REPARATIVE MEDIA
Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
We are more connected than ever before.
So why has it felt like our cultural divisions, our deepest collective wounds, are intensifying?
If culture is an ecosystem, corporations control too much land for harvesting our attention, connections, knowledge, and data. They serve us culture and information as fast food: monoculturally farmed then quickly packaged, produced, and distributed for us to binge for entertainment.
Can we cultivate a better system? When we view culture as an ecosystem, we see that diversity, interdependence, and sustainability are key to our collective thriving. Healing our collective wounds—racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate—requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.
Reparative Media imagines this community-driven process as a cookout: spaces where we all own and share organically crafted and ancestry-informed nourishment. This book offers a story and framework for storytellers, scholars, organizers, and funders trying to start or sustain such projects.
This book explores reparative media through the story of researching and developing OTV | Open Television. You can think of OTV like Netflix but independent, locally rooted, and powered by intersectionality. OTV’s app hosts films and series by Chicago-based artists who identify with multiple communities historically marginalized by systems, or intersectionality.
You can read the full Reparative Media book here. You can read the Offerings for Consent presented to artists in advance of publication here.
On this page, you’ll learn more about the individual films and series discussed in the book.
For a preview of these series, check out this super trailer:
Quare Life
Quare Life (2018)
Created and written by: M Shelly Conner
In Quare Life, M Shelly Conners paints a tender portrait of Black lesbian heartbreak.
Black queer and lesbian women are woefully underrepresented across corporate media. Only Lena Waithe’s Twenties, which premiered years after the Quare Life pilot, stands out as one of the rare series in U.S. TV history that centers this vibrant community.
Online, of course, Black lesbian women have birthed an incredible number of web series, some of the most popular indie TV around, from Charmain Johnson’s Lovers and Friends, Michelle Daniel’s Between Women, and Coquie Hughes’ If I Was Your Girl (the latter also archived on OTV). Most of these series feature sprawling casts and heightened interpersonal and intra-communal drama that spark intense discussions among the community that are largely invisible in mainstream contexts.
Quare Life takes a different approach from both corporate and indie TV representations. Instead of sensationalized or exoticised stories, the story is incredibly intimate. Many prior representations pathologize queer masculinity, or “studs” and “butches,” as has been explored by scholar Moya Baily in her book Misogynoir Transformed.
“I just really had this commitment to diverse representations of Blackness and queerness. I got tired of seeing this often one-sided, toxic representation of queer masculinity,” she said.
Quare Life centers a masculine-of-center Black woman who is incredibly sensitive due to a failed marriage proposal. Her more femme friends help her navigate her complex emotions.
“Something that can be so devastating as a breakup, a failed marriage proposal, I started seeing the humor in it,” Conner added. “This reminds of the tradition in African American comedy and humor where you sort of laugh to keep from crying from pretty harmful and painful experiences.
In all, the quiet Quare Life offers a subtly powerful contribution to the history of Black representation, one that promotes healing and solidarity over division and competition.