Ange has picked up on the Galactica season finale’s Berkeley In The ’60s vibe, but instead, I’m gonna be completely dodgy and gasp (with and without irony) about how hot all the non-white women were in the last two episodes! (Spoilers:) Tori, the pneumatic election-fixer! Boomer’s new post-natal “wild” look, with tousled, faintly orange hair! Dee in a sexy officer’s uniform! My mouth was hanging open.
It’s been widely remarked that Ron Moore’s Galactica has “dropped the ball” on the “representation” of “minorities”; I’m not one to really subscribe to such representationalist logic, but it’s still quite obvious that the prominence of powerful black men in the original series — e.g. Tigh and Boomer — seems to have been, uh, erased. What we have in its place is… odd. I’m not quite sure how race plays within the show’s discourse of otherness that I’ve been endlessly harping on about, but I think it’s significant that more effort than usual was expended on beautifying the cast’s non-white women in the last few episodes. I might be over-reading here, but I feel caught in a weird interpellation, an address the show seems to be making to straight, non-white men: okay, you can’t have your identificatory Viper-pilot wish-fulfillment, but how hott are the sistas in this show?
In the logic of incorporation, perhaps this is the next stage of “representation”: after seeing “ourselves” (the straight, non-white male spectators) on screen, “we” can then disappear as objects of scrutiny (just as whiteness itself disappears?), and gaze upon “our own” women? Weeeeeeird. It’s like the point I made to Hon a few weeks ago: in comparison to the 1980s, we Asian people in Australia are now more “public”, in terms of sheer numbers, and in terms of institutional visibility. Back in the ’80s, if you were to find a publicly distributed photograph of a half-naked Asian woman in Australia, it would inevitably be part of a fetishistic “white gaze”, a piece of kinky exoticist misogyny for white men with Yellow Fever. But now, we see photos of half-naked Asian women all the time on posters for dance parties that Asian people go to, and the audience is Asian men. Does this mean “we” (straight Asian men) have achieved a certain amount of phallic authority that we can now publicly objectify “our own” women under Australian multiculturalism?
[ tags: battlestar-galactica, race, sex, television, tv ]
Nice post. But, there’s something to be said for BSG (and other films in the last year or so) having broken with US popcult’s disinclination to have anyone bonking (or even gazing lovingly upon) someone with a different skin color.
Also, I think the actor who plays Six is probably one of the finest actors around.
It’s great that you love BG as much as we do, but would ya please stop putting in spoilers!!!!
Sorry, the dodgy way I’m doing tagging at the moment fucks up excerpts. I’ll work something out.