#queer legacies

[mrsdaphnefielding]

#507

Digna telling Marta that she doesn't have to worry about Don Agustín any longer and Marta being so impressed with Digna having taken on the priest and put him in his place.

The liquor cart comment by @newsfromthegutter sums it up nicely!

Marta being so impressed and Digna being elegantly smug about it all was the fun pinnacle of a scene that packed more weight and delivered not only some respite for a fretting Marta, but also some peace for Digna, whose gay, closeted husband committed suicide without ever having come out to her.

It's beige houndstooth day - beige runs through the episode overall, and Digna's royal blue is markedly set apart from that - and Marta has barely slept becase she worries about the threats of Don Agustín: a stark reaction, perhaps underlining old trauma returning?

Digna, like the queen she is, disperses Marta's worry over a bite of toast, and Marta is startled as much as starry-eyed. "You threatened the priest?" - "Please. all we did was have a little chat."

All that was missing was Digna buffing her nails on her shirt ruffles.

There is a nice differentiation of Marta's romantic landscape when Digna - Fina's mother figure as much as Marta's - says she will defend Cloe insofar as Cloe contributes to Marta's happiness: "if she makes you smile now" (what does that "now" do in this dialogue line other than call up that there was someone else before?), to complain that Cloe would be "a bit too French". (guess who isn't too French. Starts with F, too, but ends on ina Valero).

A good setup, too, for Digna as the mutual advisor to both Marta and Fina who will have to navigate their relationship, past and future, later this spring (yes please!).

But this moment of connection - a heartwarming breakfast set against the stressed distanced exchange at the intercut Salazár breakfast table - stretches on: Marta is moved by Digna's easy acceptance of her queerness...

...and Digna in turn gets to voice and lay to rest her regrets and pain about having been married to a closeted gay man who didn't dare to come out to her and whose suicide she couldn't prevent - and she gets to do that not only with a family member whom she considers a daughter, but also with a queer family member who is, at this moment, a stand-in for her deceased husband.

Fantastic delivery by Ana Fernández, too - no cloying wistfulness for Digna here, but a lot of frank self-insight that does not count with any kind of absolvation (special thanks to whoever in the writing room added the Gervasio moment and this rare moment of a queer intergenerational brush-up - so often, we don't know who came before us, and do not get to celebrate the similarities of experience and the ties we may share beyond that, as family given or found. Digna accepting Marta is also about Digna accepting Gervasio, and Marta learning to breathe more freely as a lesbian is also about acknowledging the legacy of an uncle who couldn't breathe as freely).

So Digna protects Marta and Marta's queerness, and, by proxy, Marta's relationship with Cloe and Cloe herself. But whom Digna will also protect fiercely is Fina... who may not be there now, but who isn't "a bit too French", and who has made Marta smile like nobody else ever has.

Between the Writing Room and the performances particularly by Fernández here, this is such a delightful domino setup.

[books-in-media]

The New York Review of Books, (January 14, 2021)

—The Opening of the American Mind: Ten Years of The Point, The Point (2020)

—Hooked: Art and Attachment, Rita Felski (2020)

—Wild Thought, Claude Levi-Strauss (1962)

—Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible, Jacques Derrida (2021)

—The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America, Ellen Wayland-Smith (2020)

—Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality, Rachel Hope Cleves (2020)

—Feminisms: A Global History, Lucy Delap (2020)

—Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives, John D'Emilio (2020)

[somestorythoughts]

"It may seem odd at this distance in time that a radical, self-declaired "revolutionary socialist" would find himself estatic because he successfully helped carry off the planning for a dance. But, at the time, there was no public dancing by same-sex couples in bars or clubs in Chicago."