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A Town Full of Babies: Queer Life and Children's Media
🕑 Added 2020-07-07 02:59:27 +0000 UTC
Image taken from Strange Suspense Stories #60, artist Jack Kirby, pub. Fawcett Comics, August 1962
Over the past two decades, “adult who consumes primarily children’s media” has gone from a reviled fringe identity — think Bronies, adult male fans of the My Little Pony revival, monopolizing cons and fanart forums meant for actual children — to a more or less normative way for grown people to relate to art. In the queer community especially, shows like Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Noelle Stevenson’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have found significant cultural purchase among older teens and adults well into their 30s and 40s. That this particular segment of fandom has often turned to intense online harassment when upset over their chosen fiction is a separate issue addressed in part by my piece on online puritanism. But why, in the first place, are queer adults forming such intense emotional bonds to children’s media, and what effect does a steady diet of soft-edged pastel art have on the adult mind?
The uniform visual inoffensiveness of such art presents its own questions: if we’re never exposed to images which cause discomfort, does that impact our ability to feel empathy for people society deems outcast or unattractive? Exposure through fiction to the inner lives of people we consciously or unconsciously consider offensive is a powerful tool in expanding our ability to connect with others, to learn to automatically acknowledge their full humanity. The near-universal acceptance in creative circles that all fictional characters should be, at a minimum, easy on the eyes is an aspect of representation in art which often goes undiscussed. Imagine stripping The Sopranos of James Gandolfini’s deviated septum and hulking, heavy frame, or Perfume of Grenouille’s insectile repugnance. So much is lost by accepting the standardization of bodies that goes hand in hand with feel-good media.
This unwillingness to engage ugliness is troublesome no matter a piece of artwork’s audience. Children must be exposed to things that trigger learned, taught, and unconscious disgust so that they can begin to unpick society’s toxic conditioning and more fully and naturally accept themselves and others. The matter of intended audience is sticky in its own right, and while there’s an argument to be made that creators of children’s art are banking on and catering directly to adult fans, it’s ultimately beside the point, which is that adults are consuming this work and treating it as an acceptable resting place for one’s tastes. Here I’ll take a moment to stress that enjoying a children’s cartoon is not a bad thing. I thought Over the Garden Wall was delightful, as a teenager I loved The Last Airbender, but I recognize that at a fundamental level these shows were not made for me and do not challenge my adult faculties. They’re art for children which I happen to enjoy, just as I enjoy reading Peter Pan and The Hobbit out loud to the kids in my life. When you bring adult focus to bear on art for children the results are disturbing, and the reverse — difficult subject matter repackaged as safely and palatably as possible — is often clinical, dull, and unengaging.
At a certain point, if you’re interested in becoming conversant in art and able to analyze it in good faith and with functional insight, you have to start challenging yourself. You have to watch and read things more emotionally and morally complicated than a Goofus and Gallant comic, and to accept discomfort as part of a mature experience of art. Does that mean you have to go out right now and watch Cronenberg’s The Fly and Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover if you want to understand art? No, but it does mean you should probably stop smugly claiming that Gravity Falls is a more thematically and emotionally complex and coherent story than Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Letting go of the idea that children’s media is somehow purer or richer than art for adults is a crucial part of growing up, of developing an adult sensibility and learning to see things in a more nuanced way than the confines of an 11-21 minute cartoon which can’t include sex or a realistic conception of violence can express.
In a world where the oppression-fueled capitalist dream of self-sufficiency in which so many of us were raised has now fully and irrevocably collapsed for even the comparatively privileged, adulthood can feel elusive, even threatening. Perhaps in clinging to children’s art, in insisting that it’s for us, actually, and that it can nourish and challenge us as fully as adult art can, we’re deferring that frightening responsibility. Perhaps we’re trying to reclaim a childhood lost to abuse, or to poverty trauma. As queers, many of us live with a sense of having been robbed of something early in our lives. Raised by straight cis parents, kept in the closet by fear or ignorance or outright coercion, growing increasingly aware with every passing year of the parts of ourselves that have vanished into that sense of wrong, that false, unrealized life. Of course we want it back. Of course we want the tenderness and carefree wildness life denied us. But no one gets a second childhood, and an hour with any six-year-old should tell anyone all they need to know about whether or not an adult should be held to the same standards of reason and responsibility to which we hold our children.
In seeking to hold onto something that’s already gone, to warp ourselves around a stunted recreation of our childhoods, we’re missing out on the complex joys of adulthood. If along the way we find solace or self-expression in children’s art then that’s all to the good, but without a relationship to adult art there’s a hard limit on how far that solace can bring you and how much of yourself you can perceive and puzzle out. Infantilizing ourselves cuts us off from a whole world of potential, not just in our relationship to art but in our ways of moving through the world. As queers we have a long, rich history of raising and caring for one another in ways the straight world refuses to care for us. If we aren’t willing to do the hard work of putting aside childish things, how will we give that to the next generation when they come to us in need? How will we carry the fire of queer liberation, of community, of the radical act of keeping each other alive, into a world that grows more hostile towards us every day? Cultivating an adult relationship to art and forcing ourselves to expand our circles of empathy in that way isn’t all of it, but it matters. It matters.
EDIT: Due to reader interest, I am including an indicative but by no means comprehensive list of my favorite adult fiction.
TV: The Young Pope, The New Pope, Euphoria, The Sopranos, Halt and Catch Fire, Better Call Saul, Hannibal, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, Mr. Robot, Suburra: Blood on Rome, Rome, The Terror (Season 1 only), Fargo, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Game of Thrones, The Affair, Dark, The Act, The Prisoner, Channel Zero.
FILM: The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, Akira, Sorry to Bother You, Dead Ringers, Crash (Cronenberg), Raise the Red Lantern, The Handmaiden, Sword of Doom, Lady Snowblood, Showgirls, The Love Witch, Cat People (1942), Under the Skin, Birth, Sexy Beast, Boogie Nights, The Invitation, High Life, Come and See, The Devils, Possession, The Wicker Man, The Witch, Night of the Living Dead, Jackie Brown, Hagazussa, Raging Bull, Casino, Belle du Jour, Eyes Without a Face, It Follows, Trouble Every Day, Marie Antoinette, Antichrist, American Psycho.
BOOKS: Lilith's Brood, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Lolita, Wolf Hall, Beyond Black, The Left Hand of Darkness, The End of the Affair, Wilding (Melanie Tem), We Have Always Lived in the Castle, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Blood Meridian, Geek Love, Black Is the Color, Laid Waste, Disorder (Erika Price), Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, The Masker, F4 (Larissa Glasser), Corrupted Vessels (Briar Ripley Page), Psycho Nymph Exile, John Dear (Laura Lannes), The Waves, Ulysses, In the Heart of the Valley of Love, The Lathe of Heaven, The Haunting of Hill House, IT.
Comments
Kelly O'Rourke
Thank you very much for writing this essay. It really brought into a focus a few things I've been feeling lately about my relationship to the media I consume, but haven't been able to verbalize. I am very fond of Steven Universe, as it helped in my early twenties to recognize that just because my family was genuinely loving and wanted the best for me didn't mean I didn't inherit or experience trauma while growing up. Even with that, though, I could never imagine insisting SU was the only media out there I could have related to or that it was the best way to do so. "When you bring adult focus to bear on art for children the results are disturbing" really hit the nail on the head for me; I see so many people online placing all of their adult needs and preoccupations on children's shows and then blowing up in anger when the show can't hold up that weight, treating it like some kind of personal betrayal. Or worse, like trotting out the most misogynistic vitriol against both real and fictional women and girls while claiming they're really looking out for the next generation. I work with kids, and the longer I do the more enraged I get that so many adults dictate the narrative around things that weren't made for them, while also twisting that narrative into something truly vile. Signed up to your patreon after reading this essay, and I look forward to reading more of your work.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
fuckin love that movie
Molly Noise
This is a perfectly succinct and cogent expression of the morass of thoughts I've had swirling in my head the last few years. Thank you. I'd also say that The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is one of my favourite films having only seen it once last year and it's an excellent recommendation owing to its symbolic density yet surface intelligibility.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
very well-said, alex. thank you
Alex M
This essay challenged me to consider why I have such a fondness for some children's art even though I know it lacks depth. It comes down to their ability to challenge me with a message of self-love/acceptance that I struggle to accept in my day-to-day life. But this viewpoint has so much more value when added to and in contrast to more complex philosophy. Thank you for sharing this criticism, and the list of recommended art at the end!
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Molly, this is so deeply touching to me <3 and yes, absolutely, Alison is one of the greatest fucking characters in modern TV. I'll write about her sooner or later!
Molly Starr
You are a brilliant critic all the time but this and the never grow up essay are just classic poleaxing the culture moments. God I would pay hundreds of dollars for your thoughts on The Affair - I don't see many people talk about that show. I think about Ruth Wilson's character almost every day.
ziggy
TL;DR I appreciate you, please never change <3
ziggy
Gretchen, I don't have any thoughts about your brilliant essay that haven't already been said here or on Twitter, but I just wanted to give a general thank you for not only the art you create but that you share thoughtful essays like this with us, too. I've followed you for a little over a year now (I think? Quarantine has sucked away what little perception of time I had) and your insightful posts really have helped me put more of my thoughts and feelings into a clear focus when they were somewhat formless before.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
see I think season 2 is huge, just brilliant, this laying out of everything you get when you put individualist heroics ahead of mass consciousness and direct action. money went to hell, but no power really changed hands at all. season 3 dissolves into a mess and I haven't seen season 4
Ashley Lake
I'm surprised you included Mr. Robot. Maybe this is off topic, but the show felt like a kid putting on his dad's clothes (I guess that's thematic). After season 1 I just sort of hung on, but I couldn't shake my disbelief after the writers depicted the country as being somehow entirely listless and beaten after student debt was dissolved, and watching Elliot keep making worse mistakes as time went on instead of just leaving town and doing something else with his life. Similarly, the subplots became less and less articulated (like Angela's weird interview after trying to blow the whistle with federal environmental agencies) until I felt like I was watching an anime--all light, shadow, and suggestion of dark plots, but no material. Everyone seemed to lose their agency as characters and be at the mercy of a story the writers wanted to work, like action figures in a kid's hands. I gave up somewhere in season 3, so maybe I missed something that made it all worthwhile, but that was what I was left with--a story punching above its weight that couldn't shake an unintentionally naive, childlike sensibility.
Zoe
I think the problem is people want something light and fun and happy, while a good chunk of adult fiction is somewhat gray. That's why I love Wayfarers by Becky Chambers so much; it's clearly written for adults, but it's warm and happy. Great article though, I love it.
Matthew McGrorty
This is a lovely piece and definitely gives me some thinking to do (alongside a reminder to pick Hannibal back up and give Jackie Brown another watch). Looking forward to reading the rest of your stuff!
Gretchen Felker-Martin
I come from a pretty intense and damaging religious background, too, and I'm so glad this resonated with you and that you found worth in it. <3
Trevor Cushman
Thank you. Thank you for this. I have been ruminating on it and so appreciate the challenge and push to growth in it. It's also helped me frame part of my own experience in a way I was not expecting. I was raised in an intensely fundamentalist Christian world, and part of my journey out of it to radical queerness was helped by gradually finding art that was more and more transgressive. Some of what helped me grow are works that were "edgy Christian" art. While it was important for my journey and I have a nostalgic fondness for the part it played in my life, I now find it artistically null and philosophically childish. To continue to marinate in that for me would be regressive, nostalgic masturbation (at best!). Not a perfect analogy to queer children's art, as I think "edgy Christian" art is much more actively harmful, but wanted to share as I found personal resonance with that!
Kate Lacour
Ew. My kids watch a lot of SU, which I like for the nontoxic yet strong version of masculinity, emotional competence, body positivity, and gender fluidity. But it never even occurred to me to consider it as more than a kid's show. And I say this as someone who watches PeeWee on my own time. What the hell.
Isabelle Aspin
This piece is giving me a lot to think about. I work in animation and think a lot about how animation can be used to smooth out the rough edges of complicated or difficult ideas, and while sometimes that effect can be harnessed to positive ends, I don't think we as a community think enough about how it can be used to sanitize and sell shitty soft ideas to kids and adults.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
YES YES YES YES! fuck yes
Sarah F.
(Lol whoops sorry this is VeRy LoNg)
Sarah F.
Agreed on all counts. I think what makes me the most nervous about this sort of thing is that in the (understandable) battle for increased representation, the spread of these delicate, desexualized, toothless depictions of LGBTQ people in kids' media feel a bit suspect. I think it's great to introduce kids to the concept of queer love early, but it does feel like an unintended byproduct of having more LGBTQ characters in these really sexless genres is seen as enough, both by the people who make decisions for networks and some queer audiences. And I wouldn't want to take that joy away from them either, because I get it, but I worry about what's happening to queer culture at large when so many of its most well-known depictions are free of the sexuality that defines the community, not to mention the essential component of rage that came from its continued oppression. I understand the fantasy of wanting to just finally be happy and okay with yourself, but it feels like this image that's being pushed onto the LGBTQ community by media executives who are largely straight, old white people, many of whom probably remember ACT UP, but don't want young people to, because maybe then they'd learn, or remember, they still have a lot to be angry about. I love reading what you write about this stuff because of how unbelievably essential it feels to break free of this desire to be acknowledged in media created by rich people who have an active interest in silencing the oppressed that's unlikely to go away with increased demands for intersectionality. Almost everything I see come up that's supposed to be some sort of large-scale representation for the LGBTQ community just seems like this assimilationist bullshit, like Queer Eye, or Love Simon, or Drag Race, or that To Wong Foo-inspired show about going to small towns and turning randos into drag queens. Like there's this deep desire to be understood by the straight world, instead of demanding/making something better than having to be seen through their gaze, to be invited to their lame parties, when straight people so clearly wanted to be invited to ours but without being asked to sacrifice anything (or worse, trying to make themselves feel better for inflicting suffering on people they had to be told over decades were cool, or just fucking human beings). Queer people deserve so much more than kids' shows. Anyway, I'll stop myself, this subject is so rich, I could read a whole book of you talking about it.
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Thank you so much, Jeeyon! I really value your opinion in general and on this, where you're an expert, specifically.
Jeeyon Shim
I loved this, it reflects so many of my thoughts as someone who's worked extensively with kids and makes art for both children and adults. Thank you for writing it!
Gretchen Felker-Martin
I think the difference is that you CAN get nourishment from adult art, so even if you don't engage it in mature way, the potential is there, the depth and complexity are there. Trying to find your adult self by projecting onto children's media is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
Eve Harms
Wesferatu
This read absolutely helped me through the strange discomfort I feel around "cozy" queer ppl who can't seem to interact with me on an adult level.
