A couple of nights ago I had the great fun of watching (and being a backup dancer!!) in Candy B' Australian Booty, a stand-up musical cabaret show about being a "big brown woman" and dealing with prejudice, dodgy exes, and lack of representation.
Representation is an issue that comes up a lot in Australian Booty. Candy talks about never seeing anyone like her on TV, and how even studying in NIDA (Australia's premier drama school) didn't make as big a difference. From childhood onwards, she received derogatory comments about her skin colour and her appearance - from insults about her birth story, to salespeople responding to her requests for a sexy dress (the one she wears in the show) with a muumuu to "hide her flab" (after gushing at her supposed resemblance to Macy Gray), to ex-partners who respond to horrible racist comments by family members with a high-5. Every so often she brings up her nieces, and talks about how she finds it hard to find toys that show a brown person in a positive light - wryly commenting on an African-American Barbie who seems to be jobless, unlike other Barbies. (Her cover story to her niece is that she is a human rights lawyer who earned so much money she never had to work again.)
Candy found it hard enough to find people in wider media that looked like her, let alone those that were portrayed as sexy or desirable. She notes that took her a long time for her to feel deserving of attraction. Where are the big brown women? she laments. Hell where are the big women to begin with? Due to that lack of positive representation, she ends up with people's comments about how she couldn't be attractive (a childhood bully taunts with "no one would want to kiss YOU!") - because she didn't look like what is meant to be attractive.
Sexuality activist flexibeast talks about something similar, from the perspective of trans women in pornography: how most trans women in porn tend to conform to a "shemale" look, how flexibeast finds it difficult to take on "androgyny" as a term despite technically fitting it because the norm tends to favour minimised displays of anything gendered (also favouring women and those Assigned Female at Birth), and how even queer porn - usually described as a bastion of diversity and wider representation, tends to favour a certain trend: pieced, tattooed, unconventional hair.
One thing I have noticed in trying to be more involved in the queer community is that my appearance often flummoxes people. My brown skin and obviously ethnic appearance (no matter what I wear) means that more often than not people think my sexual orientation is Foreign. Even with an "alternative lifestyle haircut" I don't really pass. Some say my biggest obstacle is that my current primary partner is a straight cis male - but I have noticed that it seems to be easier for White(-passing) people to find female partners even if they already have husbands or boyfriends, or just easier full stop. I feel immense pressure to conform to some idea of Hipster Queer, or of Butch or Femme - concepts I find tied to ideas of masculinity and femininity that are foreign to me - and if I don't fit in, if I'm just doing what I want to do, I'm not queer. Never mind my personal sexual preference or history.
To connect to flexibeast's point about attractive people in porn, I wonder how much of it is a Magical Veil of Hawt effect happening: that your presence in something like queer porn presumes your attractiveness. I am on the Crash Pad Series (under a different name, see if you can find me) and there hasn't been any question from anyone (that I know of anyway) about my worthiness of being there, even though Crash Pad is widely known for its "alternative attractive queer" models. I have done nude art photography before and often get met with positive comments. There's only been one time that something more explicit of mine has received a negative comment - and that got shot down immediately by others. In contrast, other burlesque performers (and the general public) have put me down for my appearance and presumed lack of attractiveness (with the idea that "only pretty people do burlesque") and, as mentioned before, my queer identity is often disputed within the queer communities.
flexibeast talks about trying to start up their own trans pornography blog, only to not see many respondents amongst trans women, and wonders how much of it has to do with trans women not being willing to put themselves out there. They bring up some strong points, such as the already-low likelihood of employment and other life access being compromised further, personal perception that they don't look the part, and the high risk of being ridiculed for putting themselves out there, since it happens so often.
I see strong parallels with South Asians and creative sexuality (or anything that even remotely comes as "indecent" - my parents felt the entertainment & arts industries were already tainted from the get-go). Representations are few and far between, and when they do exist it's often as an exotic token or item of ridicule. The risk of being shamed and cut off important basic needs, something already very precarious, increases. Because hardly anyone's willing to be the first penguin, making themselves vulnerable to very high risks for very little payoff, representations are low - and then people assume they're not wanted anyway. The Magical Veil of Hawt doesn't even have a chance to bestow itself on those that dare - because it's not made a strong case for being worth the hassle.
And when you don't see yourself represented, like Candy B brings up, you feel less inclined to take on those roles. People reinforce the idea that you do not belong. You notice patterns: dominant look, dominant skin colour, dominant attributes - even when they have nothing to do with the task at hand. You see people responding more to those dominant traits just because they are more familiar. And the cycle goes on.
Representation is part of the core of what I am trying to explore with this MFA: How do we encourage people to be that first penguin? How do we not make the playing field so full of predators? How do we mitigate the risk? How do we find positive growth pathways so that creative sexual expression is a positive and beneficial experience for the performer and audience and wider public? How do we consider the Magical Veil of Hawt in what we do - and how much of that is stereotyping and objectification?
Which comes first - more marginalised people taking the risk (and possibly not getting anywhere), or the gatekeepers of wider society being more explicitly inclusive rather than exclusive? Or does this happen only in tandem?
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