Black Queer Representation in Media

“Rac(ism) & Horror” is a YouTube video by creator Khadija Mbowe covering a general history of how the horror genre uses race as a storytelling mechanism and the racial stereotypes that are present in many films. Mbowe focuses on the portrayal of the victim and the perpetrator, and how they are racialized. As a method of oppression, colonizers created a narrative surrounding race to justify oppressing entire groups of people. Author Patricia Collins writes: “Dehumanizing Black people by defining them as nonhuman and as animals was a critical feature of racial oppression.” (Collins 55) These narratives continued into chattel slavery, and still exist in some form today. The stereotypes created and reinforced by colonization are present in film and inform how Black characters are treated. This extends to horror movies, where the trope of the Black character dying first is very common. Mbowe points out that this is caused by the hegemonic idea of Black masculinity making Black men seem ...

  “Good Representation Matters | Colorism and Casting” was created by Cheyenne Lin in 2020 to talk about Black and Asian American representation on screen and how colorism plays a role in who is cast. In the video, she discusses the fine line between real life identification and on screen representation, the limited representation of the Black experience that colorism causes, and how casting a light skinned actor in place of a dark skinned actor can change a character's role within a story. The lack of representation means that less unique stories are able to be told and people are not able to see themselves on screen, which is an isolating experience.  As a result of white supremacy, casting directors tend to cast actors with eurocentric features and light skin because they are seen as the standard of beauty. This means that people without those features or darker skin color are given less roles and representation within the film and TV industry. A result of this is the rac...

  Although lesbian representation is becoming more mainstream, there is still very minimal butch lesbian representation. Even when gender non-conforming or butch coded lesbians are shown, they rarely are called butch within the media itself. When lesbian relationships are represented on screen it is often between two femme or fem lesbians, ignoring butch, stud and stem lesbian relationships. Even rarer is relationships between two butch lesbians. The lack of representation for butch lesbians is isolating and ignores its importance within lesbian culture.  While I was brainstorming for this post, I tried to think of any butch lesbian characters to use as examples for positive or negative representation, especially if they explicitly identified themselves as butch within the media itself. I couldn’t think of a single explicitly butch character in any of the shows or movies I had watched, and when I asked my friends, they had a very similar sentiment. There were plenty of lesbian...