Dykes to Watch Out For: The Evolution of Visibility

I was born in 1987. I don’t know a time when queer* women weren’t part of our cultural and social landscape. While I was going through puberty, Ellen DeGeneres blissfully caressed Anne Heche’s on red carpets and TATU played lesbians on MTV. During high school I relished episodes of The L Word whenever my fundamentalist mother wasn’t home. I danced in dim-lit bedrooms to Scissor Sisters and Ani DiFranco with friends, hiding empty bottles in our purses. I watched But I’m a Cheerleader at least fifty times. Queer women my age don’t face the cultural wasteland that women like Rachel Maddow faced. There are women like us on TV every day. But is this peri-mainstream visibility enough?
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel had a profound effect on me this past spring. I had (finally) officially come out of the closet and I was buzzing with an odd blend of fear and ecstacy when I found Bechdel. Her collection, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008, is an iconic representation of the evolution of queer visibility in pop culture.
Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWF) began in 1983 and chronicles the lives, relationships, and politics of a diverse group of characters, most of them lesbians. DTWF was one of the earliest representations of lesbians in pop culture and has made an indelible mark on queer culture and is partially responsible for the evolution of queer women’s cultural visibility.
People my age are part of the most GLBTQ-aware generation yet, but queer women seem to have become visible only as subjects of our social dialogue about sexuality, not active participants.
In an interview about The Essential DTWF, Bechdel muses about this.

But at the same time, queer culture is more mainstream now than ever. The strip ends in a very different world than it began.
It’s been a very surreal quarter-century in that sense. I could never have imagined that things would evolve in this particular way. When I came out, it was into this very radical leftish gay politics that was all about… well, people joke about the homosexual agenda but really we did want to destroy marriage. [laughs] To create alternative structures. And that really didn’t happen.

Bechdel goes on to specify that there’s a social trend toward “sameness and uniformity,” citing the closing of independent bookstores and local businesses, so it’s not unique to the queer movement and queer culture. The rampant commercialization of political/social movements is is troubling, to say the least. It takes the radical strength from a movement and distracts from said movement’s true goals.
At the end of The Essential DTWF Cartoonist Introduction , Bechdel asks her readers a fundamental question.
She asks us to decide: are the now-iconic queer women in DTWF essentially the same, or essentially different? The mainstream presence of queer women, or at least representations of them, has positively and negatively affected our societal beliefs about women who fall outside of conventional gender roles, particularly those who are lesbian, queer, and/or bisexual. Young women like me do have someone like us to look for when we’re afraid of being who we are. We are present; we are both truthfully and hatefully represented. We are essentially the same, because we’re seen, and we are essentially different, because we’re often seen as subjects in someone else’s story, talking points in someone else’s sexual or moral discourse. When we tell our own stories, which Bechdel is an expert at, they cease being our own when they become part of a mainstream, national discourse.
Women who happen to or choose to live outside of conventional gender roles are still viewed as “fiery,” “man-hating,” “sluts,” who deserve to punished (trigger warning for that link). Being a feminist, being ambitious, being gay or bi or queer, continue to be radical identities and characteristics, even after 25 years of DTWF, millions of Ani DiFranco albums sold, six seasons of The L Word, and a ’90s Drew Barrymore saying yes, she likes girls.
Visibility matters, but it is only the first step. New media like online journalism and blogging has helped further evolve queer women’s “surreal,” ongoing journey from the margins of our cultural landscape. Blogs and social networking sites like AfterEllen.com flourish along with Twitter and the blogosphere provides a fresh, interactive platform where anyone with access to the Internet, a love for writing, learning, and debating, can join queer women’s move toward a new possibility. Instead of claiming characters as role models in fiction, we can be our own.
*I use the term “queer” interchangably with LGBTQ/GLBTQ, and I also self-identify as queer, so this is why I use the term so repetitively.
Note: This is an article I’m working on as part of a small series I intend to write about queer women in pop culture. I will be writing a review of Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out as the final article in the series. I’m still ruminating on the second one. I want to improve this one first. Please let me know any constructive criticism any of you have as well as general reactions. Thanks!