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Feminist Media Studies

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“L” is for Looking Again

Margaret McFadden
Published online: 10 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Margaret McFadden (2010) “L” is for Looking Again, Feminist Media Studies,
10:4, 421-439, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.514115

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 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN

Art and representation on The L Word

Margaret McFadden

This paper focuses on an important aspect of the Showtime television series The L Word: its
exploration of the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary visual art. The program
presents a sophisticated feminist perspective on the histories of female and lesbian representation,
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and it uses the work of particular contemporary artists, who are known for their engagement with
questions of female, lesbian, and/or queer representation, to advance its critique of a long history of
erasure, misrepresentation, and objectification. Simultaneously, while foregrounding its awareness
of the contradictions of trying to create new forms of representation in a thoroughly commercial and
commodified context, the program uses works of art to present the possibility of inventing
alternative images or of redefining existing ones. The show’s consistent attention to innovative art
constitutes a formal device that offers a counter-discourse to those conventions of representation
required by the show’s need to appeal to a broad audience. In this way, The L Word offers attentive
viewers new ways to look at and think about apparently familiar images and narratives.

KEYWORDS The L Word; lesbians; television; art; feminism; representation

Introduction
During its six seasons on the air (2004–2009), The L Word was one of the Showtime
network’s most highly rated programs. Set in upscale West Hollywood, California, this hour-
long serial melodrama explored the public and private lives of an evolving friendship circle
of lesbian and bisexual women.1 As the first US television series to represent a lesbian
community, the show necessarily presented its producers with some thorny questions
about how to portray lesbian and bisexual women in ways that did not simply reproduce
stereotypes and preconceptions shaped by a sexist and heterosexist dominant culture. At
the same time, Showtime’s profit-driven goal of attracting the broadest possible audience
necessarily complicated presenting explicit challenges to those stereotypes and
preconceptions. The program’s attempts to navigate these representational, political and
commercial contradictions have produced a wide variety of responses from audiences,
from avid fandom to passionate critique.
This paper will make two central claims. First, The L Word takes a sophisticated
feminist perspective on the histories of female and queer representation, and it makes
those histories a central theme of the program. The show makes visible and critiques the
kinds of stereotypical and objectifying portrayals of women and of queers that are
normative in US culture—in both popular cultural forms like Hollywood film and

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2010

ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/10/040421-439
q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.514115
 422 MARGARET MCFADDEN

pornography, and high cultural forms like painting, sculpture, art photography, and
experimental video—and explores the possibilities for inventing alternative forms or
images or redefining existing ones.
Second, the show simultaneously foregrounds its awareness of the contradictions of
trying to create new forms of representation in a thoroughly commercial and commodified
cultural context, and it consistently stages and explores those contradictions. That is, The L
Word knows that in order to have broad cultural appeal (and thus commercial success), it
must conform to certain familiar conventions of television. At the same time, however, it
systematically reframes those conventions, offering attentive viewers new ways to look at
and think about apparently familiar images and narratives.
This essay will focus on one aspect of this larger project of The L Word: its exploration
of the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary art. The show is quite
unusual and innovative in its focus on the intertextual connections between high art and
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popular culture. It uses the work of particular contemporary artists known for their
engagement with questions of female, lesbian and/or queer representation to advance its
critique of a long history of erasure, misrepresentation, and objectification, and to argue for
innovative female and queer self-representation as a necessary response to that history.
These artists are not constrained by the same kinds of commercial pressures as The L Word
is, so the show’s consistent attention to their (and others’) work constitutes a formal device
that provides a counter-discourse or subversive alternative to those conventions of
representation required by the show’s need to appeal to a broad audience; in other words,
these artists can do things that the show cannot. Among the artists whose work is
highlighted to create this reflexive commentary on the show’s operations are Laurie Papou,
Lisa Yuskavage, Delmas Howe, and Catherine Opie. In addition, the show has offered
numerous story arcs that focus on art, using narrative to explore these same issues and
advance its arguments, and I will analyze one such narrative arc below.
Before I develop these arguments, I think it’s important to acknowledge all the
reasons one might be skeptical about the broad claims I have just made. Indeed, given the
powerful insights about the complex and contradictory representations of women that
have been produced by two decades of feminist criticism, it seems wise to approach The L
Word with what we might call a “hermeneutic of feminist suspicion.”2 As many critics have
noted, the fact that the main characters are conventionally beautiful, thin, gender-
normative, and predominately white and upper middle class, might be read as
perpetuating a very limited hegemonic ideal of beauty and womanhood, one that has
long been the subject of feminist and lesbian analysis and critique. Further, the characters’
visual presentation, both within the show and in the publicity discourses about the show,
could be read as reproducing an aesthetic shaped more by soft-core pornography and
upscale underwear catalogues than by feminist perspectives. This casting might also seem
to participate in the “lesbian chic” phenomenon, in which a conventional and thus non-
threatening figure is promoted to mainstream audiences as a glamorous, eroticized foil to
the stereotypical frumpy, man-hating, and now deeply passé lesbian-feminist of the 1970s
(Kregloe & Caputi 1997). Further, since these characters don’t look all that different from the
fake lesbians who are ubiquitous in pornography aimed at heterosexual male audiences,
viewers might be concerned that the show’s representation of lesbian sexuality could end
up reproducing exploitative imagery, in hopes of attracting a broad male audience. Finally,
we might also note that the show’s serial melodramatic form is one that has often been
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 423

used to narrate women’s victimization and to reinforce ideologies of female powerlessness

and of the impossibility of effecting broad structural social change (Williams 1998).
Given all these points, and given the larger history of representation of women and of
queers in mass culture, there is certainly ample reason to be skeptical of how progressive or
unambiguously feminist The L Word could be, in the face of very real commercial pressures.
However, as Lotz (2006) has recently argued, the rise of new cable networks has created
new possibilities for female-centered dramas, possibilities that may require new analytical
strategies. The L Word’s location on a premium cable network, aimed to appeal to a specific
niche, rather than to a broad mainstream audience, creates a context in which a feminist
show has more room to negotiate with conventions and challenge viewers. So while a
“hermeneutic of feminist suspicion” is certainly necessary, and draws our attention to the
ways the program seems to conform to numerous representational conventions, that
hermeneutic is not sufficient to understand all the ways that the program is simultaneously
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either reflecting on and critiquing those very conventions, or attempting to redefine them.
If we look again, we see that The L Word repeatedly demonstrates its understanding of
feminist and queer critiques of representation, and integrates those analyses into its own
text. These strategies draw viewers’ attention to the fact that at the very same time that it
seems to be offering familiar, normative, even objectifying forms of representation, the
show is de-naturalizing them, through a variety of reflexive strategies. In other words, we
might not be seeing what we think we’re seeing.

The Problem of Representation

The L Word’s concern with the complexities of female and queer representation is
marked by its almost obsessive attention to the process of creating representations in
contemporary visual culture. We see characters creating pornographic, documentary, and
fiction films; music videos; video art; sculpture; television programs; websites; podcasts; and
marketing campaigns. In virtually every one of these scenes, we are shown a different
example of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of lesbian lives by commercial media
producers and consumers (often male) who are locked into hegemonic ways of seeing. We
are also shown the realities of the commercial motives that often drive (or distort) such
productions. The L Word teaches viewers to see this history of misrepresentation, and to
notice exactly how media is used to tell lies. In so doing, of course, it reflexively draws
viewers’ attention to its own status as a constructed (and potentially false) text.
A key formal strategy that the show uses to thematize these broad questions of
representation is making frequent intertextual references to specific works of art that are
themselves exploring questions of representation in contemporary culture. One of the main
characters in the ensemble is Bette Porter (played by Jennifer Beals), who is at first the
director of an up-and-coming contemporary art museum, and who later becomes the dean
of a university art school. Her position as a cutting-edge curator and critic provides The L
Word with a device by which to show viewers a great deal of visual art. Through Bette’s
character, the program returns repeatedly to reflexive questions about the representation
of gender and sexuality in contemporary art and popular culture.
For example, in each episode, the work of different artists appears on screen. The art
on the walls in Bette’s office changes quite often, and new works frequently appear in her
home. She visits galleries and artists’ studios, scenes in which we see the work of both
fictional and real artists displayed or being made. At other times, viewers are positioned as
 424 MARGARET MCFADDEN

members of her audience as Bette lectures on specific pieces to other characters. Several of
the featured artists even appear briefly in the show, with their work, which is highlighted and
sometimes even discussed by the characters. In addition, season one culminates in an
extended story arc, in which Bette and her museum must fight a far-right Christian group that
is trying to prevent the opening of a show of challenging and controversial works called
“Provocations.” The art works shown in these contexts typically comment on the action or the
cultural moment in some way, and often serve to challenge the representations of gender
and sexuality that seem to be implicit in the show’s casting and character development.

The Artists
The L Word focuses on the works of carefully chosen artists, people whose work is well
known for its engagement with and challenges to the history of representation of women
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and queers. The presence of these images enables the program to interrogate its own
apparent participation in reproducing dominant narratives about gender and sexuality.
The L Word raises the question of the relationship between art and pornography in
the pilot episode. Given that some audiences are likely to view the show’s representation of
explicit lesbian sexuality and female nudity as inherently pornographic, it is important for
the show to stake out its position from the outset; its defense of the right of artists to
explore gender and sexuality in their work is therefore not only a defense of challenging art
in a free society, but also, at least implicitly, a defense of the show’s right to exist. Including
the work of Canadian artist Laurie Papou allows the show to develop this theme.
At a gallery talk at her museum that blends the fictional and the real, Bette introduces
Papou, by asking,
How do we draw the line that signifies whether an image reads as pornography? I mean,
who gets to say what passes as art and what is obscenity? The debate has been taken up
by Laurie Papou, in a series of paintings entitled “A Group of Seven.” Please welcome
Laurie. (The L Word 2004, pilot episode)

During this introduction, the camera pans the stage, allowing us to see Papou’s large-scale
painting “Mutual Reflections” (1991) behind Bette and the artist.3 Later in the episode, we
see Bette and Tina standing before two other Papou paintings, “She wished she had been
named Hope, as a reminder,” and “Because faith was not lost in the chaos all around her,
she was” (both 2000).
The seven canvases that make up “A Group of Seven” (1997), like the ones we actually
see, demonstrate Papou’s interest in the question of the representation of women,
particularly in the European art tradition (Godley 1989).4 Each of these works is in dialogue
with the western canon, and all involve restaging well-known works of art, using Papou and
her partner Iain Ross as subjects. Most of the time, the models are nude and posed in a variety
of lush, outdoor, Edenic settings. For example, “One” is a direct reference to Botticelli’s “Venus
and Mars” (1485), while “Two” is inspired by a sixteenth-century painting by Paolo Veronese.
In these restagings, Papou is exploring several different questions. By reversing and
revising the power dynamics between men and women in the images, she makes visible
how often women in canonical works of art have been objectified or made powerless, and
she rejects this convention. In all the paintings, she is taking back the female nude from
what it has come to mean, and explicitly rejecting the notion that the unclothed female
figure is disempowered in relationship to the clothed male. Papou argues, “I’m fed up with
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 425

the idea that female sexuality is something to be oppressed or hidden . . . a nude female
figure can still be a powerful figure” (Scott 1997, p. C5).
At the same time, she reclaims Eden as a space of pleasure and freedom of choice
(rather than of sin) and reinvents conventions of representation of relations between men
and women, in order to create a new language of gesture and metaphor that evokes, but
also revises, the history of stories and images that structure western attitudes toward
women and sexuality. Further, she defends the use of painting as a medium that is not
outdated or hopelessly tainted by its history of misogynist representation (Scott 1997).
Implicitly, The L Word is making a similar claim about the possibilities of making new
meanings from within familiar forms on commercial television.
These paintings have been described by some conservative critics as pornographic,
making very relevant the question that Bette asks within the narrative: who gets to define
the boundary between art and pornography? Papou, like the producers of The L Word, is
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claiming the right to refuse boundaries drawn by those who wish to suppress the right of
women and queers to represent their own experiences, as part of a reactionary political
agenda. To feature an artist who is working in a feminist vein to take back the power of the
female figure and explicitly re-vision art history and art itself is consistent with what the
show is trying to do in the context of television. Like Papou, the show refuses simple-
minded notions about female nudity and sexuality, and embraces the representation of an
empowered female sexuality that is not defined by patriarchy or the male gaze, but that
also does not pretend that the patriarchal history of representation of women doesn’t exist
or have to be contended with.
Although Papou’s work is about the representation of women in general, its
exploration of the boundaries between art and pornography is quite relevant to the
representation of lesbian women more specifically, because the most familiar and
ubiquitous representations of lesbianism in contemporary culture are to be found in
pornography aimed at heterosexual males. The L Word knows this and consistently makes
visible the specter of the voyeuristic male (or straight couple) gazing or peeping at lesbian
sexuality. For example, this dynamic is exposed in the pilot episode, when Jenny, newly
arrived in Los Angeles, watches two women having sex in the next-door neighbors’ pool.
Later that evening, she narrates what she saw to her boyfriend Tim to titillate him during a
sexual encounter. This scene draws attention to the fact that many viewers’ preconceptions
about lesbians will have been shaped by a form that has consistently misrepresented and
misunderstood them, and that has used scenes of “lesbian” sex as a turn-on for
heterosexuals. Further, by having the camera take Jenny’s point of view, the scene shows
viewers that, through familiar conventions of filming and editing, we are participating in
her voyeurism (Heller 2006; Wolfe & Roripaugh 2006). For viewers who may not have
considered how normalized such representations are in mainstream culture, these scenes
serve to make a familiar (and now exposed as voyeuristic) viewing position a very
uncomfortable one to occupy.
This theme of the effects of pornographic representation on women is explored in
much greater detail in the season two storyline about Mark Wayland, a character who
becomes the roommate of Jenny and Shane. Mark makes low budget, “Girls Gone Wild”-
style porn videos, but intrigued by his new friends, he decides to make a serious
documentary about lesbian culture. Despite his good intentions, Mark is unable to escape
his voyeuristic, objectifying perspective and he resorts to planting hidden cameras all
through the house to spy on the women. At the climax of this story arc, after she has
 426 MARGARET MCFADDEN

discovered the cameras, which she describes as “rapey,” a furious Jenny situates the real
harm his voyeurism has done to her in a larger cultural context of male dominance:
What I want is for you to write “Fuck me” on your chest. Do it! And then walk down the
street. Anybody that wants to fuck you, say “Sure, sure.” And when they do, you have to
say “Thank you very much,” and make sure you have a smile on your face, and then, you
stupid fucking coward, you’ll know what it feels like to be a woman. (The L Word 2005,
episode 2.11)

The L Word thus constructs a representation of a ubiquitous, prurient, objectifying

male gaze and connects it to the violent, real world patriarchal oppression of women. In this
way, the program responds to the concern of some viewers that it would simply exploit the
representation of lesbian sexuality to appeal to a prurient straight male audience; indeed,
some early critics read the scenes with Tim and Jenny as doing precisely that. But I argue
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instead that the show includes such familiar scenarios to explore the consequences of the
objectifying male gaze and of dehumanizing stereotypes on women, especially lesbian
women. In other words, The L Word is working on multiple levels to make its argument that
viewers must learn to see familiar images and conventions anew; in its narrative, and in the
visual art it highlights, the show is teaching viewers the history of representation (and
misrepresentation) and inviting us to imagine new possibilities, even in commercial media.
Another artist whose work is featured as part of The L Word’s exploration of the
complexities of representation is New York-based painter Lisa Yuskavage, whose painting
“True Blonde on a Mountaintop” (1998) is prominently displayed in Bette and Tina’s house in
season two. Tina explains to her lawyer that Yuskavage is one of Bette’s favorite painters.5
The lawyer, whom we already know as rather a philistine, asks with distaste, “Jesus! You lived
with that?” as they (and we) gaze at the painting. The lawyer’s initial response is perhaps
understandable, as the image depicts a cartoony, larger-than-life woman kneeling on a
mountaintop; she wears only a beaded thong, which she is reaching into with her left hand,
as she looks down at her own body. At first glance, the painting might seem to reproduce the
pornographic objectification of women so common in contemporary culture and in art
history, and thus be an odd choice for the show.
By her own account, Yuskavage is centrally concerned with the representation of
women, both in art history and in popular culture (including pornography), and in the
relationships between all these different media. She noticed, for example, that Penthouse
photographers often used models posed and lit classically, and began to use their photos as
inspirations for her work. This influence is manifest most clearly in the cover of the exhibition
catalogue for a 2001 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, in which the
artist’s name has been superimposed in pink Penthouse-font letters over a detail from
Yuskavage’s painting “Day” (1999 –2000), raising the question of the relationship between
these different forms of representation (Yuskavage & Siegel 2000). The catalogue cover
draws our attention to the extent to which our view of the world has been shaped by the
omnipresent pornographic imagery in our visual culture. Its goals are therefore parallel to
those of The L Word, which seek to explore the same issues.
Yuskavage’s rather grotesque female figures are open to interpretation, of course,
but many critics see her as lampooning the ridiculously hyperbolic female forms apparently
prescribed by straight male pornographic fantasies. The women are typically nude or half-
dressed, and they have exaggerated body parts, blurry faces, turned-up noses, and strike
familiar, submissive poses. But at the same time, Yuskavage is exploring the complicated
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 427

effects of these stereotypical, objectifying images on women. Many of her female figures
are involved in some form of self-examination. They’re looking at themselves, often with a
certain puzzlement. Perhaps they comment on the extent to which the female gaze (and
women’s self-conceptions) has been shaped by the male gaze and representations of
women made by and for men.6 Reflecting on the complexity of these images, critic Roberta
Smith asks,
Do her figures exaggerate or ridicule and deflect the male gaze? Do they perpetuate the
stereotypes that assault women every day or illuminate some of the more private and at
times darker corners of the female psyche, including those moments of searing self-
reproach when a woman appraises her appearance and finds it wanting? (2001, p. E53)

In a similar vein, critic Marcia Hall argues that Yuskavage’s art comments on our culture in
complicated and paradoxical ways:
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It is about the gaze, but, more, it comments upon the culture that consumes such images.
She critiques the girls, but at the same time, she is deeply responsive to the women
burdened with sexual attributes that may be all the world chooses to see about her . . .
She celebrates the sexuality of her babes at the same time that she lampoons their
ubiquity in American visual culture, as if to say it is not their physicality that is vulgar, but
the use made of them by male and female alike. (2000, pp. 23, 27)

In addition to drawing on the ubiquity of pornographic imagery in our culture,

Yuskavage also draws on the history of western art. For example, by the artist’s own account,
the painting “Day” noted above was influenced by her memory of a Degas monotype, “Nude
Woman Standing in a Bathtub” (1880–1885), as well by a 1970s Penthouse photo. She wants
all these layers of meaning and influence to co-exist in her work, as they do in our experience
of the world (Siegel 2000). But to those who would read her as perpetuating the stereotypes
that assault women every day, Yuskavage is adamant that she is creating not a real person,
but “a constructed pictorial object” (cited in Gould 2000, p. 11). She explains, “I only let things
happen in paintings that can only really happen in painting. They touch on the real world,
but they are not the same as the real world” (Siegel 2000, p. 20).
In this, she is, arguably, doing much the same thing as the producers of The L Word,
who are creating a “densely layered” fiction that invites us to see the “real world” anew, but
that also, like Yuskavage’s paintings, runs the risk of being understood simply as
reproducing stereotypes and courting a prurient and exploitative male gaze. Both the
paintings and the television show ask viewers to consider the effects of the histories of
representation of gender and sexuality on all of us, but particularly on women. And both
refuse the expectation that what they are doing is straightforwardly documenting or
reflecting some external reality.
Part of the power of Yuskavage’s work is that while the figures may be grotesque,
they are so beautifully painted that they are very hard to simply dismiss. Critic Siegel
captures the complicated responses that Yuskavage’s paintings generate when she writes,
By this time, years after feminism’s lessons, we know we’re not supposed to respond
erotically to such images, that it is degrading or, at the very least, banal. Still, the women are
seductively beautiful, and so is the painting style; they are hard to resist. (Siegel 2000, p. 19)7

This insight might apply equally well to both the paintings and the program; despite three
decades of powerful feminist analysis and critique, what we respond to visually has still
 428 MARGARET MCFADDEN

been shaped by a patriarchal and objectifying visual tradition. The need to create new or
alternative representations of gender and sexuality to contest and/or replace those that
have been so dominant is another issue taken up by The L Word and the artists whose work
the show highlights. The difficulty of doing this, given the long history of objectifying and
disempowering images of female figures and the current repressive political climate, is
made legible by the show’s narrative. In this historical moment, those who try to make
visible an empowered female or queer gender expression or sexuality run the risk of being
attacked as pornographers or promoters of “depraved” ideas, rather than as artists making
visible what has been largely repressed from view.
Further, the show opens the possibility that while it may indeed be understood as
complicit with Hollywood expectations that most of the cast members are conventionally
attractive, fashionable, and “femme” in self-presentation, this does not necessarily mean that
the program is simply reproducing sexist and objectifying images designed to appeal to
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heterosexual male audiences. Contextualized differently, such non-stereotypical images of

lesbians, who certainly act as well as appear, can be understood as inviting female or lesbian
gazes that offer very different forms of visual pleasure to different audiences. In other words,
like Yuskavage, whose work acknowledges and interrogates familiar popular represen-
tations of women and the complicated and conflicted pleasures viewers take in those
images, The L Word can be understood to be encouraging viewers to interpret apparently
familiar images in new ways. The show makes visible the contradictions inherent in its
location on cable television, while simultaneously disrupting or reframing our familiar ways
of seeing.8
The L Word also features two other artists whose work is certainly in dialogue with art
history, but who also thematize much more overtly queer gender and sexual expressions
than Papou or Yuskavage. In a presentation to her museum board about the “Provocations”
exhibition, Bette highlights a work called “The Flagellation,” by gay male artist Delmas Howe.
The painting is also prominently displayed during the opening of the exhibition in the final
episode of season one, and depicts a group of men in an abandoned warehouse, engaged in
various S/M practices. This painting is part of a series of twelve large-scale paintings called
“Stations of the Cross: A Gay Passion” (1996–present) that Howe made, partly in response to
the Christian right’s attacks on gay communities. The paintings connect the suffering and
devastation that AIDS caused in the gay male community in the 1980s and 1990s with the
history of images of suffering in religious art of the past. Howe’s painting is based on
Caravaggio’s “Flagellation of the Christ” (1607), and celebrates the world of diverse gay male
sexual expression in the 1960s and 1970s, the years before AIDS.9
Including this work serves several functions. It connects gay male and lesbian art; it
makes visible and celebrates a marginalized sexual minority; and its implicit critique of the
hatefulness of the Christian right is a theme that the show highlights powerfully in season
one. Also, featuring the work so prominently forces the viewer to evaluate the painting; the
discomfort it might cause some viewers is reflected in the reactions of Bette’s conservative
board members, who exchange horrified glances at the thought of displaying this work
instead of a show of impressionists.
The other artist who is featured most often on the show is the photographer Catherine
Opie, whose work is well known in many queer communities. Like Papou, she appears in an
episode, and many of her works are shown on screen in seasons one and two.10 We first see
Opie in a flashback that tells the story of Bette and Tina’s first meeting, at an art opening at
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 429

Bette’s gallery; Opie is present and her portraits are on the walls. We also see Opie later, at an
artist dinner held at the gallery; once again, her work is on display.11
What we see here are portraits of people who are often invisible outside their sub-
cultural communities: cross-dressers, dominatrixes, transpeople of all sorts, drag kings and
queens, and other body manipulators, all of whom Opie represents as people who are
“worthy subjects for artistic contemplation” and whom she treats with a respect and dignity
that dominant cultures typically refuse them. The sitters take traditional studio portrait
poses, in front of formal, elegant backdrops. Like other artists featured on the show, Opie’s
work is strongly influenced by art history, most directly by the paintings of Hans Holbein.
Indeed, Opie has explained that she is “constantly looking at the history of photography
and art as a source of inspiration” (Reilly 2001, p. 87). Her portraits engage that history, but
also seek to revise it; she has noted that “with all my work, it’s also about creating a different
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language within a language that’s already been created” (Nys Dambrot 2006). Further, Reilly
(2001, p. 88) has argued that Opie’s portraits “manage to disrupt the traditional subject-
object dialogue, insofar as the sitter’s intense glance back at the viewer somehow disallows
objectification, as well as any pathologization.” Arguably, we might see the photographs’
refusal of the objectifying gaze as parallel to, or part of, The L Word’s attempt to draw our
attention to and refuse voyeuristic straight or male gazes.
At the “Provocations” opening, we get a long time to look at one of Opie’s best-
known and most powerful images: her 1993 self-portrait (Opie 2008, p. 71). She had a friend
carve a drawing into her bare back, and the cuts are dripping blood. The drawing is of a
happy family of two smiling female stick figures holding hands in front of a tiny house,
under a bright sun. This image is compelling, as the obvious pain (and perhaps the
pleasure) the sitter must be experiencing is vividly present, and that complex conjunction
of pain and pleasure is connected by the drawing to the complicated mix of joys and
struggles that so often accompany queer experience in US society. It also makes visible the
cutting and piercing practices that are part of S/M culture, and invites us to think about how
altering the body is a vital part of constructing one’s identity. About Opie’s portraits, critic
Catherine Lord has argued:
These are not photographs of sexual practices, but of costumes, markings, and alterations
to the body that announce the practices of sexual minorities, pictures that encode the
clues to such practices within the codes of studio portraiture. These are portraits of
mutable flesh, not fixed social identity. Indeed, the point is not somehow to reveal an
essence embodied in flesh, but to suggest that flesh itself is used to invent identity. (cited
in Harmony Hammond 2000, p. 153)

The presence of such portraits offers a counter-narrative to essentialist notions that might
seem to be implicit in The L Word’s presentation of lesbian or queer identity.
In 1992, Opie did a series of fourteen photographs called “Being and Having,”
which were portraits of lesbian friends sporting false mustaches and beards (Opie 2008,
pp. 44 – 49).12 She describes her sitters as
heavily pierced and tattooed lesbians from the alternative club scene who are into
challenging the typical image of lesbians . . . They don’t want to be men or to pass as men
all the time. They just want to borrow male fantasies and play with them. (Catherine Opie
cited in Harmony Hammond 2000, p. 150)
 430 MARGARET MCFADDEN

The sitters glare out at the viewer from these larger-than-life prints, but if we look closely,
we see past the artifice—the webbing of the mustaches, drips of glue—little details that
emphasize the constructedness of the gender performance. Opie explained that these
images “were all taken with a 4x5 camera so the detail of the false is emphasized. It is the
disruptiveness and falseness of the images which explores the extent of the invisibility of
the lesbian community and queer culture” (Opie cited in Hammond 2000, p. 152). But it is
not only lesbian invisibility that Opie is challenging, as she notes that in these photographs,
she also “wanted to play with our expectations of realism in photographic portraits to
confront the viewers with their preconceptions about lesbians and lesbian sexuality” (Smith
1991, p. 83).
In seasons two through six, three of these images are seen every week as part of the
opening credit sequence for the show, and they are visually quite prominent. What’s
significant about their presentation in this context is that they are preceded by images of
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the main characters dressing and making up to go out to an art exhibition, and the
falseness of feminine masquerade and the constructedness and fluidity of gender and
sexuality is thus emphasized by the juxtaposition of having the characters, in their high
femme finery, looking at Opie’s images of constructed masculinity. (They also look at other
photographs of women in these sequences.) These contrasting images invite us to ask what
exactly are the referents of “this” and “we” in the (much-maligned) theme song’s repeated
lyric that “This is the way/it’s the way that we live.” In this context, the photographs do
exactly what Opie hopes they will. She says about her subjects:
I see this scene as expanding lesbian visibility and showing how lesbian sexuality is
heterogeneous and complex . . . That is the aim of these photographs, to represent this
hidden subculture and challenge the narrowly defined representations of our sexuality.
(Catherine Opie cited in Anna Marie Smith 1991, p. 83)

The photographs also implicitly make visible the whiteness and wealth of the show’s
West Hollywood mise en scene, as Opie notes that her sitters (several of whom are people of
color) are borrowing their masculine images from working-class Latino gang styles that she
defines as specific to Los Angeles. Including them reminds us that the elite West Hollywood
world of the show is but one of many communities within a very diverse city.
Both Opie and Howe connect the show’s representations of lesbians to a larger and
much more complex queer community. The images of their work that we see serve several
narrative and visual functions. First, they make very clear that lesbian and queer
communities are much more diverse than the conventionally attractive, gender-normative,
and wealthy characters would suggest. They also call into question the implicit essentialism
that undergirds the show’s representation of subjects identifiable as “lesbians,” offering—if
only briefly—a vision of the instability and complex self-fashioning that might be contained
by the term. And by mapping these artists (and others) all together, the show is able to
make its point through accumulating these critical and alternative visions as part of the
show’s mise en scene.
By highlighting artists whose work thematizes the ways that representations of
gender and sexuality have shaped our understandings of ourselves and the world, and who
are explicitly challenging and redefining the conventions that have historically had so much
power, The L Word invites viewers to think about whether the show is doing precisely the
same things. That is, The L Word shows us that the process of making art in capitalism is
constrained by viewer expectations that have been constructed by a long history of
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 431

misrepresentation and misunderstanding. But even while acknowledging its own

participation in commercial culture, and the possibility that it will be misread as
conforming to familiar expectations, the show draws attention to its own status as a fiction
and suggests that viewers cannot take for granted that we know what we are seeing. It
invites us, indeed, it teaches us, to look differently.

The Contradictions of Making Art in Capitalism

By season four, The L Word’s engagement with the problem of lesbian representation
in capitalist contexts had turned into parody. The most overtly comic examples of The L
Word’s reflexive attention to its own location in a web of economic and political
contradictions emerged that season. In the course of a long story arc, the sexily
androgynous Shane is invited to model for a Hugo Boss underwear advertising campaign.
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Initially she declines, but when her younger brother Shay breaks his arm and needs
expensive medical care she can’t afford, she reluctantly takes the job, and is soon horrified
to find her image plastered on a giant billboard on Sunset Boulevard. Of course, this whole
story arc constitutes one long product placement for Hugo Boss, but at the same time, the
show also reflexively draws our attention to its participation in capitalist media structures
and overtly rejects their misrepresentations of women and queers. For example, in episode
4.07, Helena’s need to pay a gambling debt she can’t afford creates an opportunity for the
group to have a conversation about how each of them has had to compromise her
principles at some time for economic reasons. Shane admits that doing the ad “felt pretty
whorish,” and the whole conversation provides another small reminder of the show’s
location within a capitalist system that requires it to compromise with the expectations of
the people paying the bills.
On the night when Shane loses custody of her brother, and therefore no longer needs
the money from the Boss ads, she calls her best friend Alice, who arrives immediately to
offer support to her distraught friend. They sit under the billboard and commiserate over
beers, and while the action shows us the power of the bond between these women, it also
shows them working together to challenge misrepresentation. Alice has come armed with
many cans of spray paint, and in a comic scene, they vandalize the billboard. Shane’s image
is rendered unrecognizable as the figure is transformed into a long-haired, bearded male
with a giant ejaculating penis, and as the legend, “You’re looking very Shane today,” is
rewritten as “You’re looking like shit today.” The L Word has presumably been well paid by
Hugo Boss to advertise their clothing, but then has overtly mocked the sort of people who
organize such forms of advertising and publicity. We have already been shown Shane’s
obvious discomfort with the manipulative processes of being photographed and of making
public appearances, and when one of her public relations handlers shrills enthusiastically,
“Don’t you want to just die?” it is clear that Shane’s answer is “yes.” The show participates in
a now-familiar form of advertising, and then makes visible and parodies its own
participation, thereby drawing attention to its own contradictions and to the problem of
representation more generally.
The particular form that this scene takes also connects the show to a longer feminist
artistic and political history. Alice and Shane’s handiwork is very reminiscent of
photographs that Posener took of feminist vandalism of sexist advertising billboards in
the late 1970s and early 1980s; these photos once circulated widely in the form of postcards
sold in feminist bookstores and other alternative venues (Posener 1982). By evoking this
 432 MARGARET MCFADDEN

longer history of resistance to misrepresentation, The L Word situates its more post-modern
critical and representational strategies in a tradition of feminist analysis and action.
This scene comes at the end of an episode in which Jenny and Tina interview three
straight male film directors, in search of someone to turn Jenny’s best-selling novel about a
lesbian friendship circle into a big Hollywood movie. Each of the interviews, with real film
directors, both makes fun of that director’s actual history of representing women, and
presents the director as completely unable to imagine how to tell a lesbian story, other than
in a sexist and heterosexist way.13 So within this larger story arc that reminds viewers that
Hollywood does not know how to tell these stories truthfully, we also see an overt, mocking
rejection of the very capitalist economic structures that make the show possible. In other
words, this entire story line (and indeed, much of seasons four and five) stages the
contradictions of trying to tell alternative stories within commercial mass media. But in the
next episode, they find a lesbian director, who does know how to tell this story, and we get,
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thereby, an argument that while creators cannot effectively work outside of capitalism, the
possibility of telling new stories in new ways does exist, and that every queer story that is
created and gains a broad audience contributes to destabilizing and transforming
hegemonic images and assumptions and thus also contributes to changing the world. The
victories may be only partial, but they are real, and they create spaces for more stories and
more possibilities for transforming the world.

“Provocations”
As shown above, The L Word shows viewers the work of various living artists to
complicate its representations of lesbian lives. While it may be that many viewers lack the
background to fully contextualize the work of these images, a lengthy story arc that begins
in episode 1.03 and culminates in the final episode of season one takes up these issues as
crucial narrative elements, accessible to most viewers. The program powerfully integrates
the paintings and the various forms of film and video art that we have already seen in a
story arc about the tremendous importance of the power of representation in US culture.
Summarized briefly, the story is as follows. Seeking to raise the profile of her museum,
and over the objections of her board, Bette arranges to host the Los Angeles presentation
of a controversial new art exhibition assembled from the works of wealthy collector Peggy
Peabody. Including many works that push the boundaries of gender and sexuality, and that
thematize Christianity in unconventional ways, “Provocations” attracts the attention of a
fundamentalist Christian group that launches a well-organized campaign to prevent the
show from ever opening. The outlines of this story arc are very similar to historical events,
including the controversies surrounding Charles Saatchi’s “Sensation” exhibition at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, and the Mapplethorpe exhibition in Cincinnati in 1990.14
Bette must fight to protect the rights of artists to make controversial work and of the public
to see it. Her opponents are members of a powerful and well-organized Christian right that
regards any non-normative representation of gender or sexuality as by definition depraved
and obscene, and designed to naturalize and thus foster homosexuality and blasphemy. So
The L Word thus stages a central “culture war” issue of our time: who has the right to control
representation?
Two elements of this complex plot line are particularly important to make these
points. First, the show draws viewers into the debate by showing us a lot of art, inviting us
to confront our own discomfort with the kinds of controversial or radical images
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 433

“Provocations” will include. Among the artworks we are invited to consider are some made
by fictional artists, and The L Word uses these texts to focus viewers’ attention on what is at
stake.
The best example of this fictional art work is in the “random act” vignette that
opens episode 1.09.15 The action begins with us watching the filming of a work of video
art that will become part of the exhibition; this clearly marks the representational activity
of making the film. “Jesus is in Me,” by fictional artist Isabella Pernao, portrays the artist,
naked, kneeling on all fours on a bench in front of a fully clothed Jesus figure; he is
surrounded by three elderly men, also clothed, who are perhaps apostles. As we (and the
apostles) watch, it appears that the Jesus figure is having sex with the woman, and her
position, with her back to him, allows us to see both their faces. For many people, this is a
discomfiting film to watch, I suspect, and that is the point; we observe the film being
made, and then later we see Bette watching it with her assistant and praising it as a
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moving exploration of the desire for faith. A flower deliveryman enters and scoffs at the
idea that what he sees as Hustler-style porn might be art. Through these scenes, viewers
are put in the position of having to decide what we think about this video, as well as
about the larger questions of what might mark the lines between art, pornography,
obscenity, and blasphemy.
The following episode, 1.10, opens with a parallel act of representation, the making of
a porn film, set in a Catholic school bathroom, called Here Cums the Principal. Moving from
the standard lesbian “number” of two kissing schoolgirls who pretend to be frightened
when discovered by the principal, the film moves the girls to another conventional scene of
one of them having sex with him. Shot in a way that makes visible the mechanical and
unsexy grind of producing generic, low-budget porn films, this random act vignette can be
directly compared with the art film production of the previous week.
The next episode, 1.11, is the one in which this story arc comes to a dramatic climax.
After weathering a campaign of threatening phone calls, misleading petition drives, graffiti
attacks on the museum building, and the production and distribution of a videotape of
Bette, edited dishonestly to produce the statement “I am a pervert and only a pervert could
show this work,” Bette and her board decide to take the offensive and challenge the leader
of the Christian group, Fae Buckley, to a televised debate. Bette insists, “We can’t sit around
with our hands in our laps while they call us pornographers and pedophiles.” It is during
this debate that the program most directly lays out what is at stake about art and
representation, and encourages viewers to embrace its strong case in defense of artistic
freedom, and by extension, of personal freedom more generally.
Bette has learned that the young woman starring in the porn film we saw being
filmed earlier is Fae Buckley’s abused, runaway daughter, but is reluctant to use such
personally damaging information to win the debate. Instead, as the debate unfolds, Bette
presents familiar liberal arguments: that the first amendment protects the right to free
expression of unpopular views; that the supreme court has defined as obscene only
works that lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”; that people are able
to think critically and make their own judgments about art; and that censorship cannot
be allowed in a free society. Her opponent deploys the standard rhetorical moves of the
far right. For example, Buckley tries to elide the difference between representation and
reality, arguing that the artworks promote homosexual behavior, which she deems
fundamentally immoral and depraved. Bette challenges this claim, arguing that art is
meant to be interpreted and does not intrinsically advocate behavior; this blocks
 434 MARGARET MCFADDEN

Buckley’s attempt to slip from an attack on provocative art to an attack on gay people’s
right to exist and be visible.
In all her responses, Bette refuses to shy away from the difficult and challenging
content of the images in the exhibition. This is an important intellectual move that the
show is making, as it refuses to apologize either for Bette’s lesbian identity or for the right of
queer artists (and others) to represent their visions and their lives. In other words, Bette
does not stay with the much safer and more mainstream arguments about free expression;
she doesn’t make the mistake that Vance and other critics of censorship have warned
against. Vance argues, “If we are afraid to offer a public defense of sexual images, then even
in our rebuttal we have granted the right wing its most basic premise: sexuality is shameful
and discrediting” (1989, p. 41).16
As Bette insists that there is a “world of difference between complex, provocative art
and the tragedy of the porn industry,” the editing of the debate reinforces the contrast she
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is defining. The camera repeatedly cuts away to scenes of the porn film shoot and to scenes
of Buckley’s teenage daughter standing on a dark street, soliciting men in passing cars for
sex. This editing marks a clear line between the sexual abuse and exploitation of powerless
young women with few economic options and the empowered activity of artists whose
work explores the diversity of gender, sexual and spiritual expressions. These scenes lead a
viewer to the conclusion that it’s the exploitation of abused young women that is
obscene.17 Further, they reinforce the show’s point that its representation of lesbian
sexuality is not aimed at titillating heterosexual men and that to read these images that way
would be a mistake.
The L Word may agree with religious conservatives that the representation of queer
lives has powerful effects, but not, perhaps, in the simple-minded ways the conservatives
imagine. As Bette insists, artistic representation does not simply mirror life or nature in a
straightforward, literal way, nor does it have the power to cause viewers to act in particular,
predictable ways. But as Warner (1999, pp. 7 –12) has argued, it is important for members of
sexual and gender minorities to have access to representations of their lives that exceed the
normative frames of dominant culture, images that make new forms of self-fashioning and
of desire visible and thus possible to imagine and live. This is a much more nuanced point
than the accusation leveled by Fae Buckley and her ilk, that any such representation
automatically “corrupts children” or otherwise causes unsuspecting “innocents” to turn to
“depraved” lives. And perhaps The L Word is also reminding viewers that its portrayal of a
lesbian community should also not be taken literally, as a documentary about a largely
invisible group, but seen rather as a complex and contradictory televisual representation of
one small friendship circle in a much larger community. There is a complicated relationship
between representation and reality, but they are not the same thing, and the program
consistently marks those differences.
During the final episode of season one, “Provocations” is installed and opens to great
fanfare and acclaim. In the course of the episode, much of which takes place at the
exhibition’s gala opening, the camera lingers on many works that we’ve seen before,
including Howe’s “Flagellation,” the fictional Jesus video, and both Opie’s self-portrait and
her large portrait of drag performer Justin Bond. We also see Vancouver artist Martin
Guderna’s “Labyrinth 69” (2003), and several other pieces, for the first time.18 Led by Bette,
the museum has triumphed over the forces of repression and reaction and thus we are able
to see these challenging works in a celebratory context. At one level, the show presents and
affirms these works and what they symbolize about queer self-representation. And it is
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 435

important to notice that it is the characters represented as normative who fight to

exhibit these images of non-normative gender and sexual expression; this is another way
The L Word uses art to broaden its representation of queer identity and community, despite
the constraints of a commercial medium.
But at another level, the show also sounds a call to arms against the religious
conservative agenda of restricting human rights, and powerfully suggests that queer
people and their allies must fight for both the right to represent ourselves and the right to
live our lives as we wish. Changing representation is necessary but not sufficient; politics is
still required.
It may be easy for many viewers to dismiss the political or intellectual seriousness of
The L Word, given the constraints that commercial pressures necessarily place on its
producers. But I suggest that the program may be doing something surprisingly
imaginative and politically ambitious from within those constraints. That is, instead of
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simply accepting and reproducing a normative straight male gaze, the program exposes
that gaze and proposes, if only indirectly, that another way to see is possible. And by
highlighting artists whose work thematizes the ways that representations of gender and
sexuality have shaped our understandings of ourselves and the world, and who are
explicitly challenging and redefining the conventions that have historically had so much
power, The L Word invites viewers to consider that much the same work might be done
within the conventions of series television. In the end, while acknowledging its own
complicity, The L Word also offers viewers a model for how to think in sophisticated ways
about the histories and the futures of feminist and queer representation, and
encouragement to pursue those futures with political action.

NOTES
1. For those unfamiliar with the program, The L Word is a serial melodrama that follows the
lives of an evolving friendship circle of lesbian and bisexual women, who congregate at a
café called “The Planet.” Initially, the most central characters are Bette and Tina, who have
been together for seven years and whose struggle to have a child takes up much of the
first two seasons; and Tim and Jenny, a young couple who live next door and whose
relationship gradually disintegrates as a result of Jenny’s growing attraction to Marina, the
proprietor of The Planet. Jenny gradually becomes part of the lesbian friendship circle,
which also includes Alice, a bisexual magazine writer; Dana, a closeted professional tennis
player; Shane, a seductive hairdresser; and Kit, a straight musician who is also Bette’s sister.
In later seasons, the group is joined by Helena, the wealthy and initially villainous director
of her family’s foundation; Carmen, a DJ with a promising musical career; Moira/Max,
Jenny’s partner, a transgender computer programmer who begins transitioning from
female to male in season three; Tasha, a US Army captain who struggles with the military’s
policies on homosexuality; and Jody, an outspoken contemporary artist.
2. This reading of The L Word is inspired in part by Sedgwick’s (2003) recent argument that
the kinds of readings produced within a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a mode of analysis
that she characterizes as “paranoid,” preclude the possibility of more contingent readings,
ones that might be open to seeing new, surprising, or even hopeful possibilities in a text.
Indeed, Sedgwick argues, in particular, for reading queer texts in just such “reparative”
ways, ways that might enable us to see resistant queer cultural practices that the paranoid
 436 MARGARET MCFADDEN

lens renders “invisible or illegible.” A hermeneutic of suspicion is necessary, but not

sufficient, to understand the cultural work of this influential and complicated text.
3. Papou has been accused of making pornographic work by some critics. This was
discussed on a CBC television special on her work called “Adrienne Clarkson Presents”
in October 1995, and subsequently taken up in the Canadian press (Barrett 1995;
Byfield 1995).
4. Papou is clear in interviews about the influence of feminism on her work. Also, the series
title—A Group of Seven—evokes The Group of Seven, a self-styled union of male
landscape painters that formed in the 1920s. The group had shifting membership across
decades, but all the members imagined that they were Canada’s most important artists,
and were the people who were defining modern Canadian identity. Papou’s title might
seem to question their exclusivity and their presumption, while simultaneously
acknowledging their influence.
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5. An image of this painting is on the cover of Yuskavage’s book (Jenkins 2004). Other well-
known artists whose work is shown and named include Richard Prince, Shirin Neshat, Kiki
Smith, Aaron Noble, and Julia Scher. There are also casual references to others like
Matthew Barney and Anish Kapoor. All these artists share a concern with the
representational and gender issues on which the show focuses. Sometimes, the works
also comment on the narrative. For example, in several episodes of season two, the large
painting behind Bette’s desk is Graham Gillmore’s “Sorry, So Sorry” (n.d.), which consists of
the message “So sorry. So very sorry” in blue block letters on a black background. Since
Bette is filled with remorse for cheating on Tina and desperate to win Tina back, the
painting seems quite relevant.
6. One might read these paintings as a response of sorts to a notion popularized by Berger,
who argued that female socialization required women to learn to survey themselves
continually, to “watch themselves being looked at” from a male perspective. In his succinct
formulation, “Men act and women appear” (Berger 1972, pp. 46– 47). A few years later, film
theorist Mulvey (1975) developed a similar idea into a very influential feminist analysis of
the operations of what she called “the male gaze.”
7. Yuskavage herself refuses to embrace any explicitly feminist or political interpretation of
her work, avowing, “I am interested in art, not politics” (Gould 2000, p. 13).
8. Lewis and Rolley (1996, pp. 178 – 190) explore the question of lesbian gazes at mainstream
popular images of women.
9. See Howe (n.d.) for descriptions of the series and images of the paintings.
10. Though we don’t see it here, Opie has also done a series called “The O Folio” (1999)
documenting the sexual practices of lesbian S/M communities, images that are explicitly in
conversation with some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of gay male S/M. She has also
contributed to the lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, helping to create an alternative array of
images of female and lesbian sexuality outside the straight male pornographic tradition.
Her work routinely crosses the boundaries between high art and popular visual culture. For
a comprehensive survey of her work, see Opie (2008). Included in this book is an elegant
portrait of The L Word’s executive producer, Ilene Chaiken, and her then partner, Miggi
Hood (p. 128).
11. Among the portraits we see are images of Idexa, Justin Bond, and a self-portrait of Opie as
her masculine alter ego, “Bo” (Opie 2008, pp. 58, 65, 67). We also see, in a view of an
exhibition catalogue, an Opie photograph of performance artist Ron Athey as St.
Sebastian; Athey’s hands are tied behind his back, he is pierced with arrows, he wears a
 “L” IS FOR LOOKING AGAIN 437

crown of thorns, and his testicles are inflated with saline solution. This photograph is
explicitly referred to by Bette, in her debate with antagonist Fae Buckley in episode 1.10.
12. This title evokes Lacan’s (1972, pp. 271– 280) account of sexual difference, in which
masculinity is understood as “having” the phallus, and femininity is understood as “being”
the phallus.
13. The three directors are Garry Marshall, John Stockwell, and Lawrence Bender. The
reflexivity of this story is further emphasized by the fact that Jenny’s novel is a thinly veiled
account of Bette and Tina’s relationship crisis in season one; the reflexivity is further
parodied in season five, when we are shown the filming of the same scenes we saw in
season one.
14. The L Word’s Executive Producer Ilene Chaiken won a Golden Globe award for her
screenplay for Dirty Pictures (2000), a barely fictionalized account of the events
surrounding the 1990 arrest of Dennis Barrie, Director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art
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Center, for the “crime” of opening an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

For a more detailed account of the events in Cincinnati, see Meyer (2002, pp. 206 – 223). For
an analysis of the show’s political stance toward the religious right, see McFadden (2006,
pp. 113 – 129).
15. Most of the episodes in the first few seasons begin with these vignettes, called “random
acts” by the producers, which historicize, comment on, or serve as hermeneutic glosses on
the primary narratives of the episodes.
16. Meyer (2002, pp. 212 –223) offers an insightful and persuasive analysis of these issues as
they pertain to the Mapplethorpe case.
17. It is worth noting here that the show’s general stance does not seem to condemn
pornography entirely; particular examples of pornographic texts are singled out for explicit
critique. That is, the show is not espousing an anti-porn position, but an anti-censorship
one. In this regard, it is weighing in on another strand of the “culture wars” debate, and
taking the side of the feminist anti-censorship advocates against the feminist anti-
pornography advocates and their often conservative allies. On these debates, see Duggan
and Hunter (1995).
18. The exhibition provides the opportunity for some inside jokes. The listing of artists we see
on the museum wall includes the names not only of the artists whose work we see, but
also of several members of the production crew.

REFERENCES
ADRIENNE CLARKSON PRESENTS (television program) (1995) CBC Television, Canada.
BARRETT, TOM (1995) ‘Hard questions and unexpected answers in Papou TV special’, Vancouver
Sun, 24 Oct., p. C6.
BERGER, JOHN (1972) Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, London.
BYFIELD, TED (1995) ‘Odd that a national bank should have the courage the rest of us lacked’,
Alberta Report, 6 Nov., p. 44.
DIRTY PICTURES (videorecording) (2000), Frank Pierson (dir.), Los Angeles, M.G.M. Television, USA.
DUGGAN, LISA & HUNTER, NAND. (1995) Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, Routledge,
New York.
GODLEY, ELIZABETH (1989) ‘Laurie Papou’, Vancouver Sun, 15 April, p. D1.
GOULD, CLAUDIA (2000) ‘Screwing it on straight’, in Lisa Yuskavage, by Lisa Yuskavage & Katy Siegel,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, pp. 9 –14.
 438 MARGARET MCFADDEN

HALL, MARCIA B. (2000) ‘Lisa Yuscavage’s painterly paradoxes’, in Lisa Yuskavage, by Lisa Yuskavage
& Katy Siegel University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, pp. 23– 30.
HAMMOND, HARMONY (2000) Lesbian Art in America, Rizzoli, New York.
HELLER, DANA (2006) ‘How does a lesbian look? Stendahl’s syndrome and The L Word’, in Reading
the L Word: Outing Contemporary Television, eds Kim Akass & Janet McCabe, I.B. Taurus,
London, pp. 55 –68.
HOWE, DELMAS (n.d.) ‘Stations: a gay passion’, [Online] Available at: http://www.delmashowe.com/
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Margaret T. McFadden is Associate Professor of American Studies at Colby College in

Waterville, Maine. E-mail: [email protected]
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