When
Showtime's new series The
L Word premieres next month with Jennifer Beals as a lesbian
of mixed racial heritage, it will not only be a big step
forward for lesbian visibility, but for the visibility of biracial
women, as well.
Beals
originally came to fame as the welder-turned-dancer in 1983's hit
movie Flashdance, a role she landed as an undergraduate
at Yale University. She has starred in several movies since then,
but most have been small roles in large studio films, like Denzel
Washington's Devil in a Blue Dress and the recent John
Cusack/Gene Hackman film Runaway Jury, or roles in small
independent films, like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,
The Last Days of Disco, Twilight of the Golds, and
The Anniversary Party.
Then
last year, she was cast in The L Word as Bette, a
lesbian museum director trying to have a baby with her partner,
Tina (Laurel Holloman), and the rest is about to become history.
Beals
is not a lesbian in real life (she was married for 10 years to director
Alexandre Rockwell before they divorced in 1996, and she is now
married to Ken Dixon, a Canadian film technician), but
she finds it easier to play one on TV because she's biracial, so
she has "always lived sort-of on the outside," she told
Curve Magazine last December. "The idea of being the
other in society is not foreign to me."
With
an African-American father and an Irish mother, Beals belongs to
the growing group of Americans--seven million, in fact, according
to the 2000 census data--who have a racially mixed heritage, but
she did not publicly identify as biracial until recently. Prior
to taking this role on The L Word, in fact, only two of
the dozens of characters Beals played over the years have been biracial;
the rest have been white women or women whose race was unspecified
but assumed to be white. This likely has less to do with Beals,
however, than with the fact that there have been almost no explicitly
biracial characters on film or television.
Although
there have been plenty of TV characters, including several lesbian
ones, played by biracial actresses--like Sonja Sohn on The
Wire, Iyari Limon
on Buffy, and soon, Karina
Lombard on The L Word--there have been few TV characters
of any sexual orientation, let alone lesbian ones, who identify
as biracial.
Which
will make Beals' biracial lesbian character Bette a rarity on TV.
Bette
is just one of several characters
in The L Word, a series about a group of mostly-lesbian
friends in L.A., but she is one of the more prominent ones. Beals
describes her character as "a total type-A, multi-tasking,
slightly bossy women, who is moved the most by art...and she's biracial.
So there's all kinds of things you get to play with. You get to
play with the mystery of sexuality and you get to play with race
and you get to play with class and all kinds of things."
Bette
does indeed struggle with issues of race and sexuality,
beginning with the very first episode of the series
when she and Tina argue over whether to have a biracial child, prompting
a conversation between Bette and her older half-sister Kit (Pam
Grier) about how Tina sees--or doesn't see--Bette's racial identity,
and Bette's own complicity in this.
But
even
when Bette is not dealing explicitly with her biracial identity,
just her weekly presence will chip away at television's restrictive
practice of casting race in black-or-white terms.
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