Keep Dreaming: Or, The Complicated Trans Aesthetics of Supergirl
Premiering in late 2015, CW’s Supergirl is a television show that is perhaps more than others poised perfectly upon the American cultural fault line that was the 2016 presidential election. I don’t want to belabor this point too much, but it’s not difficult to see the ways that early Supergirl was a product of a tragically optimistic, white-feminist-oriented mindset that took for granted Hillary Clinton’s eventual inauguration and a subsequent continuation of American life as it existed under the Obama administration. Melissa Benoist plays the charming, bubbly Kara Danvers who moonlights as the strong, confident (but no less bubbly) Supergirl, and works under Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant — a female media mogul and certified #bossbabe whose no-nonsense mentorship of Kara positions her as a sort of sugarcoated take on Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly. The show proceeds in more or less this same way for some time, peaking, perhaps, early on in season 2 when Supergirl meets President Marsdin, an inspirational lady president in an all-white pantsuit. At one points Kara quips, “I can’t believe anyone ever voted for that other guy!”
But of course, people did vote for that other guy, and the October 2016 timing of season 2’s premiere carries a note of tragic inevitably. Supergirl, for its part, adapted to the Trump administration with aplomb. While one can hardly ignore the deeply liberal trappings of the show as a whole — characters are frequently wealthy and/or deeply invested in state policing — it nevertheless manages to tackle a number of salient social issues. Kara’s adopted sister Alex comes to terms with her own lesbian identity — entering a plot of self-discovery and romance that is compelling, if not especially challenging to heterosexual viewers — the destruction of Kryptonite and Daxam and subsequent ecological warfare against the invading Daxamites raises themes of environmental collapse, and various characters even take the time to discuss the complex intersections of their identities. It certainly is interesting to think through what J’onn J’onzz’s awareness of himself as Black means considering his entire human appearance is a constructed façade, stolen whole cloth from a man who goes on to become Cyborg Superman. Indeed, Supergirl would go on to have an entire season dedicated to an eerie adaptation of the American at-right, only one who focuses its hatred on aliens from space rather than human immigrants to America. And yes, the ethics of portraying neo-Nazis in this manner is dubious at best. Nevertheless, the images of white man screaming “roach” in the faces of aliens who are frequently played by non-white actors combined with the uncanny resemblance between Supergirl’s Ben Lockwood — a well-dressed, white intellectual with a hard undercut — and the real-life white supremacist figurehead Richard Spencer makes for a distressingly accurate simulacrum of the American political climate.
Still, for most of its run Supergirl struggled with — or more often elided — transgender issues alongside other political hot topics. Season 3 gave us the episode “Fort Rozz,” a relatively low budget bottle episode about Supergirl taking an all-girl fighting force to the titular Fort Rozz, a Kryptonian prison facility, in order to interrogate a specific prisoner. The episode begins with the conceit that Fort Rozz is falling into a blue sun, the radiation of which is “fatal to any lifeform with a Y chromosome,” to which J’onn quizzically asks, “it’s poisonous to men?” While I can hardly muster outrage about such a silly plot device — characters who apparently possess Y chromosomes include J’onn, a shape-shifting lizard man from Mars; Mon-El, a Daxamite prince; and Brainy, a freaking android from centuries into the future — the bio-essentialist nature of this plot, taken with it’s frequent jabs about which sex is stronger, is hardly inclusive of trans folks. Which perhaps made the announcement that the show would introduce the transgender hero Dreamer, played by Nicole Maines — a figure already well-known to the trans community as the subject of Amy Ellis Nutt’s Becoming Nicole — all the more surprising. Even better, Dreamer’s story had been created in collaboration with GLAAD to ensure that her trans identity was prominent, realistic, and uplifting for the communities it ostensibly represented. Nia Nal, the alter ego of Dreamer, generated a lot of excitement in trans communities who were eager to see themselves represented in a mainstream TV show.
Nia Nal’s inclusion on the show is made strange — that is, not inappropriate, but certainly complicated — for the ways that Supergirl already functioned as a trans allegory before the concept of transness ever even apparently entered the minds of its writers. Where her cousin Kal-El’s acculturation into American human male life was more or less traditional by virtue of his being a baby when he was delivered from the dying planet Krypton, Kara Zor-El didn’t arrive on Earth until she was already a pre-teen girl, her previous Kryptonian life and culture permanently undergirding her sense of self as she struggled to adapt to her new life as Kara Danvers, an unremarkable human girl. Kara’s life is thus defined by a pervasive sense of species dysphoria, the deeply felt knowledge that she is always slightly out of sync with the culture, values, and indeed biology of her female peers. That is, where Superman is perhaps allegorical for the experience of puberty — a discovery of one’s changing body and the alienating (emphasis here on alien) realities of adulthood that must nevertheless be faced and conquered — Supergirl is more accurately about the experience of being an outsider even within the context of ordinary pubescent changes. Kara’s out-of-placeness and life as Kara Zor-El precede her identity as Kara Danvers, whereas Clark Kent and Superman are more truly a unified identity. When one tacks on the uniquely feminine contours of Supergirl’s storytelling — her struggles to get ahead in a corporate world that favors masculinity, for instance — the text takes on a distinctly transfeminine flavor. Kara’s conflicts are about the unique intersection of her feminine sense of self as well as her understanding of herself as an alien in her peer group — an experience a great many trans femmes will speak to. Indeed, Supergirl’s challenges in the aforementioned “Fort Rozz” episode — a dangerous weakness caused by the blue, rather than empowering yellow, star — tacitly threatens her identification with the all-female team she assembled for the mission in the first place; the all-encompassing, strangely gendered nature of Supergirl’s distress here is no less an appropriate metaphor for trans-exclusion than the menagerie of alien faces in Season 3 is for immigration.
And yet, Supergirl’s femininity is assured by the aesthetics of the show. Kara Danvers is consistently girly, especially juxtaposed against her edgier sister and the combat-booted DEO officers that frequently mill about in the background of shots. Kara’s living space is soft and decorated with a magazine-perfect feminine Millennial taste, her demeanor perpetually smiley and affectionate, and her wardrobe composed of lacey dresses and Peter Pan collars. And when the situation calls for Supergirl’s array of fabulous powers, it is frequently the case that Kara has no time to change into her iconic red-and-blues, and so we are regularly treated to shots of Kara Danvers catching bullets with her hands while dressed in a gauzy, pastel pink pant and blouse set. Indeed, Kara’s feminine aesthetic perhaps is her greatest power, her perpetually picture-perfect hair — somehow never blowing into her mouth even as she zips to and fro in combat — her clear skin and her genetic inability to be anything other than slender and graceful constitute a more powerful fantasy than her literal super strength ever could. This femininity is queer — the Girl is Super, one might say — precisely for the ways that it extends forever beyond the limits of the rhythms of cisheterosexual life. Alex Danvers worries about her reproductivity as she ages, M’yrnn slowly dies of Martian dementia, but Kara Danvers is forever bouncy-haired and rosy-cheeked, a monstrous feminine that refuses to die, much to the delight of regular viewers.
What’s left for Nia Nal then? That is, we might imagine Supergirl’s fish-out-of-water femininity is something akin to the “pussy hat,” a soft pink construction that simultaneously gestures to the inherent performativity of gender itself but also paradoxically to an essentialist view of womanhood, one rendered in the violently deforming cuteness that the Woman’s March was so often criticized for. Supergirl’s femininity is queer for its very literal alien-ness and ironic approach to futurity — Kara carries a torch for a man who has slipped out of time and come to reside a thousand years in Supergirl’s future — but it is also relentlessly unqueer for the ways that it’s adorable nature has sanded off all the jagged edges of what woman can be; the Super Girl is always white, hetero, and unfailingly invested in the interests of the state. All other forms of womanhood exist only in comparison to hers. The threat, then, is that a literal transgender narrative appears flat and colorless by comparison, no matter how many GLAAD representatives come to work on it. Indeed, read uncharitably the Dreamer narrative does perhaps contain some hiccups.
For one, it can be sometimes difficult to view Nia’s plot as fully authentic. I hesitate to make this point because Nicole Maines is a trans woman, one whose experiences with transphobia and discrimination not only exist in full public view in the form of Become Nicole, but also whose life and advocacy work have actually helped shape trans legal protections for the better. Even still, Nia Nal’s portrayal as imperiled for being both transgender and an alien Other — Nia is half Naltorian on her mother’s side, and even beyond that her superhero name Dreamer is suggestive of the moniker bestowed upon DACA recipients — can ring a bit hollow when we consider that she is both white and cis-passing, and therefore doesn’t much resemble the very real transgender immigrants whose lives are endangered by the xenophobic practices of the US government. Even further, if Supergirl possess an always already queer femininity, then Nia’s might be read as perpetually aspirational. The very name Dreamer — taken because Nia’s powers primarily involve a hazy, puzzlingly interpretive foresight — is suggestive of a sort of fantasizing; Supergirl’s exceptionalism is obvious and readily accessible, but Dreamer’s is stolen in small snatches of (day)dreaming throughout her otherwise mundane existence. If we were to extend the trans allegory of Supergirl herself, Dreamer’s queer femininity is something unstable and more obviously constructed in the heavily symbolic world of dreams. If readers are reluctant to follow me on this, consider how Dreamer’s power is itself an act of “reading too far” into sets of images and ideas. Taken without an ounce of charity — as transphobes are likely to do — Dreamer might be seen as a construction of transness that is predicated on magical thinking, wish fulfillment, or even fetishization.
And yet, Nia’s presence on the show itself resists uncharitable readings. Nicole Maines plays Nia with a charming “adorkable” quality and uses her well-developed comedic timing to fit in seamlessly to Supergirl’s frequently tongue-in-cheek approach to its own genre. Nia’s will-they-won’t-they romance with the neuroatypical Brainiac is more compelling than it has any right to be, especially considering how Brainy’s writing ever so often dips into flanderization territory. And beyond all that, the treatment of transness on the show — literal transness, not allegorical — is simply well done. Nia’s powers, we learn, are actually inherited from her mother. As Nia explains to Kara on a trip to the progressive utopian hometown Nia is from, Naltorian women have a genetic tendency to psychic foresight, a power which typically manifests in one female in a family per generation. Given Nia’s transness, the family had believed the power would inevitably pass to Nia’s cis sister, Maeve, and are surprised to learn that Nia herself has gained the power instead of her sister. On one level, this functions well as a metaphor for all the various aspects of transness that tend to surprise cis folks. Trans women on hormone replacement therapy are forever explaining to friends and family that we do actually experience PMS symptoms on a regular basis, for instance, subverting the common wisdom that periods are a challenge uniquely reserved for those born with a uterus. While the exact mechanism that has given Nia the power is left unexplained, viewers are left to understand that trans femininity is real femininity, full stop. This is a far cry from “Fort Rozz.” Inheriting Dreamer also serves as the mechanism by which viewers are able to see the insidious nature of transphobia as sister Maeve — furious she didn’t gain the power after a life time of assumption and subsequent training — angrily accuses Nia of not being “a real woman.” The too-easy binary between support and phobia is shattered, as Nia finds that one of her closest allies and lifelong supporters harbors at least some belief that her femininity is false or unearned.
Ultimately, Nia Nal’s addition to the show is a strange one, but not unwelcome. After the relative doldrums of season 3, in which the gang endlessly fought the Kryptonian Worldkiller, Reign, season 4 progresses at a refreshing clip, and the eerily accurate portrayals of “human” supremacists both in the government and on the streets means the show never feels irrelevant. The trans plot introduced along with Nia herself was a compelling one, though one frequently treated with a light touch — transphobia is rarely addressed beyond Maeve’s outburst, for instance. Still, that Supergirl was already functioning at some level as trans makes the plot a fairly complex one, a literal trans text inside an allegorical one. Personally, I’m eager to see more of Maines’s performance, and even more eager to see just how Dreamer’s relatively unique identity as a transgender superhero influencez the rhythms and writing of the show. Perhaps we will one day see Nia Nal fighting against the backdrop of a blue star, her femininity eternally assured even as Supergirl’s wanes.
