The Argents aren’t a family, but a secret society.
I’m going to bust out my soap box here and speak for a moment, then move on with my life.
I like Lydia. I think she has the potential to be an incredibly strong, confident member of the pack, who users her intelligence to kick ass and take names. Smart is sexy, and she’s got both in spades.
However, her role in last season was as Jackson’s girlfriend and as a victim to Peter’s harassment. She didn’t make use of her intelligence. She didn’t really do much of anything (with the exception of scream, which Holland is incredibly skilled at doing well). This is where her agency is missing. Lydia doesn’t do anything: she only reacts. Even when she does something major - drugging her guests at the party - it’s in reaction to Peter’s spell/power/whatever-the-fuck-it-is.
This promo is difficult for me to process because of a few things:
There’s the history of Lydia as victim, which was clearly established last season, and a promo that’s designed to make us believe that Lydia is in the body bag. Between the curly hair and the juxtaposition with Lydia screaming, not to mention Stiles being the narrator (which I think was done intentionally; rather than Scott or Derek narrating, they picked the male character on the show who is associated with her [and not currently on another program]), the promo is made to convince us that Lydia is the woman they’ve found dead.
There’s also the fact that it’s not explicitly stated in the promo that the woman in the body bag is Lydia. These kind of things are meant to titillate, to draw us in, to make us care, emotionally, about what’s happening in the extremely short amount of time that we’re watching. There’s also the other promos to consider, which also show the victimization and brutalization of other prominent characters (Scott being drowned; Isaac being held down in a tub by clinical looking people). With those also held in context, it seems like Teen Wolf is just beating the shit out of their characters, a trend that they’ve followed throughout the series.
Now, I’m not trying to say that the promo itself isn’t problematic. It’s clearly a case of sexualized violence against a woman. It’s commonplace. It’s a problem.
However, judging the promo in a vacuum ignores some of the other things that have been released by the TW crew in regards to this season. The tagline is This Might Hurt. We should expect, at least a little bit, that the characters are going to hurt or be hurt. And I think the promos are just continuing that idea, not necessarily telling us that women are objects that can be violated and killed for our entertainment.
I hope everyone in the Teen Wolf fandom can take a moment to reconsider Allison Argent. This may not be the most graceful wording. But I just hope to dissolve an inch of the hatred or at least develop a better understanding of it. Feel free to respond, whether or not you agree.
Most advocates for queer rights would agree that we suffer from a lack of positive representation in the media, and that prejudices within the media both reflect, and contribute to prejudices in society at large.
In order for people to hold prejudice against queerness they must first believe that queerness is abnormal/wrong/bad. In order for people to believe that, they must first assume that straightness is normal/right/good.
This bias, otherwise known as heteronormativity, is the foundation on which queer oppression is built.Homophobia and biphobia and and transphobia are all products of heteronormativity.
Therefore, when I argue for better queer representation in the media, I am fighting not merely for a greater quantity of queer representation. I am fighting mainstream media’s heteronormative and totally inaccurate conception of what constitutes/qualifies as queer.
But what is queer, really?
The last couple of days I’ve been thinking a lot about representation and what I mean when I talk about it, what others mean, what different types there are, and how maybe some of the arguments we’re having are because we’re not really working with the same assumptions based on vocabulary.
