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Class on “The L Word”

Few American television shows have engaged with issues of class, partly due to the common misperception that the United States is a classless society, but also because television tends to show idealized families and social groups and generally avoids controversy in order to draw advertisers.

Characters on a given television show tend to hail from the same class or economic background. On prime-time soaps like Dynasty, for example, they are all wealthy or upper-class, or on a comedy like Everybody Loves Raymond, everyone comes from an acceptable working-class background.

When characters of different class backgrounds interact on a television show, it is often likely to occur on a crime drama, or as a matter of romantic interest (for example, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls for an upper middle-class girl on a show like The O.C.).

But from its beginnings in 2004, The L Word has been different. Los Angeles, where The L Word is set, is a sprawling, mixed-class urban area in which grinding poverty is effectively separated from extremely wealthy enclaves by freeway systems that divide the city into different class zones, a dual economic system split into a wage-based formal economy and a labor-based informal economy, and racism compounded by a large number of recent immigrants.

The characters of The L Word, however, who mostly live in the upper-middle-class gay bubble of West Hollywood, rarely if ever encounter these complexities. Instead, the lesbians on The L Word seem to live in a rose-hued melting pot of different cultures and classes, implying that a shared lesbian identity transcends class and race.

From the show’s beginning, the lead character, Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals) has been a somewhat atypical African-American lesbian. The daughter of a man who had connections to both Bill Clinton and Gloria Steinem (as revealed in the last episode of Season 2), Bette lives in a beautiful West Hollywood bungalow (complete with swimming pool and expensive works of art) and works as a highly paid museum director.

Bette’s social circle includes women from a variety of classes, but their different backgrounds rarely make an impact on their social lives. Among the wealthiest, most upper-class of Bette’s friends is tennis star Dana Fairbanks (Erin Daniels), who hails from a rich white Republican family in Orange County. Bette’s ex-girlfriend, Alice (Leisha Hailey), seems to effortlessly make a living as a freelance writer and radio host.

The former street kid, Shane (Katherine Moennig), has successfully gone from being a drug-addicted prostitute to an edgy hairstylist who no longer seems to struggle to pay the rent.

Carmen (Sarah Shahi), who was only a lowly production assistant and part-time DJ in Season 2, has become an in-demand Los Angeles DJ who is now invited to spin at celebrity parties. And Bette Porter’s sister, Kit (Pam Grier), a former pop star who fell on hard times and alcoholism, has kicked the habit and become the successful owner of the Planet, a coffee shop-cum-lesbian-nightclub that comes complete with its own top-shelf chef.

But in Season 3, this idealistic melting-pot of classes has shown signs of leaking.

Bette, formerly the wealthiest character on the show, has lost her job and is breaking down at the idea of being supported by her partner, Tina, whom she used to support financially. And newcomer Moira, a working-class computer technician from Skokie, Illinois, has carted with her the baggage of a different class, different culture and different gender expression?a bundle that does not meld well with the posh girls in Los Angeles.

Bette’s class anxiety can best be seen in her struggle with being unemployed after being accustomed to being her family’s primary breadwinner. Though she is no longer a high-powered museum director, she finds it difficult, in Season 3, to accept the idea that it is necessary to work in order to gain enough income to support a growing family.

When her partner, Tina, offers to take a job with former lover Helena Peabody’s new movie studio, Bette accuses Tina of suffering from a “petit bourgeois” ideology.

The term “petit bourgeois” refers to the lower middle class of tradespersons and small business owners who must work for a living. In Marxist analysis, the petit bourgeois are distinct from the “haute bourgeoisie” or capitalist class, who own the means of production and do not need to sell their labor. Bette’s distinctly classist statement reveals that she wishes to separate herself from the notion of having to work for a living; something that is not surprising given her background and upbringing.

It also reveals, however, that Bette is something of a hypocrite, given her supposed support of feminist art and activism.

While Bette struggles with her own class issues (which are, of course, inextricably tied to race?as her relationship with her sister Kit shows), the rest of the characters in Season 3 are being forced to struggle with class through the character of Moira. Introduced at the beginning of the season as a computer technician who dresses in stereotypically “butch” clothing (flannel shirts and men’s jeans, for example), Moira’s class background is framed in stark contrast to the L Word ladies’ upper-class aspirations in episode 3.3, when she joins them at a high-end restaurant for a dinner to welcome Jenny back home.

The other characters are clearly uncomfortable with Moira’s appearance, both the fact that she does not look like a feminine woman and that her clothing does not match the tenor of the restaurant at which they are eating. This discomfort reflects the characters’ sudden awakening to class differences as well as their second-wave feminist rejection of butch/femme identities.

In the character of Bette, class and race are intertwined; in the character of Moira, class and gender are intertwined.

The fact that The L Word is tackling issues of class is certainly praiseworthy simply because most television shows evade these issues, despite the fact that they play a pivotal role in everyday life. But The L Word‘s engagement with class has so far been clumsy, particularly in its engagement with gender as it relates to class.

Butch/femme identities have historically been more significant in working-class communities than among aristocratic or upper-class lesbians, who have tended to prefer to blend in to the broader, upper-class community. But because the character of Moira is about to become situated as someone who questions her gender, the show runs the risk of conflating butch identity with transgender identity, and pushing the complicated intersection of gender and class under the rug as Moira begins to transition from female to male.

But although the third season of The L Word may not be handling these problematic storylines with as much grace as it could, what it has shown us is quite significant. Despite the earlier idealism of the show, with its classless friendships and apparent multicultural harmony, The L Word is finally admitting that sharing common identities as lesbians does not necessarily make for a rainbow world.

And simply acknowledging that class and race and gender exist is a huge step forward in portraying the lesbian community–or indeed, any American community–with some degree of reality.

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