Partial Q-Force Review
Still watching the show (on S1E9), but spoiler warning for the entire first season. I did my job and warned you, so moving on.
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It’s very common in traditional social justice circles or conventional social justice circles for the goal to be assimilation into the wider, problematic culture. For example, during the Civil Rights Movement, there was a huge push for Black people to be allowed into all corners of white society and granted the same opportunity to succeed in that society, versus understanding that the problem is white society itself, which needs to be dismantled and replaced with an explicitly multiracial and then post-racial society. We want to seek acceptance from the powers at be and define our successes on their terms. That was the flaw with racial integrationism and that is often the flaw in conventional LGBT+ movements in the modern day.
This show was following a similar trope of a group of queer spies seeking recognition within a fundamentally queerphobic government institution (the AIA), but it subverts the trope near the end by refusing to participate and going against them.
The show also has great foreshadowing for this subversion in the first few episodes. Twink wants to impress Buck, a straight dude who was being verbally abusive towards him, and puts a lot of work into doing it, until he realizes that he doesn’t need the validation of this straight man and validates himself instead. Steve does something similar when he begins to realize this at the party with some of the head executives when he notes that it wasn’t as good as he thought it was.
This mirrors the group - Q-force - they start off trying to get recognized by the Buck of an organization, the AIA, and then realize that the AIA is corrupt and horribly abusive towards queer people (with the whole Greyscale subarc) and thus realize they no longer need the AIA’s validation.
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The “it’s promoting harmful stereotypes” point
It’s actually not, there are legit people like that. There are fem boys like Twink, there are power vers like Steve, there are cold and calculating guys like Chasten, there are coders like Stat, etc. You can make an argument that that kind of representation is played out and there should be more variety in representation and that’s fair, but also, there are legit gay people like that and there is nothing wrong with that being the case, nor is there anything wrong with portraying that in media.
It is a similar problem, a lot of people try too hard to assimilate into wider cisheterosexual culture with all its phobias and bigotry that they forget about the things that make our community special and unique. We don’t have to earn the approval of this culture, FUCK this culture, they are the ones who need to change, not us. You can never win true acceptance by being a lie, you have to be unapologetically yourself and wait for people to change on their own. And if they don’t, well, fuck them, it’s not our responsibility to pander to homophobes or try to educate them.
I think if a homophobic person sees this show and thinks “See, I was right about them fucking queers” they were always going to have that reaction, even if it was “less stereotypical” or “respectful representation”, because the problem they have is with the fact that there are queer people on their screen, not with the fact that the queer people dress or talk differently.
Pretty much anytime a new queer show comes up, a sea of queer people come out and say “This show is promoting harmful stereotypes!” when in actuality, it’s shining light on a specific part of the queer community. Like Queer as Folk talked about gay sexuality, difficulties with gay hookup culture, the experience of being old and gay and being on the dating/hookup scene, and all the problems therein. That’s a real part of being gay for lots of people and it is worthwhile to investigate that in media. I don’t interpret that as promoting harmful stereotypes, since there is nothing about that media that inherently suggests that “all gays are like this”.
I think if you look at a piece of media in that context and take away that “all gays are like this” or “they are saying that all gays are like this”, to be honest, you might just be projecting your own insecurities onto the text, because there seems to be this subconscious fear that is very close by that says “I don’t want to be associated with THOSE gays”. I’m not saying that queer media NEVER promotes harmful stereotypes, but most of the time, from what I’ve seen, yeah, it just seems to me like people are projecting their internalized queerphobia onto queer media.
