So you’re saying, you’re either with us or against us?
You are either in favor of equality for LGBTQIA+ people or you are not. If you are in favor of equality for LGBTQIA+ people, then you have a moral obligation to depict them and to depict them as equal to straight people.
Nobody would accept a world in which Marvel Studios makes dozens and dozens of films and creates over a hundred major characters without any of them being black; why is it okay to do that with LGBTQIA+ people?
The world doesn’t work that way. You can’t ask for acceptance of your beliefs without offering acceptance of anyone else’s.
No. Just as black people and their allies do not have any obligation to accept the belief of some white people that black people are not equal, LGBTQIA+ people and their allies do not have any obligation to accept the belief of some straight people that LGBTQIA+ people are not equal.
And no, it’s not an inherently political choice.
Yes, it is, because excluding LGBTQIA+ characters in a franchise with dozens upon dozens of characters means you're constructing a fantasy world in which LGBTQIA+ people are not present. That is not realistic -- it is a deliberate decision to depict straight people and their experiences as being more important than those of people who are not straight.
I repeat: Nobody would accept a world in which Marvel Studios makes dozens and dozens of films and creates over a hundred major characters without any of them being black; why is it okay to do that with LGBTQIA+ people?
If a writer got an idea for a gay character and the producer nixed it, that’s a political choice. Just saying “This character I designed is straight” is an artistic choice.
Not when you do it over 100 times in a franchise consisting of dozens of movies and TV shows. That's a pattern of centering straight people and their experiences first.
And of course there’s nothing wrong with imagining a character is gay, but if there’s no evidence to support it don’t expect the actor to personally entertain your fantasy.
They weren't upset he disagreed with whether or not Sam and Bucky are straight. They were upset he implied there's something bad about the idea of interpreting Sam and Bucky as LGBTQIA+.
You’re just as demanding of conformity as the other side is.
I do demand that people treat LGBTQIA+ people as equals.
Yes, there SHOULD be more representation of LGBTQ+ people in media. But you need to learn the difference between ‘Should do it’ and ‘Must do it or else you’re the enemy’.
1) I tried in my first post on this topic to be generous to Mackie's POV and point out that there
does need to be more space in art for depicting platonic friendships between men. Why has no one acknowledge that?
2) I never said "or else you're the enemy." But if Marvel Studios, out of dozens of films and God knows how many major characters
still hasn't introduced a major LGBTQIA+ character, then that absolutely reflects a bias in favor of straight people over LGBTQIA+ people. It is absolutely not a realistic depiction of humanity to exclude them. That doesn't make them "the enemy." But it does mean that prejudice is at play and that they need to do better at depicting a marginalized community as equals.
"cisheterosexist"? Seriously?
I don't understand what you're trying to say. What's wrong with the word "cisheterosexist?" Do you have a better word to describe a belief that cisgender heterosexual people are more important than or superior to LGBTQIA+ people? It packs a lot of concepts into one word and it's easier than trying to individually list prejudices against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, queer people, intersex people, asexual people, nonbinary people, etc.
I don't use the word "homophobic" for 2 reasons:
- The people the word is describing do not usually fear homosexuality. Rather, they usually simply believe that cisgender straight people are superior to and/or more important than LGBTQIA+ people.
- The word "homophobic" only itself encompasses fear of homosexuality, and does not encompass prejudice against transgender people, nonbinary people, genderqueer people, asexuality, and other sexual identities that exist behind the inadequate "either-gay-or-straight" paradigm.
Greece, Rome, India, just to name a few powerful cultures going back thousands of years?
Marvel Studios films are not the product of ancient Greek, ancient Roman, or Indian cultures. Marvel Studios films are the product of American and Western European cultures, and American culture inherited cisheterosexism (the belief in the superiority of cisgender people over transgender people and nonbinary people and in the superiority of heterosexuality over other sexual identities) from Western European culture going back roughly to the time Christianity became the dominant religion in Western Europe roughly 2,000 years ago.
You seem to have bought into a pretty rigid political agenda,
I don't think "LGBTQIA+ people are equal and should be treated as equal" is an unreasonably rigid agenda. Like I said: Nobody reasonable person would think it would be acceptable for Marvel Studios to produce dozens of movies and create hundreds of characters and have none of them be black. Every reasonable person recognizes that they would have a moral obligation to depict black people. So why doesn't that same rule apply to LGBTQIA+ people?
complete with made-up terminology.
Are you referring to the word "cisheterosexist?" Is there something wrong with that word? It's the most efficient, all-encompassing word I've ever found to describe prejudice against LGBTQIA+ sexuality in general rather than only one particular sexuality identity within that spectrum. It's becoming
pretty common in the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. If you have a better word to describe prejudice against the entire spectrum of non-straight sexual identities and orientations, please let me know.
Sure maybe he could have worded it better, but I don't think your version of things would have applied.
Unless someone is a member of the community so affected, I don't think it is the place of people in the dominant group to police how members of marginalized communities feel and react their (the dominant group member's) word choices.
If all of the creatives involved with the creation of a character or characters intended those characters to be straight, then those characters are straight,
Not if they don't explicitly establish them as such. Unless Sam and Bucky explicitly are identified in the text as being straight, interpreting them as LGBTQIA+ is just as valid an interpretation as interpreting them as straight.
It's art, not an encyclopedia entry.
and there is nothing wrong with them saying that when asked.
They're not upset Mackie doesn't agree with the interpretation that the characters are LGBTQIA+. They're upset he implied there's something bad about that interpretation.
The people who created the characters know.
No, they know what they intended and they know what is textually established.
Does the creators intent mean nothing?
Not if it isn't explicitly in the text.
"Death of the author," baby.
Sci said:
You realize how outdated it is to refer to people as "homosexuals" outside of highly technical contexts, right? It's borderline offensive to many gay people because it's a term that was historically used by people who hated them and wanted them to cease to exist. I'm not saying this to be mean-spirited or disagreeable -- I'm saying this in case you're unaware.
When did this happen? This is the first I've ever seen anyone get upset over the word homosexual.
To be clear, I wasn't upset -- I was trying to help you avoid offending someone else in the future.
As for when this happened, it's been building organically for a long while now. I first became aware of it just from talking to LGBTQIA+ friends. The prominent LGBTQIA+ rights organization GLAAD (founded as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) first included "homosexual" on its
list of offensive terms in 2006. Gary Nunn wrote an op-ed in the
Guardian asking them to stop using the term "homosexual" for LGBTQIA+ people in 2011, and
this essay in This Week from a straight person to other straight people explaining why the word has widely come to be seen as offensive in the LGBTQIA+ community was published in 2015.
This is just strange to me, the only "valid" interpretation of something is what the creator intended when they created the artwork.
I strongly urge you to look up the concept of "death of the author."
It's fine to have different interpretations of something if it was created with that intent, but if the creators had one interpretation in mind, then that is the only valid interpretation.
If that were the case, a lot of important works of art would have been long forgotten. How many productions of Shakespeare have used entirely different interpretations of his plays? Think about the time Patrick Stewart played Othello with a cast that was otherwise all-black. This is the ur-example, but think about all those scholars who have written that John Milton, when he wrote
Paradise Lost, was of the Devil's party and didn't know about it.
Yeah, it would be nice to see LGBTQ+ characters in the MCU but saying it's "offensive" that there haven't been any yet is taking it a bit far.
That idea only makes sense if you think that representation for a marginalized community isn't a moral necessity in treating them as equals. But marginalized people, over and over again throughout history, have stressed that not being represented in popular media causes them major psychological harm. It's one thing for
one installment in a series to focus on members of other communities. But if you have dozens of installments and over a hundred characters, then that's systematically excluding them. That harms them, and that is
not treating them as equal.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: No reasonable person would say it would have been acceptable for Marvel Studios to produce dozens of films over the course of 12 years and not feature a single prominent black character. So why is it acceptable to do that to LGBTQIA+ people?
If people want to imagine or hope that the characters are gay, that doesn't mean they are,
Sure it does -- to them. You don't share that interpretation, so they are not -- to you. No one interpretation is more valid than the other in the absence of explicit textual statements. The characters are not real, and therefore they can be LGBTQIA+ to one person and straight to another.
and it's ridiculous to get angry when the people involved say they aren't.
1) It is not ridiculous if it is
yet another instance of their being excluded from representation from a long series. 2) Again, they're angry Mackie implied there's something
bad about interpreting Sam and Bucky that way.
* * *
I won't be replying to any more posts on this topic. If after reading this post, someone still does not understand that creators are not treating members of marginalized communities as equals if they (the creators) exclude them again and again and again and again across dozens of movies and over a hundred characters, then that person is treating straight people as more important than LGBTQIA+ people even if they don't consciously realize that's what they're doing. And if that's the case, there's nothing else I can say.
