Customer Reviews

Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (Reading Contemporary Television)

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This book is for 'The L Word' fans. It helped us to understand the whole concept of our favourite tv show in every angle.

This book is overly academic, filled with the type of Ph.D student blah-blah that keeps these types from enjoying ANYTHING that is 'reifying the discursive hegemonic whiteness rather than engaging in postcolonial discourse of the subaltern'...ie, we use huge words to cover up the fact that we are saying very little. Thankfully, some of the contributors write intelligently about the L Word being QUITE subversive. However, there is the usual crap about the L Word pandering to 'straight men' merely because the stars are beautiful. By this false logic, lesbians therefore either: a. like ugly women or b. could care less what women look like. This is ignorant, ridiculous, and actually quite unsubversive, as it assumes that 'lesbian' is not a real sexuality, just a catch-all term for women who aren't 'pretty enough to get a man'. By showing beautiful lesbians, The L Word provides a little education for both ignorant straight men who assume every beautiful woman they see is straight and every ugly woman they see is a lesbian, AND ignorant straight women who call their platonic female friends their 'girlfriends' and exclaim 'but you're both too pretty to be lesbians!" when a pretty couple outs themselves. Luckily, the book is not all lipstick lesbian bashing or academicese, but there is enough of this to bring pause.