Representations of Identities

Movies serve the public as a mirror of society and a lens to explore the intricacies of human behaviour. Television and visual media are among the prime sources of content we consume as a society. This has shifted from the literary works presented to us, such as William Wells Brown’s 1883 novel Clotel and W.E. Du Bois's novel The Comet, both of which reflect the trials and tribulations of African American history. Despite the impact these literary works had in demonstrating the truth of African-American culture and the situation at hand, we find there has been a shift from literary texts to cinematic prose. They remind us that media belongs to, and is a product of, "the market," even as media texts and forms suggest modes of being that escape the market's relentless determination. (Ahn, Himberg, & Young, 2014) Moonlight (2017) and The Watermelon Woman (1996) are two critical exemplars of cinematic masterpieces that deeply reflect the representation of the African-American community and navigate the complex terrain of offering a deeper look into the politics of representation. Not only are they powerfully and intricately written, but both films stand as a transformative power of art, demonstrating to their audience, as well as society at large, the capacity to redefine the boundaries of representation and provoke meaningful dialogues on identity, authenticity, and visibility. Throughout my essay, I will demonstrate how these films are not only political statements of queer identity but also representations of African American identity, and that while both minorities attempt to emerge within these films, they do not overshadow each other from the standpoint of what is predominantly represented. I will explain how they function well on their own to highlight queer representation, and also how queer representation ties into cultural representation.

By initially looking at the film The Watermelon Woman, we are presented with an African-American protagonist – Cheryl Dunye – who, from the start of the movie, identifies as a lesbian woman despite not being in a relationship. Queer identity is at the forefront of this movie, particularly with many of the characters, including Tamara, a crucial protagonist who is a proud African-American lesbian woman. The increase of gay and lesbian representation in mainstream media worked in tandem with the emergence of a new queer market value in the film, television, and music industries. (Ahn, Himberg, & Young, 2014) Initially and throughout the movie, there is a consistent repetition of Cheryl’s identity as a lesbian woman, mainly through her friend Tamara. However, Tamara represents freedom and rebellion in this movie, not just as a side character who is defiant. She demonstrates this attitude by smoking marijuana at one point in the film with Cheryl, and additionally when she rents adult-rated movies under customers’ names. She is a symbol of defiance and liberalism in the lesbian community. To be queer now, then, means to be untethered from 'conventional' codes of behaviour. (Aaron, 2004) Thus, there is a belief, particularly for Tamara, that being queer means being unconventional and disruptive. However, she expresses this through her attitude rather than her physical appearance, unlike Stacey – a potentially queer coworker of hers – who dresses in a more new-age queer style, complete with piercings, dog collars, and hair dye. Queer is not just about gender and sexuality, but also about the restrictiveness of the rules governing them and their intersection with other aspects of identity. (Aaron, 2004) Moving on from that point, this is shown to be a more shallow representation of queer identity which clashes with the significance of what Tamara develops as a ‘real’ representation. This girl is not depicted as being in a queer relationship or even discussing it openly. In contrast, for Tamara, queerness is a major part of her identity, which is heavily represented throughout the movie, especially in instances where she wants Cheryl to find a girlfriend. However, when Cheryl begins a relationship with Diana, she is criticised by her friend Tamara for not dating a black woman. There are multiple stages in the film where this interracial relationship is criticised, not for being a queer relationship but for being an “interracial” relationship. First, despite the rigid rules of acceptable subjects dictated by Western popular culture, these films give voice to the marginalised, not simply focusing on the lesbian and gay community but also on the sub-groups contained within it. (Aaron, 2004) From the point Aaron makes, we can then explore sub-groups, such as queer black or queer interracial relationships. We see a sort of oppression and fetishisation from the white women in the movie towards the black women they are involved with, particularly in the dynamic of Cheryl and Diana. Diana is a white woman who was born in Jamaica, mentioning throughout the movie that all her boyfriends were black. At the beginning of the film, when Cheryl runs into her at the coffee shop, she is seen with another black woman who, initially, one might presume is her girlfriend. We can either deduce fetishisation or imitation, as Tamara refers to her as Cheryl’s “wannabe black girlfriend.” The representation of queer relationships throughout history, especially interracial queer relationships, is portrayed secondarily through the relationship of Fae Richards – the Watermelon Woman – and Martha Page. A mirror of Cheryl and Diana is then conveyed to the audience through the relationship of Fae and Martha—a director and her actress. At one stage in the film, she mentions a book called Hollywood Lesbians, stating it was written by a man about Martha Page, mentioning Fae’s name in passing despite her being just as successful as her lover. Although some could argue that this is designed to eroticise women’s sexuality for a male gaze, I would counter that these romantically shot scenes provide a rare glimpse of queer women of colour engaged in loving intimacy on television. (White, 2017, as cited by Gates, 2017) From the male perspective, there is then the issue of the male gaze and how it can be eroticised through the intimate scene between Diana and Cheryl; however, for the message of the movie, this scene has been executed to bring more light to the African American body. While queerness is essentially “invisible” since it requires the performance of visible actions such as nonnormative gender performance and identity and observable same-sex relationships, blackness is a visual marker of difference—through skin colour and tone, hair, facial features, etc.—that can arguably only be made “invisible” through the performance of passing as nonblack. (Faucheux, 2014) Not only is this a visualisation of the queer relationship between the two, but it also highlights the contrast between their bodies and their characters.

Moving on to the queer identity represented through a more modern, male-dominated perspective, we look at Moonlight. This movie follows three chapters of the life of the protagonist, Chiron, an African-American man growing up in Miami. The film focuses less on queer relationships as a whole and more on the self-reflection of queer identity represented in Chiron’s childhood when he questions Juan about the meaning of a “faggot,” which then evolves to another point in the movie when he is called a “faggot” and mocked for being queer as a teenager. Unlike the queer representation found in The Watermelon Woman, we see a more complex portrayal of men’s queerness in a traditionally “masculine society.” Not only is queerness portrayed through Chiron’s journey to find his identity, but additionally through Kevin, who openly discusses his sexual exploits with women despite finding himself in a queer entanglement with Chiron on the beach. The search and representation of queer identity isn’t as vocal in Moonlight; however, as an audience, it is something deduced from the moments Chiron experiences when he dreams of Kevin or even when he looks at him or is silent in his presence. It is often said (or thought but not stated) that queer studies are a nineties kind of affair, and it is true that their rise in that decade was fueled by a sense of political urgency and fortified by intersections with media-driven activist movements that were also coming into their own. (Ahn, Himberg, & Young, 2014) As a society, queer relationships – especially those between men – are often represented in the media as more effeminate and physically disruptive (i.e., drag, cross-dressing, etc.). The representation of queer identity in this film challenges the norm of what some might think being gay looks like. Queer means resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression. (Aaron, 2004) We have been led to believe that to be masculine means to repress feelings and show no emotion. However, Chiron not only represents queer masculinity but also the new-age masculinity that processes his feelings. In this case, queer is not simply about expression; it is represented as a form of self-identification. As major bastions of cultural production, Hollywood films reach national and international audiences and are, therefore, more likely than non-Hollywood films (e.g., independent, avant-garde, or experimental) to have a significant ideological impact on American and global culture (A. Collins, Hand, & Snell, 2002; Schatz, 2009 as cited by Erigha, 2016). From this notion, Moonlight proves that it acknowledges societies and ethnicities where masculinity and expression differ from those in White Western culture. To exemplify this statement, there is a simplicity in holding the other person that doesn’t need to be extravagant, which we see at the end of the movie when Chiron lets down his front of being a traditionally masculine man and leans his head on Kevin while they sit in silence. From a more metaphorical perspective, Chiron removes his “fronts” before seeing Kevin, which is the physical embodiment of letting down his walls. Although, as Aaron states, to be queer means to disrupt normative values, the characters of Chiron and Kevin demonstrate that it can be done through subtlety. Narratives of the movement of the socio-realist tendency (defined by thematising current socio-cultural issues): The films in this category draw on contemporary experiences and oppose tradition to modernity, oral to written, agrarian and customary communities to urban and industrialised systems, subsistence economies to highly productive economies. (Diawara, 1989)

Although queer identity is at the base of both movies, it becomes a struggle to show what might be overshadowed: whether the African-American identity and history are represented correctly, or whether that of queer identity takes precedence. However, following my initial argument, both groups are represented differently in each film considered. Sexual orientation and identity follow black identity. Taking the example of The Watermelon Woman, although we see Cheryl's identity as a lesbian woman, she searches for her historical roots as a black woman before discovering that Fae Richards was a lesbian woman herself in her time. “Afrofuturism can be seen as less a marker of black authenticity and more a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine.” (Kilgore, 2014, as cited by Faucheux 2014) Cheryl finds that the links are not only the revolutionary achievements of Fae Richards as a black woman in history, especially during the time of segregation, but also within a repressed and homophobic society. A personification of that time is Martha Page’s sister, who denies Martha’s lesbian relationship with Fae Richards. Queer represents the re-appropriation of power from an antagonistic, homophobic society, through reclaiming derogatory terms and adopting a new approach to 'gay' politics: confronting the institution rather than showing fearful, assimilated complicity. (Aaron, 2004) Similarly, in Moonlight, we see the stigma surrounding gay people as Chiron not only questions himself as a queer man but also tries to find his identity within the black community. Upon reviewing the movie, we confront numerous stereotypes about African American culture in impoverished areas that soon become unravelled and broken. Looking at Juan and Teresa, although Juan is a drug dealer, he attempts to be a good role model for Chiron. Additionally, Teresa offers him a home when his mother cannot. Furthermore, these movies focus on identity; one cannot override the other if they are part of the same individual. There is no loss of focus in The Watermelon Woman or Moonlight regarding racial identity to make room for their queer identity. At the intersection of black queer theory and Afrofuturism lies queer Afrofuturism, a term designating those Afrofuturist texts in which race is inextricably tied to gender and sexuality in such a way that it is impossible to discuss one without already signifying the other. (Faucheux, 2014) In The Watermelon Woman, we see ideas of segregation that remain true for black people, illustrated by the division of the “black section” in the library when Cheryl attempts to collect records of Fae Richards. Furthermore, from this point, it can be analysed that a white woman is taking ownership of a history that has been hidden from African Americans when she forbids Cheryl from filming any photos or documents she finds. The stories recount colonial encounters and often pit African heroes and heroines against European villains. (Diawara, 1989) From a political perspective, we see this racism and separation when Bob treats (the new worker who is white); although he is a black man, he prioritises her comfort. We also see a similar attitude when Diana tries to divert Cheryl’s attention from her documentary while they are in bed together. When observing Moonlight, we encounter a less racially prolific ideology; most cast members of this movie are black. However, we engage with a self-reflective concept of race. From the film's beginning, Kevin nicknames Chiron “Black,” the name he uses in the third chapter upon his transformation into the stereotyped African American man. Barry Jenkins and James Lexton indicated as much when they asserted that they designed Moonlight’s visual style, in their words, to “elevate” this story of African American men and women living in an economically impoverished neighbourhood. (Gates, 2017) Through aesthetic scenes and moments of silence, the movie breaks these stereotypes and conveys beauty that exists in an otherwise harsh world. Recognising that aesthetic choices carry racialised politics requires acknowledging that the very act of filming is a political act. (Gates, 2017) Building on the politics surrounding aesthetic choices, Juan mentions to a younger Chiron at the beginning of the movie that a woman once said to him growing up, “black children turn blue in the moonlight.” In the ending scene of Moonlight, the audience is brought back to a young Chiron standing on the beach bathed in moonlight, bringing the movie full circle while also showcasing the beauty of African-American skin with a bluish hue under the night sky, which is one of the only times we see the African-American body in that state throughout the film. Aesthetics bear the indelible imprint of racial ideologies. (Gates, 2017) Lighting in this movie plays a significant role in revealing what conventional lighting would otherwise obscure: the emotion and hues reflecting the unspoken words. Due to the centuries-long narrative crafted by white imperialism of the black body as sexually deviant, rewriting queerness into black culture and history would “threaten mainstream Black political and cultural narratives of racial uplift and achievement, respectability and civility” (Reider, 2010, as cited by Faucheux, 2014)

 Both The Watermelon Woman and Moonlight are significant modern films that not only possess spectacular plots but also drive forward political meanings of what it is to represent both African-American culture and queer culture and identity. 'Identification across identities' occurs in cinema, as the spectator aligns with someone else on-screen. (Aaron, 2004) One identity cannot exist without the other, as both have been oppressed to different extents. Queer identity in these movements further emphasises the importance of queer African-American representation as it deals with matters of the body, which, as Reider mentions (Reider, 2010), the black body is considered sexually deviant. In these movies, there is a beauty that only aesthetics and representation of queer identity can provide without eroticisation. To be queerly present is to apprehend 'the complexity of what happens “between” the contingent spaces where each variable [race, class, gender] intersects with the others.' (Mercer, 1991, as cited by Aaron, 2004) Even though both movies have different focal points in terms of what meaning they aim to convey, they tend to align in successfully representing these two identities without neglecting one or the other. Understanding racism and the construction of race from the perspective of sexuality studies becomes relevant because racist discourses are entwined with hetero-patriarchal ideologies. (Faucheux, 2014)

References

Aaron, M. (2004). Introduction: The New Queer Cinema. In The New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. Rutgers University Press.

 Ahn, P., Himberg, J., & Young, D. R. (2014). Introduction. Cinema Journal, 53(2), 117–121. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43653571

 Amandine H. Faucheux. (2017). Race and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson’s Oeuvre; or, Queer Afrofuturism. Science Fiction Studies, 44(3), 563. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0563

 Diawara, M. (1989). African Cinema Today. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 37, 110–128. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44111684

 Dunye, Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman. San Francisco, California: Kanopy Streaming, 2023

 Erigha, M. (2016). Do African Americans Direct Science Fiction or Blockbuster Franchise Movies? Race, Genre, and Contemporary Hollywood. Journal of Black Studies, 47(6), 550–569. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43927324

 Gates, R. (2017). The Last Shall Be First: Aesthetics and Politics in Black Film and Media. Film Quarterly, 71(2), 38–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26413861

 Jenkins, B. (2016). Moonlight. A24.