#for real though hmu with recommendations for spinster reading and watching

[lbmisscharlie]

On queer spinsters

Queer spinsterdom is a state I think a lot about: as someone who identifies as queer, as a woman (ish), as demisexual (ish), and who is generally happier single than partnered, I feel invested in it as a personal identity and state of being and as a mode of representation. The thing is, though, that like lots of queer representation, like lots of representation of women, like lots of representation of single women, the representation around queer spinsters is pretty fucking shitty. 

The impetus for this post, right now, is that yesterday afternoon I went to see Their Finest. I had been intrigued by it, because I do love a British WW2 home front drama, and become doubly interested when this photoset of Rachael Stirling looking very dapper in her role as Phyl Moore went around. I love Rachael Stirling! I love ‘40s dapper costuming! I love Rachael Stirling playing queer/queer-coded characters in period pieces! And, in Their Finest, it’s not just coding - there are three separate moments that affirm Moore’s queerness. Great!

I went in with anticipation; I came out feeling absolutely gutted.

Part of this, to be fair, is that for all that the movie seems light, it’s actually pretty intense, with lots of complicated and sometimes contradictory human emotions. [Spoilers ahoy]

But it’s also that it offers up a queer female side character, something ever so popular for one’s WW2 media these days, gives her steely resolve and ambition, moments of levity and bonding with the other main female character, and absolutely no internal life beyond what she can offer to the main heterosexual pairing. The other side characters get to have mentions of family - one of the other writers has a sick or disabled wife that he takes care of, one of the main actors in their film has a developed friendship with his agent and then a budding romance with his agent’s sister (and oh, yeah, even the agent gets to mention his worries about how his sister is doing), another actor mentions getting in touch with his mom. After the two main characters, played by Sam Claflin and Gemma Arterton, and the leading secondary character, played by Bill Nighy, Stirling has the next most screen time and lines.

And yet, the only mention of any life outside of her job we get -- the only time she talks about the impact of the war on her own psyche, or makes a human connection with another character from her own impetus (rather than responding to a connection offered) -- is when she’s talking about her landlady’s death and hearing her landlady’s husband crying through the walls of her flat. There is literally a wall between her and the nearest available expression of human emotion. She only accesses grief through someone else’s (straight, married) mourning. And the whole point of her telling that story is to encourage Arterton’s character to tell Claflin’s she loves him, thus operating essentially as the catalyst for the culmination of the hetero love story. When that culmination is thwarted, too, she gets to help our straight female lead figure out a more independent life - a storyline that on its own I applaud, but in the context reads like yet another queer sidekick who only exists for the enrichment of her straight friends. 

So what? She’s ambitious, she’s steely, she’s humorous, she’s stylish - I love all of those things! But she’s basically nothing beyond that: a queer spinster, so alone that she can only experience emotion through a fucking wall or by encouraging the coupling off of the straight leads. She’s queer, and she’s alone, and the only happy endings she gets are the ones they write for their films. 

This hit me hard because I’m ever in the middle of negotiating a life with essentially no representation, no image of what it might be to be a queer woman who’s single but not lonely, who’s ambitious but not heartless, whose relationships with her friends and family are full and fruitful in both directions. 

It hit hard because it came on the heels of another lonely queer spinster representation that I saw recently: that of Alex Bornstein’s character in the pilot of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (which was pretty funny otherwise!), who is so alone that she literally cannot invite another human being into her home if her murphy bed is out, because the door won’t open. Who also acts as a (mostly unwilling) conduit for the happiness of the main hetero relationship, and, as in Their Finest, acts to help the straight female lead figure out a more independent life after her straight happy ending is disrupted. 

And the thing is, being queer is often lonely. Being single is often lonely. But loneliness is not the essence of either of these states of being. Newsflash: single people can and do have a lot of relationships outside of romantic ones. They have rich internal lives that don’t focus on their alone-ness. They have yearnings and ambitions that don’t relate to romance at all, and they have reasons for being in friendships that aren’t just about bolstering the romantic endings of their friends.

Honestly, this is why reading another of Rachael Stirling’s characters, Millie in The Bletchley Circle, as queer is so fucking important: it’s never directly stated, but she doesn’t have any romantic partners, male or female, she wears trousers sometimes, and she’s got a mean strut. But more importantly, she has deep, abiding, intense, passionate, meaningful relationships with her friends; she has brains and ambition but also a deeply caring heart; she has secrets and plays things close to the chest, but she also accepts help when she needs it. She’s the most well-rounded representation of a queer spinster I can think of, and she’s only barely coded queer. 

One of the biggest projects of my adult life has been to push at the boundaries of what women, queer women, queer single women, queer single ambitious women are allowed to be. It’s why I make myself so visible over on my fashion blog and other social media sites; it’s why I talk about what fashion means to me, what my career means to me, what spinsterdom means to me, what fatness means to me. I, like so many other people in so many marginalized identities and states of being, am striving for a representation that doesn’t exist. A representation that, when it comes close, is either monstrous or sad. And honestly, I’m fucking exhausted.