Shondaland – Bitch Flicks

A Love Letter to Dr. Callie Torres on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

Against a backdrop of a television landscape lacking in queer representation (especially queer women of color) emerged Callie Torres’ anxious and exciting adventure of self-discovery. … Callie Torres is a fully fleshed out resilient, sensitive, complex, and unapologetic bisexual Latina woman. … Callie’s journey was an iconic one that helped to not only change television, but to cement the oft forgotten notion that bisexuality is very real.

This guest post written by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

It’s no secret that bisexual characters are lacking on television. Even as queerness becomes more prevalent on-screen, the roles are sparse and often times showcase harmful generalizations and stereotypes. Shonda Rhimes’ television empire Shondaland is a powerful part of the changing landscape of entertainment. Her portrayal of people of color, women, and queer characters is nuanced and intricate. She doesn’t discriminate when it comes to drama and thrills; everyone is subject to the emotional roller coaster that is TGIT, no matter who they are.

Her portrayal of LGBTQ characters has been heralded by GLAAD, the most recent accolades coming from the inclusion of How to Get Away with Murder’s protagonist Annalise Keating’s bisexuality. And while the revelation resonated on social media in the weeks afterward, becoming yet another notch in the lineup’s belt of diversity, the best bisexual character lives in another corner of Shondaland.

The groundbreaking story of Dr. Calliope “Callie” Torres on Grey’s Anatomy has been one of the greatest journeys on television. Callie (Sara Ramirez) made her way into the OR in late season 2 in 2006 as a love interest for George O’Malley (T. R. Knight). One tumultuous relationship rocked by typical Grey’s Anatomy drama and an elopement later, the couple broke up. Later in season 4, Callie began realizing she was attracted to cardio surgeon Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith).

In 2008, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still in effect. Washington expanded its domestic partnership legislation and the California Supreme Court struck down the same-sex marriage ban, but states like Arizona and Florida passed amendments prohibiting it. On television, depictions of LGBTQ characters were incredibly sparse. Will & Grace was over, with The L Word soon to follow, and shows like Glee and Modern Family were more than a year away from premiering. GLAAD reported LGBT representation on scripted broadcast television that year at a measly 1.1%. Against a backdrop of a television landscape lacking in queer representation (especially queer women of color) emerged Callie Torres’ anxious and exciting adventure of self-discovery.

The trepidation Callie had about her budding feelings for her friend were clear, and oh so relatable to anyone discovering their own sexuality. She skirted around asking for advice on dating women from her friends and peers. She reverted to sleeping with her friend-with-benefits Mark Sloan (Eric Dane), in an effort to convince herself she was straight. And after having sex with Erica, she became even more confused because she couldn’t decide if she preferred sex with men or women better, ultimately coming to the conclusion that she likes both. Being dumped by her first girlfriend hurt her just as much as divorcing her first husband. The added sting of Erica telling her she “can’t kind of be a lesbian” tapped into the very real biphobia that bisexual people face from inside the LGBTQ community. Between the drama of stealing organs and patients dying of the hiccups, moments crafted around Callie’s sexuality often encapsulated incredibly genuine experiences.

Callie’s subsequent relationship with Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) quickly made them one of the most popular power couples in the show. Their drama ranged from silly to heartbreaking, just like the straight couples. They were given growth and hardship equitable to everyone else. The only way the relationship differed from the rest on the show were the storylines dealing explicitly with their sexuality. Arizona was sometimes insecure of Callie’s bisexuality, even going so far as to use it against her in the more heated moments of fights. Callie coming out to her father and being exiled by her family was an all too real display of the experiences many queer people have and fear. Her refusal to back down against her father, her iconic “you can’t pray away the gay” speech strengthened the resolve Callie had inside of her sexuality and affirmed to the audience that it was very real. Her emotional breakdown after the falling out with her family painted her as such a tangible, authentic character. Not only did the TV series depict the tough ortho surgeon as resolute and confident in her bisexuality, it showed her devastation when the people she loved didn’t approve of her.

The season 7 storyline regarding Callie getting pregnant by Mark after she and Arizona break up only to reconcile, and the ensuing decision to co-parent the child was criticized when it aired. Some felt the storyline stereotyped bisexuality and watered down the importance of Callie and Arizona’s relationship. Arizona even somewhat lampshaded the situation in an argument, saying it’s “some kind of bi dream come true… you get the woman that you love and the guy best friend who’s also a great lay,” in season 7, episode 16. It was hardly writer negligence, however. Mark had already been established as a thorn in Arizona’s side and an unwanted addition in her relationship; an annoying best friend to those he befriended. Callie sleeping with Mark after the break-up was a common situation we see in TV: characters hooking up with someone else to escape the pain of being dumped. It further served to show that Callie’s relationship with a woman didn’t negate her bisexuality or attraction to men. While convoluted and ridiculous, the The Kids Are Alright-esque plotline didn’t stray from the generally ridiculous Shondaland stories we’ve come to know and love (or hate).

Callie’s bisexuality is important because it never became stigmatized. She isn’t painted as a cheater or overtly sexual or greedy — common harmful tropes about bisexual people. She had the acceptance of her peers and the support of her friends and coworkers. While it took some time for her father to come around to acceptance, and the series made it clear that her mother never would, there existed a dichotomy of how sexuality is perceived, even within the same immediate family. Callie faced “normal” problems in her personal and professional life. Her relationships contained exciting highs and depressing lows. She was allowed to be vulnerable, even though she broke bones for a living. Callie Torres is a fully fleshed out resilient, sensitive, complex, and unapologetic bisexual Latina woman.

Callie’s story and the showcasing of her ability to enter into emotionally deep and complex relationships with both men and women is commendable. Her discovery that she’s attracted to women as an adult gives representation to people who also had latent realizations about their sexuality. Her relationship drama was just as heartbreaking and intense as the other couples on the show. Grey’s Anatomy and actor Sara Ramirez did an outstanding job at telling this story over the course of a decade.

In real life, Sara Ramirez is a prominent advocate for the LGBTQ community; she’s on the board of True Colors Fund, a nonprofit that aims to eradicate LGBTQ youth homelessness. In 2015, the Human Rights Campaign honored her with the Ally for Equity award. Just check out her Twitter feed and you’ll see how serious Ramirez is about supporting queer communities. Witnessing this real-life advocacy juxtaposed with how fantastic her Grey’s Anatomy character is written and portrayed is just the cherry on top.

Although Dr. Callie Torres may not be scrubbing into Grey Sloan Memorial anymore, the legacy she left at the hospital, and on television as a whole, is insurmountable. Her story was groundbreaking at its inception and continued breaking barriers as the years went on. She wasn’t afraid to own her bisexuality, reminding us that the B in LGBTQ didn’t just stand for “badass.” She managed to incite real change both on and off-screen. After Callie came out, more than 200 other lesbian and bisexual characters were introduced on TV. Callie’s journey was an iconic one that helped to not only change television, but to cement the oft forgotten notion that bisexuality is very real.

Update on 10/20/16: Ramirez’s connection to the orthopedic surgeon she played is bone deep; the actress publicly came out as bisexual on October 8th at the True Colors Fund’s 40 to None Summit. In a speech on ending LGBT youth homelessness, she stressed the importance of recognizing intersectionality and mentioned her own intersections, including bisexual and queer, as reasons why she is invested in the cause.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Interracial Relationships on Grey’s Anatomy
Being in the Sun — Women and Power in Grey’s Anatomy Season 11

Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman is a freelance entertainment writer and digital content manager who is obsessed with an absurd amount of television shows. She is an advocate for accessible entertainment and sometimes develops websites. You can find her at @heycheyennehey on Twitter or cheyennecheyenne.com.

‘Crossroads’ Was a Dry Run for ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.

Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal showrunner and How to Get Away with Murder executive producer Shonda Rhimes recently tweeted the following:

In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called Crossroads, which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut. Spawning the coming of age anthems “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and “Overprotected,” Crossroads may have been a critical flop but it drew $61 million internationally and will forever remain a cult classic for many millennials, myself included.

Another of Rhimes’ success stories that allowed her to go on to produce some of the hottest dramas on TV was Grey’s Anatomy. Originally sweeping the Golden Globe and Emmy nominations (with a few wins here and there) in its early years, the general consensus about Grey’s today is consternation that it’s still airing after 11 seasons. What originally began as a dramatic look at the lives of a diverse cast of surgical interns arguably devolved into a shark jump of epic proportions with Izzie’s cancer-induced hallucinations and a musical episode. As a lifelong Grey’s fan, I’ll defend it to the death and contend that it has corrected course in the past few years while not being afraid to take risks.

At first glance, two of Rhimes’ early successes might not look so similar, but I’m here to argue that Crossroads acted as a dry run for Grey’s Anatomy. Let me count the ways…

First, both center on a somewhat boring white woman whose less conventional friends turn out to be much more interesting. Crossroads (along with Center Stage) introduced us to Zoe Saldana, the well-to-do popular girl to Spears’ awkward valedictorian and Taryn Manning’s pregnant teen from the wrong side of the tracks, subverting stereotypes of race in the small Georgian town where the movie is set, which has become Rhimes’ calling card.

In Grey’s, Meredith finds immediate kinship with Cristina Yang, and later brings Latina Callie Torres and mixed race half-sister Maggie Pierce into a fold that’s more fucked up than their Crossroads counterparts. Like Orange is the New Black (in which Manning also stars), Meredith and Lucy act as Trojan horses to introduce audiences to the lives of other, more diverse women.

There’s also the awkward, bumbling love-interest-that-wasn’t. In one of Crossroads’ opening scenes, we see a lingerie-clad Lucy about to have sex for the first time with Justin Long’s Henry, who’s pined after Lucy for the three years they’ve been lab partners. Over in Shondaland, it was Meredith who drunkenly succumbed to George’s subtle advances, but it was not to be–she started crying during sex and damaged their friendship, working relationship, and housemate dynamic for a long time. (The one aspect in which Grey’s differs to Crossroads is that Anson Mount’s Ben is certainly no McDreamy.)

Crossroads is a road trip flick whereas Grey’s primarily takes place inside a hospital, but make no mistake: there have been plenty of outings away from the four walls of Seattle Grace/Mercy West/Grey-Sloane Memorial Hospital. These include the men’s camping trip in which Alex and George get into a “slap-fight” (“open-handed combat” to protect their surgeon hands); the residents’ sojourn to San Francisco to take their boards where April and Jackson finally get it on; Cristina’s fellowship at the Mayo Clinic sees her isolated in icy Minnesota; and the car accident involving Callie and Arizona which spawns the abovementioned musical episode, “Song Beneath the Song.”

Speaking of music, Crossroads is a film that utilizes it quite heavily and with Britney Spears as your leading lady, you’d be (“Drive Me) Crazy” not to. In addition to the songs I mentioned above, there’s also the requisite karaoke scene in which Spears, Manning and Saldana sing “I Love Rock & Roll,” also released as a single for Spears. Like The O.C. before it, Grey’s is one of those TV shows that has become better known perhaps for its music than its melodrama. In 2006, the show won a Grammy for best compilation album featuring two of the songs the show is perhaps best known for: “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. Both have the requisite Madonna singalong while Grey’s has made famous the “five second dance party” and drunken boogie sessions Meredith and Cristina frequently engage in.

Finally, both protagonists have strained family lives. Lucy in Crossroads grew up with her father (Dan Aykroyd) after her mother left them to start a new family; this is part of the reason Lucy tags along on the road trip in the first place. The titular Meredith Grey rivals Lucy in the dysfunctional family department: in addition to her father walking out and her mother’s cold and distant demeanour, Meredith discovers later in life that she has not one but three half-sisters spawned from her parents’ subsequent dalliances (spoiler alert: these sisters three don’t all share the same DNA).

Crossroads’ Mimi (Manning) begins the movie pregnant but miscarries at the culmination of the road trip, while Grey’s Izzie gave the product of her teen pregnancy up for adoption. Where Crossroads doesn’t deal with abortion, Grey’s certainly does, with Cristina undergoing an abortion and a miscarriage for her two pregnancies. For a teen movie, Crossroads isn’t afraid to deal with rape, either, which is how Mimi came to be pregnant in the first place.

At first glance the two Rhimes productions couldn’t be more different, and while Grey’s is far more sophisticated, Crossroads is evidence that Rhimes began her progressive storytelling long before Meredith, Olivia, Annalise and co. hit our TV screens. Who would have thought that Britney Spears would be involved?

Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she writes about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter.

Angry or Complicated?: Misrecognizing Black Women

At best, the White Gaze can be challenged on Twitter (see: #lessclassicallybeautiful); at worst, it can get you killed (see: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin). And for black women, in particular, our complex experiences disappear in the crossroads of intersectional oppression. Where racism and sexism meet, we fall through the cracks.

This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. Blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Anyone who may have seen interviews with Shonda Rhimes, read her forthright speech on diversity on television, or watched her hit TV show Scandal, would not recognize her in Alessandra Stanley’s description of an “angry black woman.”

It would be easy, actually, to become an “angry black woman” after reading Stanley’s New York Times review, but what such descriptors ultimately reveal is how certain critics fall back on readily available stereotypes and misrecognize the complexities of black womanhood.

Rhimes has rightly been lauded for bringing much nuance to her portrayals of black female characters in her television shows: the brilliant and assertive Dr. Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy, the ultra competent but vulnerable, wine-guzzling Olivia Pope on Scandal, and now the take-charge but flawed Annalise Keating in the new murder mystery, How to Get Away with Murder. Such characters have demonstrated a wide array of emotions on screen. Yet, Stanley reduced them all to “Angry Black Women.”

Chandra Wilson as Miranda Bailey on Grey's Anatomy — Chandra Wilson as Miranda Bailey on *Grey’s Anatomy*

In her clumsy attempts at praising Rhimes for enabling more complicated portrayals of black womanhood, Stanley revealed the often difficult task of transcending the White Gaze, which has a long history of racial distortion and misrecognition. “Confidence” or any behavior not characterized as servile from a black woman becomes “angry” and “scary.”

These distortions often manifest in other ways too, so that dark-skinned Viola Davis becomes “less classically beautiful” and “menacing” in her sexiness, and Nicole Beharie, who stars in the Fox TV show Sleepy Hollow, is reduced to a “sidekick.” Even when these women land leading roles in their respective TV shows, Stanley reduces their star power (through looks or character status). No wonder, then, when black women assert themselves, appear confident, or fail to merely be “of service,” they can only become the “Angry Black Woman.”

Kerri Washington as Olivia Pope on Scandal — Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope on *Scandal*

This is why so many have been eagerly awaiting Shonda Rhimes’ latest drama to arrive at Shondaland. We know she will feature shows that reinforce black women’s humanity.

In a culture where Janay Rice‘s suffering at the hands of her husband, Ray Rice, was only believed once her privacy was breached by TMZ’s release of a video illustrating her husband’s violence—and not when earlier video showed him dragging her out of an elevator, which merely prompted conversations that she must have “deserved” his treatment (i.e. a black woman’s “anger” instigates domestic violence)—and in a society where Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw can have his bail reduced when he is accused of raping and sexually assaulting eight black women, the “Angry Black Woman” trope makes it difficult to view these women as “victims.”

And even when black women’s bodies become the site on which national outrage and public conversations emerge to address problems such as domestic and intimate partner violence, they are still excluded from the table, as occurred when the NFL’s attempts to form an advisement panel—in the wake of the Ray Rice scandal—failed to include women of color. If we are not readily recognized as “victims,” we are also not recognized as “experts” or sources of knowledge and wisdom. And when we complain of this unfair treatment, we once again become “Angry Black Women.”

Viola Davis as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder — Viola Davis as Annalise Keating on *How to Get Away with Murder*

Of course the media landscape does not have sole power to transform our society and change what ails us. However, media normalizes concepts of race and gender, and any portrayals that advance our humanity can help us unpack our assumptions and challenge the racialized and gendered gazes that we bring to such images.

Will we recognize complex characters when we see them? Or will we resort to convenient stereotypes, as Stanley did in her review? And I don’t wish to only single out this one New York Times writer. Recently, advertisements for Fox’s new TV show Red Band Society, featuring Octavia Spencer as Nurse Jackson, described her as a “scary bitch“; they were eventually pulled from Los Angeles public buses after complaints from community members. Obviously, this rush to stereotype manifests not only in the pages of a widely read newspaper.

We need more diverse stories and more complex characters and images of black womanhood in media. But more than that: We need viewers to push themselves to interpret what they see on screen beyond recognizable stereotypes.

Octavia Spencer in one of the "scary bitch" ads for Red Band Society — Octavia Spencer in one of the “scary bitch” ads for *Red Band Society*

Fortunately, Rhimes has led the way. It’s time the rest of us learn to complicate our views.

Janell Hobson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, and a frequent contributor to Ms.