoke to the executive producer of the
show, Katherine Fisher, we talked about the ways that community can be so supportive. Even how it enveloped her during the making of the series and since its release. Looking forward to the likely possibility of a second season, we started to agree that even the tensions within finding good queer representation had, themselves, the chance to be productive. Perhaps the answer looks more complicated,
than the simple ways we want to reject those who spread toxicity and rejection and instead find ways to create and come together through trauma negotiations. It won’t be easy... But it might be amazing.
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RAGE monthly | MARCH 2016
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