The L Word: Pretty (Complicated) White Girls
Clare Reed
Abstract
Showtime’s network hit The L Word is better known for its explicit depictions
of lesbian life above all else, but it also engages intricately with issues of race and
ethnicity. A show which appears to feature a large group of pretty white girls has a
far more complicated relationship with the ethnicities of its main characters than is
at first apparent. Its portrayal of complex white ethnicity diversifies the group more
than token non-white characters ever could, ranging between a mixed race black
and white woman who can pass for white (Bette), a Hispanic woman with multiple
notches on the bedpost (Papi), and an assimilated Jew with mental health problems
(Jenny). It also shows several inter-ethnic relationships, such as Bette and Tina, or
Alice and Tasha. The sexuality on the show is strongly linked to ethnicity: the
transgression of heteronormative sexuality is accompanied by a transgression of
traditional depictions of whiteness, but less simplistically than a straightforward
analogy between lesbianism and non-white ethnicity.
Writers such as Jonathan Freedman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bonnie Zimmerman have made links between nonnormative sexualities and the condition of being simultaneously white and not
white, referring to Jewish, Hispanic, Native American and Gypsy groups.
Sedgwick’s analogy of coming out of a Jewish or Gypsy closet as opposed to a gay
one is relevant to this paper, as I shall study in what ways the characters ‘pass’ as
straight or white, or how they go out of their way to avoid doing so. Specifically,
the paper will focus on Bette’s relationships with black characters on the show; the
white ‘ethnic’ character of Jenny, and how her sexuality is linked to her ethnic
heritage; and the ethnic/class ‘queering’ of the more traditionally white character of
Shane.
Key words: lesbian, television, passing, black, Jewish, working-class, mental
illness, body art.
*****
As a site of ethnic complexity, The L Word is problematic: out of the main
characters in the first season, the only ethnic diversity is exhibited in Bette (black
and white), Jenny (Jewish), and Marina (Mediterranean).1 Even this is easy to miss,
given that Jenny is only identifiable as Jewish by her subtly-placed chai necklace
until the second-to-last episode of the first season, while Bette has to be explicitly
identified as part black, and could be mistaken for Mediterranean or Hispanic. The
other women are all straightforwardly white, and two (Alice and Tina) are blonde.
At first glance, this conforms to images of other lesbians on American television,
who are represented as ‘white, affluent, trend-setting, Perrier-drinking, frequent
flier using, Ph.D.-holding consumer citizens with more income to spend than they
know what to do with.’2 Friends, Will & Grace, Mad About You, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and The O.C. confirm Ron Becker’s theory of the new gay stereotype
above, although Mad About You and Buffy the Vampire Slayer do each include one
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(very assimilated) Jewish lesbian.3 In comparison, The L Word seems even less
diverse: Jenny’s Jewishness is not even ‘double coded,’ but is entirely missable
until ‘Locked Up’ because of her almost-invisible necklace. 4 Bette - although
happy to identify as black - clarifies that this is only half of her identity; in ‘Listen
Up’ she identifies as half black and half white, and the ‘one drop rule’ allows her to
be defined by white people, not herself. In ‘passing’ as white so easily
(confrontational Yolanda points out that most people do not even realise Bette is
part black), Bette’s ethnicity has the potential to become a non-issue; the publicity
photographs for the show look like a group of white women with one token black
character (Bette’s sister Kit). However, whiteness as a dominant feature of identity
is linked to normative status in other categories than ethnicity; the characters’
lesbianisms, and even genders, deconstruct the meaning ‘white.’
This paper shall examine three characters’ complex whiteness: Bette, Jenny and
Shane. While other characters are complex in their whiteness because of nonnormative behaviour or social status (bisexuality, nationality), these characters are
overtly non-normative in their liminal state between white and black, ‘ethnic’
whiteness or working-class economic status. These alone are not necessarily
challenges to white normativity, as many characters appear on television in doubly
non-normative roles: black and working-class, ‘disabled’ and elderly, foreign and
Jewish.5 Sasha Torres argues that American television displays ‘particular social
conditions which it understands to be both undesirable and inextricably linked to
racially marked communities.’6 She discusses black characters specifically, but her
argument can be extended to other categories which are generally linked in popular
perceptions, such as that of the Jewish immigrant or unemployed Hispanic man.
These depictions do not challenge or subvert cultural expectations, but reinforce
them, confirming the implied audience’s belief in stereotypes of cultural ‘others’:
they are acceptable within white heteronormativity because they do not threaten
the social order. Homosexuality and lesbianism present more of a challenge
because of their being perceived as anything from perversions to choices of
lifestyle. Even today, when gays and lesbians are protected by law in America,
‘non-offensive’ portrayals still tend to focus on either those qualities enumerated
by Becker, or ‘humorous’ depictions of faggots and bulldykes.7 They are almost
exclusively white, and can therefore be absorbed into the social order. Because a
black lesbian produces a threat to black heteronormativity as well as white simply
by existing, she is rendered invisible by a perspective which aims to ‘perpetuate
and maintain the presence of male desire as desire - as unsatisfied quest’ and
reinforce social boundaries that recreate established ethnic, class, national, gender
and sexual ranks.8
Bette’s very presence in The L Word is therefore radical, although it is
important - as Bette indicates herself - not to ignore the white part of her identity.
Her ethnicity is in frequent conflict in the first season: not visibly black, her wish
to have an African American sperm donor for her and Tina’s baby is shocking, as
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her ethnicity is reconfigured in light of the statement. Yolanda’s claim that the rest
of their therapy group does not realise Bette is black performs the same function,
and places Bette as the only other black in a white and Hispanic group (one of
whom has darker skin than Bette).9 However, when placed next to Kit or their
father, Bette is markedly white, and her attempt to reproduce mixed ethnicity in the
baby is met with a lack of appreciation by Bette’s father, which separates Bette
from her African American heritage and emphasises the fact that her baby - like
Bette herself - will have a white mother as well as a black parent.
Bette’s whiteness is quite typical in many senses: although a lesbian, she has a
highly-paying job in the creative arts, a stable relationship at the start of season
one, a stylish home, expensive clothes and an education from an Ivy League
university. In fact, she strongly resembles Becker’s new gay stereotype, except that
she is not uncomplicatedly white. This one area in which she is atypical of smallscreen lesbians is crucial to her transgressive nature, as the whiteness of gays is
key to their ability to access the privileges generally reserved for heterosexuals on
television: education, family and money. Bette is able to combine qualities of a gay
consumer with those of the occasional Harvard-educated black character, usually
male, who has become part of middle-class, predominantly white, society. 10 She
aspires to the cultural perception of whiteness if not actual whiteness, given that
her blackness is, in television terms, a hindrance to achievement and affluence.
However, Bette implies in her arguments with Yolanda that she has undergone
more trials than are apparent from her current lifestyle, which are contextually
linked to her blackness. Therefore, whiteness is, for Bette, a negative category: she
suffers because she does not entirely belong to it, and is told by another black
woman she should identify only as black. She transgresses the boundaries of white
and black because she cannot be identified on sight (usually the sole defining
attribute of ‘black’ or ‘white’), but also because she is denied cultural identification
with either, creating a new category of ethnicity not based on traditional concepts
of race.
The lack of connection with her ethnic heritages is embodied in the family life
she creates in season three. Angelica, her and Tina’s daughter, is a problematic
expression of both ethnicity and sexuality. Her biological father was chosen to
express Bette’s blackness, but - in having darker skin than her mother - Angelica
demonstrates the near-impossibility of recreating Bette’s skin colour, and the
unfulfilled longing of gay parents to have a child that genetically belongs to both.
Because Angelica is not Bette’s biological child, Angelica transgresses the
traditional boundaries of the family during Bette and Tina’s separation, particularly
when Tina is in a relationship with Henry: Bette points out that people think
Angelica is adopted when she is with two white parents, but that Bette is her
biological mother. The effect of this on Bette’s own ethnicity is astounding: a
woman who was previously unrecognisable as black is made more so by a child
who is not even a genetic relation. Bette subverts every cultural expectation: the
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usual role of African Americans (especially women) on television, white privilege,
the importance of skin colour in ethnicity, and biological relationships in lesbian
parenting. Bette’s lifestyle, replete with wealth, comfort and family love is not
transgressive in actions performed or decisions made, but by its very existence
shakes the core of what it means to be white, when ‘white’ can actually be ‘black.’
Jews in literature have been discussed in terms of ethnicity at length, and
particularly interesting discussions occur in Eric J. Sundquist’s Strangers in the
Land of Jews as cultural blacks, and Eric L. Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness, in
which he discusses how Jews shifted from being ethnically ‘black’ to white.11 The
role Jenny plays is therefore liminal between black and white, although not like
Bette: Jenny’s skin is undeniably white, but her minimalistically represented
Jewishness complicates her ethnicity. Her Jewishness is not Judaism, and therefore
her difference is not of religion; although she is seen at a Shabbat dinner at the
beginning of season three, this is only because she is staying with her parents. 12
Her cultural identification is with lesbianism, not Jewishness. However, her
labelling as Jewish changes the way she is perceived. Given that difference of skin
colour (usually) requires no signpost to ensure that an audience notices it,
Jewishness must be mentioned or visually indicated, as Jenny’s is in the very first
episode; the fact that it is mentioned indicates its purposefulness.
Jenny conforms to no Jewish stereotypes: even the accusation of Jewish
women’s sexual promiscuity and exoticism does not apply, since Jenny does not
have a great number of sexual partners, and her lesbianism is hardly ‘exotic’ in a
show where this is the main subject matter. Cultural indicators are absent,
excepting the necklace, and so the boundary between Jewish and ‘white’ is blurred
because the adherence to Jewish culture seen in shows like Friends is not present.
Whereas characters like Ross Geller are marked as different by nominal
observance (treading a fine line between Jewish and ‘white’), Jenny’s lack of
engagement with ritual means that she passes for white similarly to Bette: if neither
one draws attention to their ‘blackness’, they are white. However, while it is
specifically mentioned that no one realises Bette is part black, the topic of Jenny’s
Jewishness as an invisible cultural marker is never raised. Perhaps her last name,
Schecter, accounts for this, although it could just as easily be a German name as
Jewish. Nevertheless, while Bette’s whiteness is visible above her dark skin,
Jenny’s non-whiteness is more visible than her literally white, very pale skin, in
that she is definitively Jewish because her Jewishness is mentioned.
Jenny is the only main character who is shown coming out as a lesbian, and
therefore she is quite transgressive simply because of this, performing the action of
denying the privilege of white, heterosexual society rather than leaving the
audience to infer that she has done so in the past (cheating on her white, allAmerican, athletic boyfriend with the olive-skinned, foreign, feminine Marina).
However, Jenny’s form of transgression is linked to her mental health rather than
her shift in sexual identity, which must necessarily stabilise in the narrative arc of
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the show. Her mental health deteriorates sharply at the end of season two when
Shane finds her in their bathroom with slashed wrists. Her problems apparently
disappear after this, although she is still portrayed as aggressive, narcissistic,
petulant and demanding - all potential symptoms of mental illness overlooked as
hysteria or normal personality defects. This is strongly linked to Ellen Jean
Samuels’s argument about ethnicity and disability, which states that certain kinds
of women - black or working-class in particular - tended to be seen as ‘faking’
illness in cases where there was no obvious problem, rather than having mental
health problems which could range from depression to hypochondria.13 Samuels
discusses this tendency in both history and literature, and she also discusses its link
to passing as white: in looking at escaped slave narratives, she analyses the link
between passing as white and invalidism, either genuine or fake. This resonates
deeply with Jenny’s character, whose lacklustre Jewishness is insufficient to
maintain a connection with Jewish identity (she is passing as white if Jewishness is
regarded as ‘black’), and whose mental wellbeing is linked to this (she returns to
her parents’ very Jewish home to recover from self-harming). While passing as
white, Jenny’s mental health is under threat, but goes unrecognised until she is
found self-harming: she is ‘faking’ both whiteness and illness until - through
transgressing the literal boundary of her body, her white skin - she forces others to
acknowledge her illness while being forced to come to terms with her own nonwhiteness.
Shane is not like Bette and Jenny, in that - ethnically - she is unquestionably
white. However, her transgressive nature means that her whiteness is not the same
as male, heterosexual whiteness, or even the whiteness of other characters like
Alice, Tina or Dana. As a category, American whiteness is almost ubiquitously
defined not only by skin colour (privileged above blackness, Arabs, south east
Asians and Native Americans), but by gender (male), sexuality (heterosexual),
class (middle-class), education (university-level), age (below middle-age, but at
least early-twenties), physicality (able-bodied) and nationality (American). This is
not to say that white characters adhere to every category consistently, but this is the
ideal: ‘white’ is a synecdoche for all privilege. By these criteria, Bette is certainly
white, given that she falls into almost every category of privilege. Shane has more
literally white skin, but her gender, sexuality, class and education remove her from
the site of white privilege, changing her cultural ethnicity to whiteness of a sort
which is at odds with the ideal. The only one of the ensemble to be genuinely
working-class, Shane highlights her transgressive whiteness by reminding the
others she is a hairdresser; dressing in a fashion which is not simplistically butch,
but more evocative of labourers than professionals; and sleeping with women of all
ages, ethnicities, classes and sexualities. She transgresses the boundaries of
lesbianism with her prodigious history of sexual partners, and by sleeping with
women who are not lesbians but are desperate to have sex with her (culminating in
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her escape from a bride on her wedding day, as well as encounters with two
bridesmaids and the bride’s mother in ‘Look Out, Here They Come!’).
As a visibly white woman, Shane’s fashion choices de-emphasise her potential
privileges: rather than dressing like Tina (who, as Bette points out, is not a visible
minority), Shane’s clothing creates an androgynous appearance, her overtly
feminine body (braless, slender and wearing make-up) clashing with her men’s
shirts, vests, jeans and trainers. In denying a specificity to her gender identity, she
complicates her whiteness, confounded even further by her hairstyle (ambiguously
gendered) and body art. Her tattoos literally add colour to her skin, and reject white
culture as well as white flesh. Her piercings also show a destructive attitude
towards cultural norms, tearing holes into her skin.14 Both tattoos and piercings
decorate the body, and invert normative expectations of appearance: ‘normal’
appearance is defined as white, unblemished skin, matching gender to biological
sex. Shane cannot change her skin colour, but she can cover, tear, and decorate it,
creating an androgynously gendered look. Her whiteness is confounded by choices
which disturb cultural perceptions of dominant ethnicity: unlike Bette and Jenny,
she rejects whiteness, rather than reacting against its rejection of her.
Whiteness in The L Word is yet more complex than this, and this paper
examines only three of the characters’ problematic whiteness. What of the disabled
whiteness of Jodi Lerner, Bette’s deaf girlfriend? What of the transgendered
whiteness of Moira/Max Sweeney, Jenny’s sometime girlfriend? How is Helena
Peabody, the English millionaire, situated as white? Where are Hispanic characters
Papi and Carmen positioned? Because of The L Word’s intimately transgressive
nature as a show with explicit depictions of lesbian sex, its transgressive forms of
whiteness are linked to non-normative sexuality, but provide a template for
transgressive whiteness in heterosexual contexts as well, highlighting nonnormative whiteness, and how this alters cultural perceptions and definitions to
include non-privileged members of white society, as well as those who fall within
its clearest boundaries.
1Notes
Various, The L Word (Canada/United States of America: Anonymous Content, 2004-2009).
2 Ron Becker, ‘Prime-Time Television in the Gay Nineties: Network Television, Quality Audiences,
and Gay Politics.’ In The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill
(London: Routledge, 2004).
3 Various, Friends (United States of America: Warner Bros, 1994-2004). James Burrows, Will & Grace
(United States of America: KoMut Entertainment, 1998-2006). Various, Mad About You (United States
of America: In Front Productions, 1992-1999). Various, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (United States of
America: Mutant Enemy, 1997-2003). Various, The O.C. (United States of America: Wonderland
Sound and Vision, 2003-2007).
4 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3. Also, double coding relies on an audience’s knowledge of that
which is being coded, and the chai is not as widely recognisable as the Star of David, so a Gentile
audience may not take any notice of it at all.
5 I use the definition of ‘disabled’ that appears in British legislation, as any condition which impairs the
life of an individual in any way, which includes mental health problems and long-term illnesses.
However, disability on television tends to be indicated almost exclusively by the presence of a
wheelchair or white cane.
6 Sasha Torres, ‘Television and Race.’ In A Companion to Television, edited by Janet Wasko (Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 396.
7 See Judy Grahn for a thorough explanation of the place of these terms within gay culture. Grahn,
Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 203-231 and 133-161
respectively.
8 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 164 and 151.
9 My positioning of Hispanic as somewhere between white and non-white is extremely problematic,
but I will follow American definitions of ethnicity here, where ‘Hispanic’ is listed in administrative
paperwork as separate from white, black and other identities.
10 See John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity.’ In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited
by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993). Danae
Clark, ‘Commodity Lesbianism.’ In Abelove, Barale and Halperin, The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader.
11 Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews,
Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Other notable works on this
subject include Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in
America (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 1998). Joe Lockard, ‘Reading The Turner Diaries:
Jewish Blackness, Judaized Blacks, and Head-Body Race Paradigms.’ In Complicating Constructions:
Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts, edited by David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
12 Shabbat is Hebrew for ‘Sabbath.’
13 Ellen Jean Samuels, Fingerprinting the Nation: Identifying Race and Disability in America (PhD
diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2006).
14 For a discussion on disturbing links between tattooing and piercing as forms of self-harm linked to
cultural ostracism, see Sheila Jeffreys, ‘“Body Art” and Social Status: Cutting, Tattooing and Piercing
from a Feminist Perspective,’ Feminism & Psychology, 10, no. 4 (2000), 409-429.
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Filmography
Burrows, James. Will & Grace. United States of America: KoMut Entertainment, 1998-2006.
Various. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. United States of America: Mutant Enemy, 1997-2003.
Various. Friends. United States of America: Warner Bros, 1994-2004.
Various. The L Word. Canada/United States of America: Anonymous Content, 2004-2009.
Various. Mad About You. United States of America: In Front Productions, 1992-1999.
Various. The O.C. United States of America: Wonderland Sound and Vision, 2003-2007.
Clare Reed is a PhD student at the University of Reading. Her primary research interests centre on
problematic expressions of Jewish and lesbian identities in literature, film and television.