Just as fundamental to Doctor Who as the Doctor himself (the gendering of who needs to be addressed separately in its own post), the various companions are right at the Doctor’s side for his adventures in time and space.  In her work on Doctor Who, Lindy A. Orthia (2010) succinctly characterizes the traditional role of the Doctors’ companions: “Dramatically, the function of companions is threefold: (a) to scream and be rescued, (b) to enable the plot to be explained to viewers, and (c) to provide a point of identification for viewers” (54).  The primary companions since the show’s return in 2005—Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy—maintain this role, yet are at the same time depicted in a post-feminist fashion that suggests that even though the Doctor is represented as smarter, wiser, more educated, and over all better suited for travel through time and space, these women are empowered to make their own decisions and take independent actions as they accompany the Doctor.  However, as the “companion” their real-time lives are made to seem secondary, bland, and lacking excitement.  Life with the Doctor is often constructed as an escape; they are rescued from banality by a white Time Lord in a blue box.  They might disagree with the Doctor, disobey his wishes, and talk back to him, but, in the end, it is the Doctor who saves the day.  These post-feminist heroines, while clearly distinguishable from dependent sidekick companions from the show’s first few decades, still easily fit into the Doctor-companion model described by Margaret and Michael Rustin (2008), in  “The Regeneration of Doctor Who”, where “The Doctor…took an innocent younger companion on adventures in his special vehicle, and on these adventures protects her and everyone else from danger” (146).  But what about the Doctor’s newest companion, Clara?  Is she just a reincarnation of this ubiquitous model?

Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy

Played by British actor Jenna-Louise Coleman, the character of Clara Oswald is really a series of characters, all similarly named and appearing physically identical.  Referred to by the Doctor (portrayed by Matt Smith) as “the impossible girl” (“The Bells of St. John”), Clara is a mystery both to audiences and the Doctor.  From the viewers’ perspective, Clara is a character that seems to be immortal, sacrificing her own life to save the Doctor again and again.  She runs into the Doctor multiple times, across time and space, each time playing the pivotal role in the Doctor’s success and survival.  “Feisty” (“Journey to the Center of the Tardis”), brave, and independent like her predecessors, Clara finds her travels with the Doctor thrilling.  Yet the fashion in which the show frames her as a companion is different.  Her real-time life is sacrificed in order to replicate herself into what character River Song calls “echoes” (“The Name of the Doctor”); splicing herself in order to be present at every point in the Doctor’s timeline.  Clara’s identity is created as inextricably linked to that of the Doctor, her sole purpose to exist caught up in the fabric of the Doctor’s timeline.

Clara’s Self Sacrifice as She Jumps into the Doctor’s Timeline

As Alec Charles (2008) has previously noted in“The War Without End?”, “It is [the Doctor’s] human companions, his surrogate family, who provide not only the emotional center and the moral compass but also the dramatic and diegetic motivation for the series” (459).  Yet, in the case of Clara, her role is more than just indeterminate member of his surrogate family; she is his surrogate mother.  Connoted as irrefutably maternal—most explicitly shown through her employment as a Victorian governess in “The Snowmen” and a nanny in what could be understood as her real-time life—it could be argued that Clara is merely the traditional mother archetype, just re-packaged.  In the final episode of the current series, “The Name of the Doctor,” she explains to the viewer that “I’m born, I live, I die.  And always there’s the Doctor.”  It is at the end of this episode that we are provided the answer to the question: Who is Clara?  She tells the audience “Always I’m running to save the Doctor.  Again, and again, and again…I’ve always been there, right from the beginning.”  Taking on the responsibility of the Doctor’s well-being, Clara positions herself as the Doctor’s caretaker.

Clara is there to Save Every Regeneration of the Doctor

Clara’s independence and brash nature can seem like a break with the normative femininity that framed the characterization of the previous companions. However, the revelation that this companion was “born to save the Doctor” ultimately aligns her with a regime of representation that constructs motherhood, and the self-sacrifice inherent in that, as the paramount purpose of women.  Yet as a character that has redefined the Doctor-companion relationship, Clara is able to stand apart from the more recent post-feminist companions by flipping the savior-saved dynamic on its head; simultaneously fulfilling the traditional, modern, and re-imagined companion roles.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who, commemorating the television series’ fiftieth anniversary and its lasting cultural legacy. If you missed Matt Hills’ inaugural post earlier this month, you can read it here. Stay tuned for regular posts in the series throughout the remaining months of 2013.

While I originally situated this excessive ethnicity firmly within Mama Elsa (whose eccentricity did not disappoint us in the reunion), as the season progressed viewers were introduced to another figure that served the same purpose: Freda.  As the long-term maid of one of the show’s original cast members (Lea Black) this season was, surprisingly, the first time viewers saw any of this woman who is supposedly an integral part of the Black household.  What makes her entrance significant is not that she was absent from the first season, she is significant because she is a representation of Cuban latinidad that is not only based in African descent (a topic that warrants its own essay) but one that further aligns “Old” Miami with a racialized and excessive quality.  Freda is framed as both superstitious and highly religious and her unglamorous body and lifestyle was set is stark contrast to the aesthetically enhanced housewives.  In one scene, Lea (shown with both hair and makeup done, nicely dressed, with the required high heel) exasperated from calling for Freda, huffs up the stairs to her room where Freda is content to ignore her so that she may read her bible.  Lea speaks to her in broken Spanish, making a comment about Freda’s habit of listening to “that religious” music too frequently.  As just one of the many examples of the patronizing manner in which Lea interacted with her, Freda seemed entirely out of place among the cast.  Lea, who talked to her as if she were a child and suggested that she was responsible for styling Freda’s untreated natural hair, treats her domestic worker of many years more like a helpless rescue puppy than an employee.  The fact that Freda cannot (or chooses not to) speak English further Others her and suggests that she is truly a remnant of a Miami that is slowly fading away.  While there are numerous other examples of “Old” Miami’s excessive ethnicity throughout this season, it is the appearance of Freda that stands out most.  I contend that RHOM used Freda as a narrative device in order to make the primary cast members appear more beautiful, eloquent, and, well, white.

While Freda was the figure in the show most marked by difference, the same narrative device was deployed in the story arc concerning Daisy, Lisa Hochstein’s maid, who is one of the other housewives.  Daisy is treated by Lisa as though she were her sidekick and to reward her for being such a loyal friend, has her plastic surgeon husband give Daisy the ultimate makeover.  There is an observable affection towards Daisy from Lisa, but yet again, it is more similar to the affection doted on a pet than a companion.  While such a connection is comical, that is part of its cover.  Shari Roberts (see: “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” 1993), in her analysis of Carmen Miranda, suggests that such comical displays of excess render ethnic subjectivities as harmless and operate as what she terms a “spectacle of containment.”  Therefore, I assert that Freda, Daisy, and Mama Elsa are all deployed within the narrative framing of the show in order to let the producers continue to utilize discourses of the Latin spice while at the same time containing that spice within the bodies of a handful of figures with excessive ethnicity.  Such containment provides the means for a simultaneous indulgence and rejection of what is depicted as “Old” Miami while at the same time heralding the emergence of a newer, brighter, and whiter Miami.

Replacing over half of the original cast, the second season seems to be attempting to reflect a more diverse sampling of the city’s residents. Situated within the discourses of class and excessive wealth, the show’s new cast members claim that Miami is changing. What is not said, but clearly implied, is that Miami’s transition from “Old” to “New” is one not necessarily marked by wealth—new versus old money—as the cast members might suggest, but one that is instead marked by a process of whitening.  The “New” Miami is a white Miami, one that can capitalize on the extracted elements of Cuban culture when it so desires, but one that is ultimately laboring to disassociate itself from the racialized baggage of the “Old” Miami.

I am not denying the association of Cubanness with notions of whiteness that played a critical role in the form and fashion of representational Cuban latinidad—a reality reflected in Mary Beltrán’s analysis of Desi Arnaz as ethnically Latino but racially white (Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes 2009). What I am suggesting, is that even though the usage of racialized or ethnicized signifiers is abundant in RHOM—much in the same way the franchise’s Atlanta cast is racially marked (see Kristen Warner)—it nevertheless uses those signifiers to assert the city’s movement away from its Cuban heritage. Best represented in the image and rhetoric of the show’s most famous new cast member, supermodel Joanna Krupa, the beautiful people of Miami are being replaced not by a new generation of Latina/os, but by those who better adhere to normative white standards of beauty and don’t stand for, what Krupa called in her Bravo blog, any of Miami’s “nonsense.”

I would argue that the articulation of a “New” Miami by the new cast members of RHOM is an effort to normalize and racially separate themselves from the eccentric latinidad of “Old” Miami, one that is epitomized by the show’s breakout figure: Mama Elsa. The mother of one of the show’s three remaining original cast members and one of the most talked about secondary figures from the entire franchise, Mama Elsa is a woman from the “Old” Miami. She is not only disfigured by extensive plastic surgery, but is positioned within the representation of the Latina witch (a figure that might be lesser known than other Latina representations, but one that nonetheless has a long history in U.S.-based mediated constructions of latinidad that often manifests in the “superstitious” abuela, or the Caribbean santera, or the elderly woman in the village who has held onto the old indigenous ways). At the end of the first episode, Mama Elsa, in describing Miami, suggests that people like Miami not because it is a great place, but because it is an odd place. And it would seem that no one knows that more intimately than the psychic, dramatic, and overly expressive Mama Elsa.

Diane Negra’s scholarship on ethnicity and female stardom provides an approach to a concurrent and contradictory distancing and appropriation of Cubanness in RHOM. Negra contends that “In a large part, the ethnic female body serves as a repository for fears of difference that play out across several registers, activating anxieties pertaining to femininity, to ‘foreign’ ethnicities, even to the uncontrollable, lower-class body” (Off-White Hollywood, 2001: 19). What is important here is that ethnic female stars, as both personae and texts, reflect and contribute to the labor of articulating and maintaining the boundaries of American whiteness. The ethnic female star, as one that transgresses many of the normative boundaries of whiteness, threatens to reveal the “fragile construction” of white, American patriarchy and therefore it must be neutralized. Furthermore, Negra contends that intimately tied to such processes are the discourses that construct ethnic femininity as excessive and exaggerated—in a very embodied way. By offering figures seen as clearly binary oppositional (Mama Elsa and Joanna Krupa) and deploying a ubiquitous framework of “New” versus “Old,” RHOM demonstrates the excessive ethnicity of the “Old” Miami and subsequently reinforces boundaries of whiteness.

Latina bodies are explicitly both ethnically/racially and sexually marked in such a way that they can be consumed, commodified, and exploited, and the RHOM is in many ways no different from the litany of media texts that exhibit this practice. Yet this is a shallow assessment of what is actually unfolding in the show’s representation of a transforming Miami identity. When one delves deeper, what is revealed is how ethnicized Latina bodies are participating in the “processes of ethnic retention, invention and resuscitation” that contribute to both the maintenance and assault on normative boundaries of U.S. whiteness (Negra 2001: 24). I am in no way suggesting that the show’s intention is to reflect the hegemonic struggle over constructions of whiteness, however, that seems to be the result of Bravo’s re-casting of the initially abandoned Real Housewives of Miami.

What becomes important is not how the actor self identifies, but how a mainstream audience would racialize them playing a given character. Subsequently, I contend that mixed-raced actors are associated with a perceived blackness, regardless of whether or not they identify as such, based on notions of a mixed-race identity as unsatisfactory and inconsistent with national inclinations to define blackness. What is evident is that these actors are (1) not being racialized as white in most contexts, (2) forced to fit into a highly structured and restrictive U.S. system of racialization, and (3) are usually not represented as both Black and Latina/o, ruling out a construction of racial mixture or acknowledgment of mestizaje (notion of mixture based in Latin America).

While, of course, none of this is surprising, it does lead me to ask: which social discourses concerning race demand an exclusion of Latina/o mixed subjectivity and why hasn’t media studies—with very few exceptions—taken a more critical eye to this phenomenon?  To address this question, I turn to the film work of Rosario Dawson, who is a successful and critically acclaimed actor, but whose racial ambiguity and subjectivity is often a matter of public debate. Even though Dawson is often able to pull off the generic Latin look, there is always a level of ambiguity that must be clarified through racial comparison or other cultural markers. Mary Beltrán (2009) refers to this process as “cultural racialization,” where an individual is racialized based on perceived cultural factors that are, in turn, associated with a specific racialized category. The very need for such a process speaks to the intense desire of audiences to be able to racially identify a person as well as the flexible utility of the racially ambiguous actor.

In an informal experiment, one based on these questions of racialized identification, I conducted a brief survey of a group of college students in a course about race and ethnicity in media. Specifically, they were asked to watch a very short clip from the film Clerks II (2006, dir. Kevin Smith) and identify Dawson’s race as well as suggest why they saw her that way. This dance scene between Dawson and her white male romantic interest in the film is almost devoid of racial and cultural markers. The scene is set on the roof of a New Jersey fast-food restaurant, where her character is in the process of teaching the white lead how to dance to the song “ABC” by the Jackson 5—a song that emerged in the Motown aesthetic that was just black enough to appeal to both white and black listeners.

What these students were essentially asked to do was find a way to read a seemingly racially unmarked scene. While many of the students responded that Dawson’s character was racially ambiguous and that they were slightly uncomfortable in being asked to categorize her, most of them were completely comfortable making a claim. A fraction of those students read Dawson as Latina, yet the majority read Dawson as Black. Because the scene was so unmarked, they had to focus on the minutia of the scene to act as interpretable signifiers. And for all those students who read Dawson as Black in this scene, even though they were pre-informed of the details of her racial mixture, they cited the choice of music and the style of dancing as signifiers of the character’s blackness. Therefore, even for those who are informed of her Afro-Latina identification, they nonetheless read her as Black based on the context of the scene.

As an attempt to make sense of my findings and to answer why Rosario Dawson seems to be denied a mixed-race subjectivity by mainstream U.S. audiences, I turn to the work of Angharad N. Valdivia (2004). Drawing on the scholarship of Mary Beltrán’s articulation of the Latina body as a site of struggle, Valdivia asserts that the malleability of the Latina body is evidence of negotiations of racial constructions within the U.S. The very fact that the Latina body can be used in such a flexible manner, within the context of media representation, harkens to the way that U.S. systems of racialization exclude and are unable to accommodate for mixed-race subjectivity. Therefore, as a provisionary answer to the questions I proposed above, I suggest that due to the ambiguous in-between status of latinidad, Latinas can become imbued with racial and ethnic meaning based on the dynamics of the text. Dawson’s ambiguity, just like the song “ABC,” is just black enough to appeal to a spectrum of audiences.

To avoid the inevitable regression into a full on rant (which I have already levied at ABC) I would like to explain why, to those who might be unfamiliar with the show, GCB represents a recent attempt to incorporate the aesthetics of camp into a prime-time commodity. Placed in a time slot on Sunday night that has been associated with notions of queer spectatorship (with shows such as Desperate Housewives, Pan Am, and Brothers and Sisters), GCB not only displayed the categorically camp over-the-top theatricality, humor, and tongue-in-cheek innuendo, but it also tackled relationships in complex ways that denied a binary logic of sexuality (hence queer). Included in part of its dynamite ensemble cast are two well-known and accomplished Broadway performers: Kristin Chenoweth and Miriam Shor. Both women have extensive gay followings and were, in my opinion, the main instigators of camp performance in the show. Furthermore, by casting Annie Potts as the Dallas elite Grand Dame, the show was able to capture not just a significant mainstream audience, but the obsession of much of the “gay community”. This attention, which I argue is both queer and due to its camp appeal, is substantiated in the multitude of social media backlashes proffered by GLBT organizations.

But then, with the promise of such popularity, why would a show only given ten episodes be cancelled without a seemingly good explanation? I contend that this was not a ratings concern (although the show was never exactly a ratings “success”) but more the result of the anxieties that this dramedy stirred by being seen as a text that was both camp and open to queer spectatorship in a more overt way than may have been previously seen as appropriate. While there are certainly elements of gay representation (I use “gay” here because those representations were of gay men exclusively and not other members of the GLBT community) that played a role in the narratives, this is no longer inherently problematic for a network prime-time audience that has become more accustomed to seeing representations of gayness, even lesbianism, as more commonplace. However, because the show used more explicitly “queer” themes (I use “queer” here as a reference not merely to associations of homosexuality, but to a re-conceptualizing of essentialist categories that would place people within normative labels) it positioned a mainstream audience, and one can assume advertisers, out of their comfort zone. Specifically, the “bearded” relationship between Miriam Shor’s strong-willed and aggressive character Cricket and her non-straight (I do not make the claim that he is explicitly identified as gay) husband Blake. Not a relationship of mere convenience, this husband and wife shared a real bond (that was arguably different from the stereotypical gay-husband articulation so in fashion as of late), one that might not have included much of a sexual relationship (although their marriage surprisingly was not completely devoid of either sex or sexual intensity at moments) but was nonetheless intimate and central to both of their lives. While not the only queer trope in the show, I would argue, it is certainly the one that had the potential to disrupt those normative and binary labels that allowed mainstream U.S. audiences to be comfortable with representations of homosexuality. So when combined with a clear camp aesthetic, such queer narratives not only made the show a favorite of mine, but a gamble that ultimately was too risky for ABC.