#sweepsweek

People LOVE Cosima and Delphine on Orphan Black.  Love them.  I personally have never quite understood the appeal of Delphine as a character, but my entire mod yelled at me a few days ago about how wrong I was, so I believe that my opinion is unpopular.  Delphine is textually bisexual; she states that before Cosima, she’d only been into men.  Cosima’s sexuality is not discussed in the show.  So far, we’ve only seen her with Delphine.  This has led to a popular belief that Cosima is a lesbian.  In fact, fans of the show and particularly of Cosima, Delphine, and their crazy science refer to themselves as “clonesbians.”  However, Tatiana Maslany has stated that series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett have known from the beginning that Cosima is actually bisexual.  

I was thinking about what would happen if in an upcoming episode Cosima were to be romantically or sexually paired with a man.  There’s no way to know, but my guess is that there would be a pretty significant backlash.  I think that people would feel as if their queer representation had been taken from them, even though being interested in men in no way detracts from Cosima’s interest in women.  I wonder, too, if this reaction would be tempered if Cosima had been intratextually bisexual (if she had stated her identity within an episode) instead of it potentially coming as a surprise to those who aren’t reading stuff about the show outside of watching it.  My guess certainly indicates my belief that bi erasure exists.  But it also taps into what I call the Sweeps Week Lesbian Fear Trap.  Sweeps weeks are times when local advertisers calculate how many people are watching a TV show and set their rates accordingly.  Historically, this means that TV shows have tried to raise the stakes during February, May, July, and November.  There are weddings and shootings and births and deaths and a long history of kisses between women that are conveniently ignored as soon as sweeps are over.  Though Orphan Black is consistently great with LGBTQ representation, their goodness cannot totally override a lifetime’s worth of training to be afraid that after ratings are achieved, queer female characters will disappear.