This is a story all about how my life got flipped
turned upside down...
In the context of the prevailing invisibility of older women, and
particularly older women-loving women, on screen, and in the
context of the relative lack of LGBTQ representation in the BBC’s
primetime scheduling, the Berena storyline on Holby City was is
( IS! Oh my god! There’s going to be more!) a rare thing. My work
as an academic has always been focused on media representation,
and more often than not it’s been about sexuality; once I fell down
the Berena rabbithole and started talking to other viewers who’d
felt the impact of the storyline, I knew I had to make it the focus
of a research project.
I’m not going to bang on about the academic stuff here because if
you want, you can read more about it online (I’m on Twitter
@intweed), but this all started with a survey asking people to
talk about their experience of watching Berena. When I read
the responses, I found so many stories of how Berena and other
Berena fans had changed or enhanced people’s lives. I’ve written
an article for an academic journal about this (it’s still under
peer review so I can’t share it yet, but when the slow wheels of
academic publishing eventually turn, I’ll share it via the links
mentioned above), which I hope will have an impact on how
researchers think about the impact of LGBTQ representation.
Most of that research focuses on young people,
on coming out, and on ‘queer TV’ (like Will &
Grace, or The L Word).
What this zine shows is that there is so much
more to talk about than that! The stories, poems
and artwork in here come from women of ALL
ages and from all kinds of different backgrounds.
Some are about coming out but others are about
coming together, about changing track, about
building networks.There is so much love in these
pages for Berena, for Catherine and Jemma,
and for other fans. There’s a scholar called Ann Cvetkovich
who’s written about finding creative ways to capture and archive
LGBTQ+ experience, and she says our feelings about media events
are as important as the events themselves.
So, welcome to this little archive of feelings about Berena.
GT