Thursday, May 29, 2014

Visions of the Dark Ages: Eclipse & Cloud of Unknowing


"They must be playing with the blind-spots in your vision"

Eclipse, Stephanie Meyer

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Working in trans, queer, and disability theory in the field of medieval literature, I have found myself compulsively seeking what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative readings" of rejected persons, narratives, cultures, and even time periods. I have come to firmly believe that a smart reader makes a book smarter. While Twilight has been a public success, it remains an abject or guilty pleasure for many serious academics. In many respects, however, the things that attract readers to Twilight queerly reflect much of the allure of medieval literature; including shared relations to time, conflicts and magical realisms. Pulling Twilight and Medieval-Early Modern Literature together becomes not only a queer project of appropriating from the mainline but a medieval project of messing with the archive. Enjoy!

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In the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse distinguishes itself by dimming the vision of the character of Alice Cullen, a sort of walking plot-device, whose ability to look into the future rail-roads many of the plot-lines in the series. The "Alice-has-a-vision" moment marks the beginning and nearly all the significant plot points in the series. It is because of Alice's vision that Bella will one day be a vampire that Bella and Edwards romance is allowed by the Cullens and the Vultori, the vampire ruling class. Alice's vision is the mechanism by which Edward is brought back in the second book after his long absence. Attentive readers of the books remain suspicious of whether the "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob" love triangle is ever a real conflict, given Alice's consistent predictions that Bella eventually joins the world of the undead.

The most tense moments in the Twilight books all play upon "blind-spots" or uncertainty in Alice's visions. Because there is free-will, explains Edward, the future that Alice sees is constantly changing. She has to focus on persons to foresee the results of their life changes. If Bella's enemy, Victoria, means to attack, Alice brags "I would have seen her decide," but not before then. She can also watch other enemies choices at the same time, like the Vultori through "Aro's decisions." There are persons that live in the dark spots of her sight. She cannot see the were-wolves, says Edward, because they are like change incarnate. Alice can only be looking in so many directions at once. By focusing on certain people's futures, the decisions and consequences of other people remain outside her vision. Rather than crediting her with omnipotence, Meyer liberates her plot and her character by acknowledging that epistemological truth that "every way of knowing is a way of not knowing something else." (Robert McRuer, "Queer Austerity and Excess: Cripping the Crisis; or, the Rise of Disability Capitalism." the University of Maryland, Feb 7, 2013. Keynote). In addition to recognizing diverse ways of knowing, there is a kind of queer vitality given by unknowing. 

Once time becomes dim, more things seem possible. This seems to be the promise of Eclipse for its young adult readers. In this book, the plot hinges in the second act on "Alice-not-having-a-vision," or rather having suggestively incomplete knowledge of the plot of neighboring vampires seeking vengeance on Bella and the Cullen family. By deploying unknowing against a the certainty of previous books, Eclipse speaks to young adult readers who have just left the relative certainty of childhood and adolescence behind. In previous posts I have examined how these moments in childhood development are mirrored in the first two books of Twilight. Nearly a hundred years younger than Edward and less physically (and socially) powerful, the progress of Bella's relationship with her lover mirrors that of a hyper-protective parent of their child. In Eclipse, the reigns loosen a bit and provide some space for Bella to make her own choices. The personal conflict of this book is that it marks the point in the series where Bella is making her "final" choice between a life as a human (presumably with Jacob) and an unlife as a vampire (decidedly with Edward). Towards this end, Alice's vision needs to be dimmed in order to allow a real choice to be made.

For young adult readers, the feeling of leaving a childhood behind and being initiated into the liberal position of a self-governing subject, brings with it the dangers and joys of unknowing. This may account for some of the attractiveness of the Twilight series as a kind of coming-of-age story. Yet for Alive and Bella, entering into the dimness of the future is a relatively passive event that they try to break past as soon as possible. How might turning to literature that revels in the thought and promise of the "dark ages" might liberate our reading the Eclipse as an active process of unknowing?

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In the fifth chapter of the Cloud of Unknowing (c 14th century), the unknown author describes a method of mystic contemplation called the "cloude of forgetyng" (5.423). Participating in an ontological argument of God, sometimes called negative theology, the "cloude" prescribes the dismissal of all things, "good or ivel," from the mind in order to experience "the nakid beyng of Him" (5.431-447). 

The argument for this emptying is not that knowing (i.e. attending to things with the mind) is bad in itself, "it be ful profitable sumtyme to think of certeyne condicions and dedes of sum certein special creatures," but that by attending to certain things you obscure your knowledge of other things (5.433-434). When one thinks on something, "thi soule is openid on it and even ficchid therapon, as the ighe of a schoter is apon the prik that he schoteth to" (5.436-438). The language of an archer here exhibits an exclusionary mode of vision whereby intense focus allows for certain objects to become highlighted while allowing other things to fall away. 

For the mystic's goal of entering more fully into the presence of God, any knowledge puts an object "bitwix thee and thi God" (5.439). The difficulty is that any knowledge will inevitably spur on other knowledge. Attending to any thing will cause one to not only think of the thing itself, but "alle the werkes and the condicions of the same creatures" (5.428-429). Seeing a person will spur thought of all that has made that thing and all that it makes happen. In this way, knowing makes a thing present in such a way that pulls the mind into the past (history) and into the future (prophecy). This suggests that all rational and metaphorical thought works like the power of dynamic prophecy. This works against being present in the moment with "nakid beyng."

What the Cloud of Unknowing describes here in terms of relating to God (as Being par excellence), can be applied more broadly to liberating the way one relates to the present. By surrendering the compulsion to know things, one enters into the darkness that creates between the influence of history and prophecy a moment in which choices might be made. The trouble with this cloud or darkness, warns the author, is that these metaphors will be taken as things in themselves rather than a process. "For when I sey derknes, I mene a lackyng of knowyng; as alle that thing that thou knowest not, or elles that thou hast forgetyn, it is derk to thee... it is not clepid a cloude of the eire, bot a cloude of unknowyng" (For when I say 'darkness,' I mean the lacking of knowing; as all that thing that you don't know, or else all that you have forgotten, it is dark to you... it is not called the cloud of air, but a cloud of unknowing; 4.415-419). Thus rather than being a means of dismissal or essential being, darkness becomes a critical mode of action by which one liberates one's self from the trauma of the past or the prescriptions for the future in order to assert one's power and presence in the moment.


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Considering the medieval canon, Alice's place in a history of mystic woman with prophetic visions is brought into focus. During her human life, Alice had been kept in a dark room at an insane asylum. This confinement and claims of madness resonates with the Book of Margery Kempe and the Showings of Julian of Norwhich, who found themselves, bound (by choice or force) to forms cloistering that become sites of mystic visions. For Alice, it was not until she was freed from the Asylum and made into a vampire that her gift of prophecy crystalized, but as with all special gifts in the Twilight Saga, it begins within human experience. The language of blindness and darkness takes on a more critically active role in considering Alice's prophecies. The hyper-ability of her sight inscribes into its center the work of isolating madness. To be a visionary in this way is to be a "super-crip" (Eli Clare, Exile and Pride). Disability is not excluded from ability, but subtends it. Ultimately, Alice's experience of the darkness is not dwelled on for its own sake but used instrumentally to provide Bella with her moments of choice.

The work of isolation then is to undo the chains of the history and futurity. This offers the potential for violence when committed against one's will or for liberation when adopted by choice. Undoing or unknowing seems to enact both dangers and hopes at once. For Bella, as young adults, there is consistent anxiety at the prospect of giving up either past lives or possibilities for the future. She would be saying good-bye to her mother and father, the stewards of the past. She would no longer being able to conceive a child, to act as a steward of reproductive futurity. "Every so many years, everyone you know will be dead." In this sense, becoming a vampire is to enter into a fixed present that never changes. She would "always be this. Frozen. Never moving forward." With Edward able to read Alice's prophetic mind, their life holds no secrets. As Bella tells Edward, "I know you know what she saw." Edward always seems to know. Unknowing does not come easily with him. To commit to him is to surrender "possibilities," to commit to a certain future where this critical moment of darkness is exchanged with the cloud of the air (i.e. the night). 

On the other hand, to chose to remain a human ties keeps her moored in the normative script that runs from high-school, college, marriage, children, parenting, retirement and death. Besides her super-natural companions, Bella does not seem to buck expectations in any peculiar way. If we account for her choice to stay human as aligning her with Jacob and the werewolves, her future may turn out to be more liberating. He is "flesh and blood and warmth" and she "wouldn't have to change" to be with him. As a werewolf however, he is hyper-mutable, "incapable of control." The danger of the beasts is that they are hyper-changing, emotional, creatures of the moment. Yet to give up being the "vampire girl" to be the "wolf girl" may only be a minor improvement as it still yokes her to a lifestyle determined by the animacy of another. No matter what she chooses, the thing begins to work backwards and forwards to contextualize her existence. The moment of darkness is broken no matter which way the spheres move. However she occupies this dark age, it is a precarious way of being.

This vicarious freedom and precocity expresses key tensions for young adults in the ages of unknowing. Danger comes in losing attachments to the things that provide the circumstances for life and choices to arise. Conversely, the state of unknowing is perhaps impossible to maintain. Even the choice to defer choosing has its consequences. Once a choice is made, things fall back into lines of sight and as with Alice's visions, suddenly our path is mapped. Hope remains in continuing to play with these blind spots and allowing our visions to mark their mutability and limits because it is at these points of contingency that we contact the unknown. We begin to reach backward and forward against yet never totally leave our dark ages behind.


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Friday, May 23, 2014

Passing is Magic: Transgender in My Little Pony

Twilight Sparkle has a transgender bathroom experience

"What if they find out 
just how different I really am?" 
My Little Pony: Equestria Girls

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A Strange New World

Previously, I've examined the Erotics of My Little Pony, demonstrating how this reboot of the classic toy-inspired cartoon series has adapted a variety of non-normative affects and relationships into pony-form in a way that explores queer issues under the nose of potential censors. While this analysis became one of the most read posts on Transliterature and cited on the Huffington Post, there remains a number of aspects that need to be unpacked.

A critical aspect of the show's queer feminism is how it deals with Trans issues. In LGBTQ politics, the "T" continues to be a silent remainder. The structure of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic plays out a problem that Lesbian Feminism has had a hard time expunging: transphobia. Because the world of Ponyville is populated largely by cis-gender women (well, ponies), there is a lot of room to play with same-sex erotics but at the risk of naturalizing and privileging certain gender identities. The pixie-haired Rainbow Dash and the butch cowgirl Applejack help are sites where the topic of "female masculinity" (to borrow a phrase from J. Jack Halberstam) but these characters do not occupy the precarious position of having to transition.

The danger of trans-exclusion in Ponyville is what makes the film My Little Pony: Equestria Girls (2013) remarkable as an engagement with topics of transgender, transition, and alliance. The film opens with the protagonist Twilight Sparkle struggling with her new status as princess (as of the end of Season 3), only to have her crown stolen at her very first "Princess Summit" by her mentor's former apprentice. Chasing after the thieving pony, Sunset Shimmer, a mirror image of Twilight's name and personality, the two disappear through a magic mirror that leads them into "a strange new world." Suddenly in high-school and transformed into a "tall fleshy two legged creature," i.e. a human, Twilight must deal with the Trans issues of passing, access to technologies of change, and alliance forming in order to retrieve her crown and return back to her home and embodiment. While not overtly identifying as transgender (just as she never identifies as queer), in this film Twilight Sparkle occupies the position of a trans body and plays out public anxieties around gender transition through her transformation into a human.


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Twilight Sparkle has a Transgender moment looking in the mirror
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Twilight Sparkle

Discovering that her body has changed from pony into human form, Twilight panics. How is she supposed to walk on two "skinny" legs? What are these finger "things" where her hooves should be? How does one adjust to wearing "funny clothes," like a skirt? Running into the closest building (a high-school mirroring the social structures and personas of Ponyville) Twilight seeks refuge in a bathroom. No sooner has Twilight caught her breath than her feeling of safety is shattered by a stall door opening to reveal a boy screaming at that a "girl" is in the Men's Bathroom. Many trans people will recognize this fear of being seen as out of place in bathrooms, where privacy and security is replaced by abjection and an interrogation of one's gender.

Playing out the transgender/trans-human trope, as the scene concludes, the image of the bathroom door with the ominous Men's Room sign fades over the humiliated Twilight. For a moment the images blur on top of one another, picturing Twilight caught in the shape of the Man, signaling an analogy between passing as a man (i.e. human) and passing as a man (i.e. masculine gender). For a show that reliably demonstrates a commitment to feminist politics, the spectral positioning of masculinity as the literal sign of humanity may very well have been intentional. In any case, the scene establishes the uneasiness of Twilight's transition in the context of queer gender politics. A critique of the human remains inextricable from the critique of gender models established over a long history of male dominance. 

Furthermore, the danger surrounding Twilight's artificial humanity draws on social discourses around the artificial bodies and gender of trans persons. What will happen if Twilight's transition is discovered? In answering this question, we are bound to draw on the violence we see publicly directed at trans persons: shame on failing to occupy an identity, humiliation and ridicule, bullying, exclusion from public office (including becoming King or Queen of a high-school dance), fear of rejection from friends and potential lovers, and expulsion from bathrooms. In one fashion or another, all of these come to pass when Twilight's failure to sufficiently perform her humanity are made public through cyber bullying, when Sunset Shimmer releases a viral video on You-Tube. Reflecting a common-place scene in many Trans films, Twilight stands in front of a mirror looking at herself and internalizes the alienation that is being directed at her trans body.


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Fluttery experiences shaming for her queer orientation towards animals
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Fluttershy

Given the analogy of the film between transgender and trans-humanity, it fits that the first ally that Twilight makes in this strange new world is Fluttershy. While distinguished as not "that" Fluttershy, the pony from Ponyville, this teen girl is marked by the same name, coloration, butterfly motif, and personality as her pony counter-part. Twilight first encounters this Fluttershy in the halls of the school being harassed by Sunset Shimmer for being weird (read: queer) because of her inordinate affection for "stray animals." Previously, I have noted how this trans-species eroticism marks Fluttershy as breaking from the normative expectations of same-species, opposite sex attraction. Here, the orientation (if not sexuality) opens her up to be Twilight's first ally as a trans human.

Witnessing the verbal attack and physical intimidation of Fluttershy, Twilight jumps to protect her and forces away the bully. Already, Twilight's trans perspective is affecting her actions. First, the feeling of alienation is immediately recognizable and objectionable to her after running from the Men's Bathroom. Even if this person is a stranger, like many queer bodies, they share a common marginalization that prompts mutual defense. Second, transitioning from pony to human has trained Twilight to look for constancy across change as the world "starts to look familiar." Twilight looks different as a human but retains certain aspects (hair, color, cutie-marks) and so she is able to quickly recognize Fluttershy. Even though her bashful friend is a counter-part and not the transformed version of her friend, Twilight is able to recognize the potential for kinship in this stranger.

Likewise, Fluttershy's cross-species orientation allows her to see affection and potential alliance in unfamiliar forms. She recognizes Twilight's care for her and for her "dog" Spike, as reflecting her own love for animals she keeps in her backpack. In very short order, Fluttershy turns from stranger to friend, helping Twilight to navigate the high-school. Assisting her in hiding Spike, getting food, mapping out the political structure of the high-school, Fluttershy gives Twilight a perspective on this new world that matches Twilight's position on the margins. Rather than offering help in a condescending or policing manner, Fluttershy recognizes Twilight as another oppressed subject in the system of violence and directs her accordingly.

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Pinky Pie performs bisexual and pansexual eroticism
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Pinky Pie

Second in the order of allies that Twilight gains in her new body and environment is the hyper-relational, hyper-affective Pinky Pie. Previously I have noted how Pinky Pie's excessive energy reflects an eroticism that is not counter to hetero-normativity but beyond it, overflowing it. Pinky Pie gets "excited" by seemingly everything and everyone. In other words, she opens herself to the same marginalization felt by many bisexual or pansexual people. The stigma against moving from man to woman, woman to tranny, etc. that paints many bi and pan people as sluts, shallow, or fake, and the common demand to "pick one" reflects a distaste in society for people who love "too much." Although this Pinky Pie is not overtly involved in legible sex-acts, her immediate relation to Twilight in this world shares the same radical openness to new objects and the willingness to cross new boundaries, including personal space.

While Fluttershy's friendship required mutual oppression to facilitate becoming friends, Pinky only requires proximity to latch on to her new friend. As in Ponyville, Pinky is particularly interested in Twilight. As ponies, Pinky follows Twilight around and frequently bursts in on her during private moments, suggesting that she has been stalking her. Only knowing her for minutes, Pinky is ready to sign on to help the stranger with whatever she needs. This intimate friendship, plays out how bisexuality and pansexuality compliments transgender, even in their stereotypes. Whereas the trans person is seen as secretive, the bi/pan person hyper-extends. As the trans person is subject to inconstancy in their body, so the bi/pan person is subject to inconstancy in desire. The trans person embodies too much and the bi/pan person desires too much.

This willingness to embrace change, which frequently accompanies a trans person's life time and time again, allows Pinky Pie to be the first person to affirm her alliance with Twilight as she continues to undergo shifts in her identity. When Twilight becomes publicly humiliated by the viral video released of her awkwardness as a human, she temporarily hides in a new outfit and persona. Bursting into the room, however, Pinky immediately recognizes the changes Twilight has undergone and affirms her transition with facial expressions (leaning forward, checking her out up and down, staring with half-closed eyes), and cooing, "I like your new look," reeking of flirtation. 

Later, when Twilight is about to come out to her friends as trans-human, Pinky interrupts her confession and suggests all that Twilight was about to say with oddly specific detail. Has she been stalking Twilight? Are they so complimentary that Pinky knows what she is thinking? Is Pinky so open and receptive that she knows the thoughts and plots going on around her? Perhaps, Pinky Pie's excessively queer desire suggests we embrace all of the above.


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Rainbow Dash and Applejack play out a butch lesbian relationship
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Rainbow Dash and Applejack

While the whole group enacts queer female friendships, Rainbow Dash and Applejack seem to play out the most overt tropes of lesbian relationships, including the potential to lock out other members from their community. In the show, Rainbow Dash and Applejack are often found alone together already in the middle of an untold story that gets interrupted when Twilight and her gang comes knocking. So too in the film, where Applejack enters the drama incidentally on a delivery of apple cider for the school dance. At this chance meeting, Twilight convinces Applejack to help her to become the queen of the dance and thus receive a crown (which turns out to be the one Sunset Shimmer stole). In exchange, Twilight promises to help Applejack with her own problem: her and Rainbow Dash split.

Encouraging Applejack to talk it out with Dash, the group moves to the soccer field where Dash and Applejack speak intimately in the distance while the others speculate on what must be going on from the bleachers. As in the show, we do not hear or know exactly what passes between Applejack and Rainbow Dash. The extent of their relationship as friends (or potentially lovers) is not divulged. The audience is left, like Twilight, to speculate from the outside on the exact nature of what is going on in their relationship. All we know at the ending of the conversation is what Pinky Pie observes, "Hugs! Hugs are always good!" 

In many respects, the closed circuit of the relationship between the sports-obsessed rainbow pony with a pixie cut and the rough and tough southern cowgirl reflects the distance between lesbian feminism and trans politics. At times outright trans-phobic, traditionally the tension has been one of exclusion rather than harassment. Despite any willingness for a trans-alliance, there remains hesitancy for many butch lesbians to identify with trans men or to allow trans women to join in their community. Applejack and Rainbow Dash are open to being friends, but maintain their own distinct lives and critical distance from the group.

Joining the group, Applejack introduces her good friend Dash to the others, describing her as "captain of the softball team," common code language for being a lesbian as the sport where many queer women find community. With this pair on the team, the group jumps into action with a musical montage where they convince the whole school to shift their votes from Sunset Shimmer and ally themselves with Twilight. 

As those who get things done, Rainbow Dash and Applejack offer Twilight some of the best of what the lesbian community has to offer trans persons: established social networks and resources. Rainbow Dash is able to pull strings with her sports teams to lobby for Twilight. Applejack is a successful business with capital that might be mobilized. While the montage cuts over the details of how each of them help, it is evident that things cannot get moving for the new trans student until she gets the butches on her side.


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Rarity acts a Feminist ally for Transgender and queer rights
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Spike and Rarity

Of the many enigmas and untold stories that are suggested but not declared in the show and the film, Rarity's relation to the others is consistently one that goes without explanation. The most wealthy and the most passing in heteronormative circles, showing the greatest signs of sexual attraction to men, Rarity seems as though she does not need the others in the same way that they need her. Associated the Element of Charity, Rarity's social status and relative normativity offers her the privilege that affords her the ability to make it on her own. In a more mainstream movie, the audience would expect Rarity to be the snooty rich popular girl that is too good for the band of misfits (at least at the start of the film). 

Yet Rarity, in the film, as in the show, jumps at the chance to help the others. She appears when Twilight is most in need as the viral video is released, offering her momentary safe haven when the hallways brim with people laughing at her, then without stopping to explain gives Twilight a change of clothes and a new identity. Rarity continues to give to the queer group and to her trans friend without any specific reciprocity, because it is the right thing to do. She offers the costumes that the group wears to convince the school to vote for Twilight. She makes the dresses that her friends wear to the dance; many different dresses in fact as each girl has many complaints and adjustments they want rectified. She even offers a box full of her own riches so that the girls could all have pretty jewelry to wear.

In this way, Rarity stands in the place of cis-gender straight feminists who reach out to their queer and trans sisters. Afforded the financial and social benefits that come with a longer history of privilege, Rarity is indeed a "unicorn:" the best non-explicitly queer friend that a group of queers might want. Her willingness to admit her social status and to use it, even divest it, for the sake of others shows that Rarity is a powerful model for feminists allies to LGBT politics. Rarity gives herself to her friends, joins with them, and offers what she can without lording it over her friends. She could live in a world without them, but that is a world that she does not want.

In a queer move of her own, Rarity possesses an explained intimacy with the film's purse dog, Spike. As the shows only regularly speaking male, he inordinately desires the hetero-like Rarity. This eroticism continues even though there is an evident gap in their age and species, which as the film demonstrates, reflects a gap in gender as well. What is remarkable is Rarity's willingness to feed Spike's desire for affection. In the film, she calls him "adorable" at first meeting, locking eyes with her as their faces come within kissing distance. At the conclusion of the film, Spike is feeling a bit left out of the celebration of female-friendship and Rarity picks him up, telling him how much she cares about him. Spike melts at Rarity's touch with an orgasmic "Oh, yeah!" Again, this moment is opened up without explanation. In this sense, Rarity practices the act of queer friendship, allowing for intimacy without the need to pin down or police relations or identities. Rarity is on board for whatever the future offers the ever changing world of her queer and trans community.

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My Little Pony concludes with something like an LGBT right campaign
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Elements of Harmony

The conclusion of the film is (not surprisingly) the least queer thing about it. It tries to tie up loose ends rather than leave things open to possibilities. Yet despite its desire for closure, that works towards homogenizing politics where we "put our differences aside" rather than attend to the lasting critique of social inequalities and violences that these differences suggest.

After a campaign song and dance number, the school won over by the message: "we may seem different as the night from the day but look a little deeper and you will see that I'm just like you and you are just like me." If nothing else, we can all rally behind school spirit (here a stand in for the government/nation). This reflects the argument that we are all "humans" so that transgender rights are human rights. This however closes down the conversation about cross-species identification or community across differences that does not try to homogenize or cover over those differences. 

However the film opens up room for radical difference, noting through music that "things are only starting to get better," it concludes with the platitude that "things are only gonna get better" without the need for any radical changes to the status quo. Twilight Sparkle's success at becoming the princess of the dance and receiving back her crown sparks a final battle between herself and Sunset Shimmer. Stealing the crown, again, Sunset turns into a winged demon and transforms her friends into hell-spawn. What began as a complicated series of social politics is suddenly reduced to a flat and dualism between good and bad that can only be settled through violence, or else magic. 

Using the crown, Twilight calls upon the Elements of Harmony (and "the magic of friendship... the only magic that can truly unite us all"). By coming together, the team emits a beam of rainbow light that spreads throughout the community and hitting Sunset destroys her power. Using the LGBTQ rainbow, bringing together many different colors, the trans outcast is saved by the force of unification and integration. The film thus ends as one of its songs promises "it's alright... we will come together in the end."

Whether or not one can buy into the inevitability of progress, even cynics, radical queers, and trans feminists can appreciate an air of optimism. The show is targeted to children, after all is said and done. That means, for instance, that there is a strong push from producers and distributors of children's media to conclude with hope and bite-sized lessons. Just as putting trans community in the seemingly benign context of ponies allows for more complex visions of gender and sexuality to be presented, so too can a ridiculously simple (however out-of-place) ending provide a glossy frame to a potentially counter-cultural drama. It is part of My Little Pony's magic formula: a spoon full of sugar and cutie-marks helps the queer politics go down.


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My Little Pony celebrates the rainbow