Streaming privilege: Addressing intersectionality in Transparent

In an episode of Jill Soloway’s Transparent (2014–), a character laments the fate of intersectionality, describing it as a word which has ‘too many syllables: in-ter-sec-tion…I’m bored’, she says. ‘I’m not even finishing it’ (3:2). By mentioning the concept in this way, the scene not only overtly signals the show’s preoccupation with it, but also points towards the type of viewer one can reasonably assume the series is addressing; one informed enough to have at least heard about intersectionality, who may or may not agree with the character’s point. In examining the link between intersectionality and television, I thus focus this entry on the series’ third season, which explicitly thematises the notion at various instances. Intersectionality is mentioned in conversation between characters and is even seen during a protagonist’s hallucination, as Ari (Gaby Hoffman), referred to in the season as Ali, imagines attempting to guess the word during a psychedelic game of Wheel of Fortune, with none other than poet Ntozake Shange and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner as their co-contestants (3:3). ¹ My focus on the series thus stems from two central reasons: on the one hand, from its relevance as one of the key LGBTQI+ televisual texts on the US media landscape; and on the other, from its overt engagement with the term and how this can be understood.

The series revolves around the Pfefferman family, with Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) coming out to her children as transgender in the beginning of the show. As Amy Villarejo (2016) points out, Transparent takes place within what can only be described as a ‘carefully constructed white world’ (12), the limits of which are often quite narrowly defined by the material privilege the family possesses. ² In the initial episode of the third season, the spatial limits in which the characters are normally sequestered are emphasised through a plot line centring around Maura volunteering at an LGBTQI+ helpline, where she receives a call from the African American Elizah (Alexandra Gray). The two characters are initially presented as being unable to find common ground, with Maura untrained for her new post and trying to counsel Elizah by reading her generic replies off a volunteer ‘cheat sheet’. However, once they learn that both of them are trans, this leads to a moment of genuine connection, visually reinforced by the characters leaning on a glass wall, their faces edited as if leaning on each other. After Elizah abruptly hangs up the phone, Maura is worried and attempts to find her in a South Los Angeles shopping mall, and the rest of the episode highlights just how ill-prepared she is for such surroundings.

Once at the mall, Maura approaches a group of transgender Latin American women, asking if they are also family or the Spanish familia, thus invoking their mutual transness as a signifier of shared community, which the women eagerly accept. However, once Maura asks if they have seen Elizah on ‘the streets’, their offers of help are revoked when they read this question as an implication that they are sex workers. Though we, as viewers, might understand this phrasing more as a misunderstanding, the term streets acts in the sequence to highlighting the spatial dimensions of this exchange, and so the scene localises questions of recognition and misrecognition within precise geographical borders. In this sense, both the scene and the episode as a whole raise the question of whether there is such a thing as a transgender or queer community alongside intersections of race and class. This is a theme addressed once more at the ending of the episode, when Maura finally finds the surprised Elizah, but manages to do so at a moment when she has lost her purse and is consequently accused of stealing by a black fast-food worker. In Soloway’s own words, ‘the intersectional question for Maura and Elizah in this moment is, “Are we more bonded because we’re trans, or are we less bonded because we’re different races? Do our differences make us more alike, and bonded together, or do we need to recognize and pull out and separate our differences, so we can truly have movements that see everyone?”’ (cited in Murphy, 2016). In terms of this particular storyline, the final separation of Maura and Elizah at the end of the episode points towards their inability to transgress class and racial borders; a notion further reinforced by Elizah never again reappearing in the season.

By portraying Maura’s attempt to help the African American Elizah as a failed one, Transparent avoids depicting its white and affluent central character in accordance with what has been termed the ‘White Savior’ trope (Brown, 2013; Hughey, 2012, 2014), seen in films like The Help (2011) and Dangerous Minds (1995). In Maura’s case, she is depicted as struggling through the social order of the inexpensive shopping centre—apart from her interaction with the Latin American women, this is evident in her shoe breaking as she walks, her altercation with the fast-food worker and her loss of consciousness at the episode’s end, with each of these developments acting as a clear sign that she is misplaced. Accordingly, while most of the series’ humour comes from the often clueless narcissism and self-absorption that marks the characters, the episode also portrays its protagonist as almost hyperbolically incapable of navigating any terrain except the one in which the show normally takes place. The attempt at a genuine connection between Maura and Elizah is not only cut short, but rendered impossible by class and racial lines which effectively limit their physical movement.

This inability to connect across group lines is again thematised through minor characters who also address the notion of intersectionality, this time in contact with Maura’s child Ari. In one scene, Ari is criticised by a fellow university teaching assistant for their reluctance to approach black authors (3:2). While this exchange raises the notion of white fragility, the African American character who expresses such criticisms is, like Elizah, never again seen in the show. In the same vein, two episodes in its third season depict Ari's exchange (3:2; 3:6) with their dentist, the black Dr Gunderson (Paula Newsome), and focus on a number of uncomfortable silences, such as when the two disagree over the title of Ntozake Shange’s ‘For Colored Girls: When the Rainbow is Enuf’, implicitly raising questions of whose heritage it forms a part of and who has the authority to speak of it (3:3). In all these scenes, the common denominator remains: once the matter of intersectionality has been directly raised through either Ari or Maura’s contact with a black character, they cease to reappear. ³ Thus, both Pfeffermans continue to live, save for a few recurring characters (most relevantly Maura’s friend, the Latin American Davina [Alexandra Billings]), in a predominantly white world, while Ari’s Black colleague, Dr Gunderson and Elizah remain relegated to an ‘intersectionality’ presented as inaccessible to either Ari or Maura.

In this sense, Transparent’s third season and its exploration of intersectionality inhabit a somewhat paradoxical position. On the one hand, the season's critique of the figure of the White Saviour pokes fun at its protagonists' misguided approach to intersectionality, as well as at their frequent lack of awareness of their own privileged positions. On the other, it is by linking its exploration of intersectionality primarily with episodic characters of colour who fail to reappear that Transparent risks reducing intersectionality to what has been described as its ‘easy “buzzword” status’ (Taylor et al., 2010: 3), through which ‘continued interrogation of inequalities’ is swept aside as ‘what we “already know”’ (3). Thus, while its critique of misguided approaches to race and class offers itself as constructive material for analysis, its refusal to present viewers with even a flawed continuation of this dialogue risks reifying categories of race and class as monolithic and fundamentally incomprehensible to those that stand at their most privileged points and who are therefore paradoxically perceived as ‘outside’ them.

Moreover, by explicitly referencing intersectionality only in relation to episodic black characters, Transparent runs the risk of contributing to what Sara Ahmed describes as the depiction of whiteness ‘as invisible, as the unseen or the unmarked, as a non-colour, the absent presence or hidden referent, against which all other colours are measured as forms of deviance’ (2004). Consequently, whiteness itself becomes a concept reified by the series and returns to haunt its narrative geography and investigation of intersectionality even as the series is attempting to interrogate it. In this sense, its presentation of intersectionality matches Kent Ono’s (2013) reading of another series that deals with race through the lens of whiteness and includes only minor African American characters; namely, AMC’s Mad Men (2007–2015). Ono writes that ‘because of its self-reflective mode of representation’, it ‘may appear to operate outside of traditional racial logics’ (2013: 301). However, it is ‘the show’s’ own ‘lack of major characters of color and lack of complex perspectives of characters of color - including point-of-view shots, narrative development, and home or family settings-’ that ‘construct a white racial perspective’ and continue the ‘long-standing racially exclusionary practices in televisual and popular culture’ (301). In the case of Transparent, it is precisely through its positioning of wealthy white characters as the primary lens through which intersectionality is addressed that the show risks presenting whiteness as transparent and intersectionality as a peripheral matter, relevant only to those who are neither wealthy nor white. It is therefore no accident that the season which begins in the impoverished ends of South Los Angeles ends with the family on a luxury cruise ship—for the Pfeffermans, both are essentially excursions, welcome breaks from the gated community settings in which the series normally revolves. What remains unchanged is precisely the privilege which surrounds them, drawing thus the borders of how far the Pfefferman family is willing to go and whom Transparent represents.