After delaying it for a long time, I finally watched Dee Rees' Pariah and it blew past my high expectations. It's the tale of a teenage girl who comes into her own sexuality and deals with the issues she encounters on this journey. The girl, Alike, is African-American and this further complicates matters as Rees delves into what it is like to be a minority within a minority.
The film really touched me on an emotional level. As a white gay male living in an upper middle class neighbourhood, my experiences with coming out and discovering my sexuality were clearly much different. However, this is both integral and irrelevant to the success of the film. The film connects with the viewer on an emotional level by demonstrating the feeling of isolation and ostracization that any person in any minority often feels and even those within the majority. While my journey has been a lot different and better than Alike, I still felt connected to her tale and it reminded me of feelings and events in my own life. The film succeeds because it tells a story that is not often seen on film. While many films are made on coming out, few are made about women and even fewer about people of colour. The film becomes much more important in the cultural context for addressing these issues and will remain important due to the level of emotional depth it displays and the beautiful talent displayed by all of the actors.
While thinking about how few films are made about queer females, I realized that it's not just a narrative that is lacking in cinema but in our culture as a whole. This fall on network television there are two new shows that depict gay male couples and both happen to be sitcoms. This is what most in the gay community would consider a big step for equality as it demonstrates that we are so far along that being homosexual is no longer the entire punchline but allows homosexuality to exist along comedy as opposed to being the comedy as it has been since the inception of comedy films. While this is a big step, this demonstrates that there is still a huge lack of queer females being depicted in the media.
The lack of demonstration of queer females does not demonstrate a lack of queer females but a sexism that exists within gay rights movements. When gay rights are discussed, the general opposition appears to be the straight males whose masculinity is threatened by the possibility of queer masculinity existing within them. It's a narrative that has been expressed countless times. However, the opposite is never discussed because straight females are generally viewed as being accepting of the gay community. The lack of discussion about gay females hints at a lack of comfort existing within the strongest allies to the gay community, straight women, with the idea of queerness existing in their own sexuality. Queer femininity also threatens straight males as it demonstrates that the women can be independent and survive in the world completely without the need for males to satisfy them. Rees clearly displays this in her film in a scene where a man confronts an androgynous female about her sexuality. While queer masculinity also threatens the heteronormativity that we all participate in, it has been more easily accepted as sexism is still prevalent within our society and limits the choices that women are allowed to make.
It's important for films like Pariah to continue to be made and to continue to allow audiences to connect with these stories. Representation of queer femininity need to exist to allow the women who struggle with their sexuality to see their struggles exist within the media and to allow a greater understanding among straight females and males of their struggles and to allow us to connect to each other on a human level, as art so often allows.
