Debra Ferreday suggests that the TV series Transparent shows how the media can operate as a site of cultural struggle, and help liberate us from rigid sex and gender systems.

In May 2014, Time magazine featured on its cover the actress and activist Laverne Cox, star of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black and the first openly trans person to appear there. The headline declared 2014 to represent a ‘Transgender Tipping Point’, a term which went viral, heralding a period of unprecedented visibility for trans people.

This ‘moment’ - described by Time as ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’- has raised complex questions around visibility, representation and mediation. The general mood in the mainstream media is rather self-congratulatory: when Caitlyn Jenner chose the cover of Vanity Fair to come out in spectacular style, for example, more difficult questions seemed to be swept away - especially questions about the years of bullying and abuse she had previously suffered at the hands of the press that now celebrated her as an icon. The focus on celebrity figures who do little to disrupt feminine gender norms has led to concerns about whose stories get to be represented in this cultural moment, and whose are excluded. As the activist and blogger Alok Vaid-Menon sums up, ‘Society’s message to trans people feels like: ‘Congratulations! As long as you look like a conventionally attractive, respectable, thin cisgender model.’ Certainly it seems a little early to celebrate the end of transphobia when trans people are still disproportionately likely to be victims of violence, and trans youth recently faced having their very existence debated by a charity whose supposed role it is to protect young people.

Menon concludes that perhaps we need to see the ‘tipping point’ not as the conquest of a new frontier – a fantasy which suggest the incorporation of trans people into a nationalistic fantasy of US identity – but as an opportunity for reflection. Perhaps we need to see this opportunity as not just relating to the ‘issue’ of trans - as though trans people were a single, homogenous group that can simply be ‘represented’ through media visibility – but on the relationship between gender, sexuality and media in general, and by extension, what a liberatory media representation of sex and gender might look like. Below I turn to the Amazon streaming TV series Transparent – an ambitious, richly entertaining family drama – which illustrates how media can operate not just as ideological machines or as spaces for more improving representations of minorities, but as a site of experimentation and struggle.

This relates to John Storey’s work on culture in this website: as he writes, ‘both text and audience produce meaning: in political terms, a text can help change how we see the world, but so can the meanings we find in it’. Storey calls attention to the complex ways in which identities are produced in dialogue with media, arguing that ‘signification has a ‘performative effect’; it helps construct the realities it appears only to describe’. This idea of signification as performative has been hugely important in theories of gender and sexuality. In 1990, Judith Butler proposed the idea of gender as performative: that is, while dominant ideology sees gender as the natural outcome of biological sexual difference, gender is in fact not something we are, but something we do: the identities we see as natural consist merely of the repetition of particular stylised acts. This means that we learn how to do our gender through constant citing of the same normative practices: and it follows that in an increasingly mediated society, media representations are central to this process.

Butler’s work is important for feminism because it takes a fluid rather than rigidly ideological view of the way institutions operate to produce gender difference, and I want to suggest that this queer-inflected feminism offers a more nuanced way of looking at media than the model of media as ideological institution that dominates much discussion of gender on the Left. The problem Storey identifies – that ideological critique denies agency to media consumers, seeing them as ‘cultural dupes’ – seems particularly intense in relation to women and minorities, who are often seen as particularly vulnerable to ideological brainwashing: there is a certain kind of feminist criticism that can feel like little more than an alibi for attacks on cultural practices traditionally associated with women, queer subjects and people of colour. This can produce moments of aggression that seem in excess of the professed desire for better representation: the writer who wished Kim Kardashian dead – a view she claimed to be entirely compatible with her self-identification as a feminist is a recent example.

Queer feminist approaches to media studies take a stance that is in a sense both more radical, and more attentive to the highly complex ways in which audiences actually engage with media. A key figure here is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who famously argued that the omission of queer identities from mainstream representation was not simply a side-effect, but was central to Western art and literature: the closet, she writes, is central to Western thought, and normative, heterosexist representations are haunted by the queer identities they exclude and silence. Sedgwick questions what she calls the ‘minoritizing view’ of sexuality – that is, the idea that a minority of individuals are born gay, and that depictions of homosexuality are only relevant to the ‘deviant’ few who fit that category, in favour of a ‘universalising’ view which positions queer identity and its denial at the centre of Western culture.

Often, representations of gender fluidity are situated firmly within the minoritizing model. In The Danish Girl, where Eddie Redmayne’s performance as the central character, Lili, presents her as fragile, damaged and ultimately tragic: her untimely death is succeeded by the restoration of heterosexual romance when her wife, Gerda, falls in love with a cisgender man. The film’s obsession with medical issues is typical of transphobic discourse: its final act consists of little more than a series of failed medical procedures, with Lili literally fading before our eyes. The film approaches trans people as curiosities: we are invited to take a prurient peep, but then our assumed anxieties are soothed through the restoration of heterosexual order in much the same way that crime cinema opens up the possibility of terrible violence only to end by restoring a sense of justice and hence safety. Not surprisingly, the film attracted the dismay of trans and feminist critics.

Sedgwick’s work suggests that this minoritising view is inadequate to explain straight audience’s fascination with queer subjects, who are fascinating because they suggest that all gender is constructed. While some of us might think of ourselves in terms of binaries – male/female, gay/straight –the reality is much more arbitrary and more fluid. 

Transparent, which has just completed its third series on Amazon, centres on the experience of Maura Pfefferman, played by Jeffrey Tambor, an older trans woman who is anything but the ‘conventionally attractive, respectable, thin cisgender model’ stereotype – although she is white, middle-class and wealthy. Maura is a retired academic who, in her previous identity as Mort, has not always been respectful of her female counterparts: the series deals partly with her relationships with her three children and her ex-wife Shel, and partly with her attempts to cope with the pressures of coming out, and with coping with her past and current privilege. But what is important about Transparent is that Maura is never presented as an anomaly in a world of ‘normal’ cisgender subjects: instead her transformation is the catalyst for sometimes jolting change in those around her. Through Maura’s network of old and new relationships, the show has explored marriage and divorce, marriage equality, racism, Jewishness, abuse, abortion, women and ageing, male privilege, bisexuality and the BDSM scene, to name just a few. Writer Jill Soloway, who was inspired to write the script by her own father coming out as a trans woman, has spoken of her desire to address intersectionality through ‘the questions of whether or not women, people of color, and queer people have similar or different struggles, especially for people who are sometimes both, who are women of color or queer people of color’. ‘What’, she asks, ‘do trans women owe each other if one is black and one is white; what is the trans sisterhood, and does it transcend race’?

It’s to the credit of Soloway and to extraordinary performances by the core cast that the show manages to do all this and still be warm, funny, and believable – there are no conventionally likeable characters, only believably complex, sometimes contradictory human beings. Moving beyond the model of trans* people as anomalies who have rights and who must be treated as equal but who nevertheless deviate from what is assumed to be the norm of fixed, intelligible gender identity, Transparent shows that gender identity – all gender identity – is political. It is also deeply about the ways in which gender identities do not exist in isolation – as the individualising discourses of neoliberal capitalism would have it – but are embedded in social worlds: from Maura’s support group, which includes a number of real-life trans activists who were also consulted in the writing of the script, to set-piece disastrous family gatherings (a Thanksgiving dinner that almost turns violent: a huge, vulgar wedding that ends in the break-up of the happy couple), these are characters firmly located in a social world - and that can be both oppressive and liberating.

What all this suggests is a new way of doing media feminism – one that moves beyond the idea of ‘minority groups’ as Other for the enlightenment of an audience which, by looking at these Others comes to ‘know’ itself as normal – as I would argue The Danish Girl does. What queer feminism suggests is that equality is not enough. Transparent, then, can be seen as a work of what queer theorist Jack Halberstam terms - in reference to one of its most visible media symbols - Gaga feminism: “a feminism that recognizes multiple genders, that contributes to the collapse of our current sex-gender systems, a feminism less concerned with the equality of men and women and more interested in the abolition of these terms as such’. Those who want equality, they suggest, lack ambition: only the collapse of the sex-gender system will do. In Transparent, we see a family caught – scarily, exhilaratingly, triumphantly – in its death throes.

John Green outlines the disappointing failure of the new TV series to accurately portray life and events in East Germany.

The gullibility of even sophisticated audiences and readers when it comes to accepting pure fiction as reality never ceases to amaze me. This is particularly so with portrayals of East-West relations and the characterisation of Communists and former Communist countries. The recent, much-hyped German series Deutschland 83 is no exception. Cold War clichés and the most improbably scenarios seem to be de rigueur. Such fictionalised dramatisations then take on a life of their own, replacing real facts and real events in people’s memories.

The blurb for the new series, which is based on real events, promised to offer a new and different perspective. British-American author Anna Winger, co-producer of the series with her German husband, Joerg, said in an interview about the film:

‘It’s important to remember that a lot of people were happy in East Germany, It didn’t work economically, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel good to be part of it sometimes. The existence of the East made the West more humane but now, in an era of unbridled capitalism, we don’t have that balance.’

Quite promising, you might think. The series does indeed begin quite well with a family party scene in the GDR that doesn’t rely on the clichés of drab-greyness, dour East Germans and low living standards. We actually have attractive looking individuals and young people who could just as easily be from the West, listening to rock music and enjoying themselves. Even when we meet the film’s young protagonist, Martin Rauch, who is a GDR border guard, we are presented with a pleasant young man taking two West German visitors to East Berlin gently to task for buying books in the East with money exchanged illegally. He tells them to scarper, unscathed, but keeps some of their books.

Unfortunately the drama very soon begins to serve the usual stereotyped narratives. When a couple of Stasi agents visit the family home to recruit the young man to work as a mole in the West German Bundeswehr, we are presented with two hard-bitten, stony-faced men, who break one of the young man’s fingers and drug his coffee so that he can be kidnapped.

When Martin wakes up in the West, now as an unlikely agent of the Stasi, he walks into a supermarket and is mesmerised by the array of goods on the shelves. Most GDR citizens regularly watched West German TV and, even if they or their families hadn’t travelled to the West at any time, they would have been used to seeing consumer adverts and programmes that featured big cars, shopping malls and glamour. They would hardly be surprised to see it first hand.

What makes this series very much of a missed opportunity, however, is that the facts of the real story are just as dramatic if less fantastical. In 1983 the world really was on the edge of a nuclear holocaust and it was a single East German counter-espionage agent who saved the day. Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the USA in 1980 and unleashed an unprecedented and hysterical campaign against the ‘Evil Empire’ as he characterised the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies. He, along with his close political ally, Margaret Thatcher embarked on a new and dangerous confrontational policy, surrounding himself with fanatical anti-Communist warriors, like Richard Perle (the Prince of Darkness), Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush who were all determined to confront the Soviet Union and bring about its downfall. After years of detente, the Helsinki Accords and a general easing of tension, the world was once again plunged into a new phase of confrontation that threatened to destabilize post war detente with dangerous brinkmanship.

In 1979, as part of its medium range nuclear modernisation programme, NATO began deploying cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe. The first Pershing missiles were deployed in West Germany in autumn 1983. Because of this provocative escalation and the reduction of launch warning time, tensions were stretched to breaking point. The Soviet leadership became convinced that the US was seriously planning a nuclear surprise attack under the cover of carrying out military exercises.

NATO’s giant ABLE ARCHER exercise in 1983 was meant to simulate a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union with weapons. It would take place close to the German-German border. As tension mounted, Soviet nuclear bombers were deployed, on the tarmac at their East German airbases, engines running, waiting for the order to go. If the order had come, most likely nuclear holocaust, at least for Europe and the UK would have ensued. Recently released papers indicate that even among British military leaders Reagan’s reckless agenda aroused concerns that the Russians might take the exercise for the real thing and be provoked to take irreversible action in return.

We were spared this scenario largely due to the efforts of one man: Rainer Rupp, who at the time held a top job in NATO headquarters in Brussels, but at the same time was secretly working for the GDR’s foreign intelligence service. As a student, Rainer Rupp had been an active peace campaigner and was recruited by the GDR to help them monitor Western intentions. He managed to work his way up the hierarchy in NATO, and had access to top level and highly secret documents. He saw his role as keeping the Soviet Union and its allies up to date on NATO strategies in order to help avoid the sort of hellish scenario that seemed to be unfolding.

Richard Perle, State Secretary in the Pentagon for planning and policy, was of the opinion that a limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union could be fought and won without massive damage to the US. Back in the early 1980s the US knew that the Soviet Union had an advantage in terms of both conventional weaponry and size of its armed forces and would prevail in a non-nuclear war scenario, so a pre-emptive nuclear strike was logical from this warped perspective.

In the autumn of 1983 the worst case scenario looked as if it was about to unfold. Reagan’s crusader rhetoric and his Star Wars programme, together with the decision to station Pershings in Europe, had dangerously raised the stakes. The Soviet Union would now have only minutes of warning in the event of a nuclear attack. It considered that NATO’s previous policy of defence preparation had now been transformed by Reagan and his cohorts into one of waging a pre-emptive war. It had already experienced surprise invasions into its territory in the Second World War, which cost the USSR 27 million lives, and it didn’t wish to be caught out again.

ABLE ARCHER took place in that context. The planned combined NATO exercises were viewed by the Soviets as a pretext for a first strike, but they were not prepared to wait and find out. They desperately needed to know urgently if such a plan was indeed about to be put into practice. They were convinced that the exercises were a ruse to initiate a first strike.

The exercises were to be carried out under very realistic conditions, and would take place over ten days, beginning on 2 November and involve all Western European NATO members. The aim was a simulation of a co-ordinated deployment of nuclear weapons and their use. What was particularly alarming was that there were new elements in this exercise: middle-range nuclear weapons were brought onto the field for the first time, absolute radio silence was maintained, and a new code format was introduced for communications. For the first time, leaders of all the NATO countries were intimately involved, which also alerted Moscow to its unusually high political significance. Moscow also thought, wrongly, that the USA had put its troops on the highest alarm stage, DEFCON 1. In reality DEFCON 1 was only simulated during the exercise.

Convinced of an immediate US attack, the Soviet Union put its own strategic nuclear forces on red alert. The smallest mistake could have unleashed a catastrophe. Even Gorbachev later declared that the situation at the time was as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but with an even greater potential for nuclear holocaust.

At virtually the last minute, Rainer Rupp was able to photocopy a whole swathe of top secret documents that convinced the Russians it was indeed only an exercise, thus saving the day. Years later, at a Berlin conference on international espionage in 2005, the former CIA-head for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Milton Bearden, congratulated the former Head of East German foreign intelligence, the legendary Markus Wolf, saying that thanks to his excellently placed source in NATO-HQ in Brussels peace had been saved in 1983, as he had ‘been able to calm the recipients in Moscow’ and in this way, avoid a nuclear war. Rainer Rupp, the agent who literally did save the world, was given a thirteen year sentence for his troubles after the demise of the GDR and his British-born wife, a clerical worker at NATO HQ was also imprisoned.

That is the real story, but Deutschland 83 has used the realistic background to create a fantasy scenario for commercial purposes. Even though the series attempts to portray daily life in the GDR with some sense of balance and doesn’t hide Reagan’s vitriolic rhetoric or the concerns of NATO generals about his dangerous policies. In the blurb to the series written by Gabriel Tate for the Guardian Guide, he writes:

‘The arms race is on and Ronald Reagan and his Russian counterpart Yuri Andropov are ramping up the rhetoric from the White House and the Kremlin. Germany is caught in the middle, split in half and subject to the whims of its effective occupiers’.

The rhetoric, though, was coming solely from Reagan and the White House, not from Andropov who was acting with restraint and caution. The last things the Russian wanted was a war with the West – they had enough of their own internal political and economic problems to deal with.

The series creates its own fantasy world and thus relinquishes any claim it may have to historical accuracy or real insight. Did the producers not have any proper consultants from the secret services to point out how ridiculous much of the storyline is, and how stilted the dialogue sounds? The idea that East German security services could recruit a young GDR soldier against his will, drug and kidnap him, dumping him in West Germany where, within days, he will become aide de camp to one of the country’s top generals, is extremely whimsical.

The agent is given a cursory training and then let loose on his target. While a visiting top US general and his own chief are out to lunch, he breaks into the latter’s office and photographs secret documents left conveniently behind in an unlocked briefcase, listing all the US nuclear targets in the East. At the general’s house at a party given for the same visiting US general, he slips away from the crowd and telephones his girlfriend in the GDR from the general’s own telephone, only to be overheard by one of the general’s daughters, so has to pop a heavy sedative into her drink very quickly to render her unconscious. His GDR handler meets him and waves copies of secret documents in his face while he is in the middle of a jog at an army training camp. The improbabilities and fantasies mount as the story unfolds.

There is in principle nothing wrong with fiction, however wild and improbable, but when such fiction replaces historical fact in the minds of viewers it becomes dangerously corrupting. It then starts to have more in common with Goebbels’ methodology than Harry Potter. Deutschland 83 is good, gripping entertainment, but it could have been so much better.

Chris Jury explains why we should defend the BBC against the free-marketeers.

The period of public consultation on the BBC Charter renewal has already been undermined by the announcement that from next year the BBC will be responsible for the cost of providing free TV licences to the over-75s. This in itself represents a 20 per cent cut in BBC funding. But Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has made it clear that this is the very best the BBC can hope for and that far more significant changes are being considered.

In response, the Federation of Entertainment Unions has launched the Love It Or Lose It: Save the BBC campaign. Much to our surprise, the campaign has met with sullen indifference and even hostility from many on the left, based on the assertion that the BBC has a malevolent right-wing bias and is simply a propaganda tool of the Establishment.

It is undoubtedly true that for at least the last 20 years the BBC has mirrored the prevailing neoliberal economic and political orthodoxy and that “the suits” have seen their salaries rise to staggering levels in exchange for imposing cuts on
everyone else. But this has happened across the public and private sectors, so why would we expect the BBC to be any different? And does anyone seriously think that turning the BBC into a fully commercial media company will improve its political bias?

Ever since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, every BBC Charter renewal has seen the its legitimacy challenged using the catch-22, free-market argument which says that if the BBC makes popular mainstream programmes then it is unfairly competing with commercial businesses that should provide such programmes.

But if it only made niche public service programmes a universal licence fee would not be justified and the only way to resolve this dichotomy is for BBC content to be paid for directly by individual consumers through a mixture of commercial subscriptions, pay-per-view and advertising. Thus the size and function of the BBC would be determined by the market, not by politicians.

In response, many quite rightly argue that for licence payers the BBC is incredible value for money. For 40p a day you get 11 TV channels, 18 radio stations, iPlayer, the website, three orchestras and one of the most highly regarded news services in the world.

But the free-marketeers simply respond by saying: “Great! If it’s such value for money then consumers will voluntarily pay for a commercial subscription, right?”

And they claim that “free” consumers, making “free” consumer choices in a “free” market will force the BBC to provide the programmes that the viewers actually want — and that these “freely” made consumer choices are a far more authentic expression of the collective will than any choices made through democratic institutions ever can be.

This is of course the same “public bad, private good” logic that is used to attack the NHS, education, social services and everything else in the public sector.

But it is a profound misrepresentation of how business actually works. The purpose of any commercial business is not to provide goods or services to the public but to make money for its owners.

Indeed, the law has established that for public companies traded on the stock market, this is their only legal purpose. And it may surprise you to hear that the business of commercial TV companies is not the making and broadcasting of television programmes but the selling of advertising and/or subscriptions.

In business terms, the content of TV channels is simply a cost that has to be endured in order to generate the income from the real business, which is selling advertising and/or subscriptions. The profit comes from charging more for advertising and subscriptions than it costs to acquire the programmes.

This is not of course how viewers experience television. To viewers, its programmes are cultural objects, just like books, plays, songs, symphonies or operas and they carry huge significance and meaning. To a passionate Whovian, Dr Who is not a consumer product. It is an imaginative window into a life-enhancing world of infinite possibilities. To a regular viewer of Eastenders, the characters and world of the story are part of their own experience of social life, not simply a branded consumer product like washing powder.

Being informed by television about the arts, wildlife, history, news, science or how institutions work from the inside transforms lives on a daily basis. It informs career choices for the young, stimulates people to take action by joining organisations and it enriches all our lives by allowing us to observe and share experiences across space and time.

We experience television as a transformative cultural experience and for most of us television is the principal, if not the only, opportunity we get for such experiences. Television, and what’s on it is hugely important to us as individuals and to the health of our society. Making money for the owners is not the primary aim of the BBC, nor is selling advertising or subscriptions.

Its purpose is, or should be, to use the latest broadcasting technology to inform, educate and entertain the British public as democratic citizens and to do so without pressure from corporate advertisers or the government — hence the licence fee, which is actually a noble and praiseworthy attempt to provide value-for-money for licence-payers and a non-commercial income for the BBC while keeping the government and commercial corporations at arms length.

For a democracy to be meaningful all citizens have to be informed and educated to a level that allows them to analyse and critique competing economic and political theories and policies, to engage with civic life and to make informed choices at the ballot box.

The BBC is not simply a provider of consumer media content; it is, or should be, one of the foundational institutions of our democracy. A fully commercial BBC would owe no allegiance to Britain or its democratic citizens but only to its “customers,” and the only influence they could have would be to subscribe or not to subscribe.

So the questions we need to ask about the BBC are not whether we like this programme or that programme, or whether this or that presenter is a Tory bastard.
We need to ask whether we think our democracy would operate more effectively if the BBC became a commercial business, whether cultural life and the public expression of our shared cultures would be enhanced or whether television news and comment would be more reliable.

Just like the NHS, the questions about the future of the BBC are ideological. Do we believe that free markets are the only just and efficient way to provide individuals with all their wants and needs? Or do we believe that collectively owned public institutions are crucial to mitigating the inevitably brutal, destructive and chaotic effects of the marketplace?

Culture is both individual and universal and, of course, we make personal and individual choices based on which cultural objects we prefer. But the result of these choices is far more than simply an aggregate of these choices. It is what we call “our culture,” all of us live embedded within it and, like it or not, television has for the last 50 years been the defining and determining expression of our culture and will, in some digital manifestation or another, be so for many years to come.

Thus we need to defend the BBC as one of the core institutions of our culture and our democracy and not fall into the free-marketeers' trap by defending it solely on their terms or conversely dismissing it as merely a tool of the Establishment. Whatever its current failings, a national television broadcaster independent of both the government and the marketplace is the envy of the world and should be treasured and defended with all the passion we on the left can muster.