When did “representation” start to belong to the vocabulary of media rather than politics? I couldn’t tell you where the usage comes from, but I started noticing it about a decade ago. How early it penetrated your thought-world probably depends on where you stand in the map of American culture. By now, though, it’s part of the public discourse. You have to be a real nerd to care about whether people in Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C. are getting adequate representation in Congress, but anyone can have an argument about whether giving representation to more genders and races made Star Wars worse (a deceptively good question if you take the prequels into account, and one that I’ll try to answer by the end of this post).
Some people are pushing for representation in media that reflects the actual diversity of the world; other people want every show to be as cis/white/straight as Friends. Both sides are working from the super-dubious assumption that “representation,” per se, is good. The pro-diversity crowd wants that good to be distributed more fairly, while the white-supremacist crowd wants to keep it all for themselves and people who look like them. It doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone that, actually, being associated with Friends should be deeply embarrassing, and that’s just the start of the trouble with a discourse where the possibility of misrepresentation gets suppressed.
There are reasons why things work this way, or at least beneficiaries. Both major political parties benefit from keeping their constituents’ concerns about representation focused elsewhere and from keeping even the notion of misrepresentation out of our heads. The Democrats probably have it slightly worse right now (we’re not supposed to be asking practical questions about Obama’s legacy, especially whether his “representation” of Black America actually worked to its benefit), but the Republicans are going to get it just as bad whenever Trump’s supporters stop assuming that he represents them and ask themselves in what conceivable world Trump might represent the interests of anyone but himself.
Everyone in the political mainstream has an interest in reminding us that what matters is our seeing ourselves onscreen, not what our mirror images do there or whether they really resemble us. White people have actually worked on those assumptions for years, molding themselves in the hollow image of (say) the cast of Friends rather than being shocked that anyone could imagine white people acting that way. You get the sense that these happy mimes would be lost without fictional characters to imitate, which might be why some of them seem to get so triggered by the notion that a Jedi might be a woman.
Well, what about the pretext that most of these crackers hide behind, the claim that diversity detracts from plot, that Finn and Rey have somehow “ruined Star Wars?” That’s a claim you could only make by deliberately forgetting Return of the Jedi, a much worse movie than either of the sequels, both of which (I’d bet, someday) are going to end up near the top of the Star Wars canon. With respect to the sequels, the trolls don’t have a leg to stand on.
They could have made a better case re: the prequels, which, even at the time of their release, were criticized for basically trafficking in blackface. Would the prequels have been better without the Trade Federation, Jar Jar Binks, or the living anti-Semitic tropes from Tantooine? Unquestionably. I think that the groups supposedly “represented” by those figures wouldn’t miss them either. What we have here is a clear-cut case of misrepresentation, one made easier to recognize by the fact that the “representatives” were CGI, not members of the races or ethnic groups they were supposed to represent.
We yearn for simpler times. The problem of misrepresentation has only gotten more insidious as we lose our language for talking about it. Eli Valley surely speaks for more American Jews, but Ariel Sobel and (ugh) Meghan McCain are better at the rhetoric of representing a Jewish identity that somehow turns out to be identical with Zionism, so Valley gets ignored when he’s lucky and slandered as an anti-Semite when he’s not. We have a language for attacking McCain – she’s “appropriating” an identity that doesn’t belong to her – but what about Sobel? She really is Jewish, so does that make her representative?
With that example, I may seem to be reverting to a political meaning for representation. All the figures involved, though, belong to a media landscape that (I wouldn’t be the first to observe) people now approach via something more like fandom than political partisanship in the classical sense. From that point of view, Sobel’s claim to “represent” is unquestionable – but that just goes to show that representation isn’t reality, and that it’s not always a good thing.