what are some of the more interesting frames of reference we should be considering instead of just representation?
sorry in advance that this answer is going to be much less about what i think you should be doing and much more about what i think people who take this 'representation'-based approach are doing wrong. i know that may not be what you're looking for, but i think it's more helpful to lay out why i think 'representation' as a framework is bad -- i don't know if there's one single 'correct' way to approach anything, but i do know that the approaches being taken now in fandom and fandom-adjacent circles (and honestly, more and more mainstream critical circles these days) are, like, wrong. and here's why.
so the thing is, 'representation' on its own only ever really has two end goals. the first is literally to 'represent' a particular group, which in practice is often indistinguishable from 'selling' or 'marketing' an identity, often to people who fall outside of it. and what you end up with is often this anxiety that things should be sanitised and defanged, effectively made, like, frilly and joyous and free of the suggestion that the people being 'represented' could be capable of violence, or for that matter could be subject to violence (think of the way people deploy bury your gays indiscriminately, for example), or, in extreme cases, could even be allowed some level of complexity. this is representation politics at its most extreme, really, but it's just this total sterilisation of media for fear that people might be 'misrepresented' that keeps people from creating anyone or anything with depth, or even putting real thought into how they're talking about characters subject to particular forms of violence beyond whether or not they're doing a good job at 'representing' them.
the slightly better but still ultimately useless deployment of 'representation' is an intracommunal one, where people are seeking to see a portrayal of some facet of their own identity in media, and in doing so, essentially project their own sense of self onto particular characters. and this is -- it's dull! and it's very different to looking at a character with a shared positionality, marginalisation, whatever, and having a take on how the piece might be asking its audience to engage with that positionality. what you end up with is these characters who people are treating as essentially repositories for their own wish fulfillment in their own lives.
in both of these cases, the sorts of stories and narratives that 'can' get told according to this rubric become hugely limited, jeopardised by this paranoia that they might be 'bad representation.' i think the former is more insidious -- you as a minority will never sell the fact of your humanity to the people who wield the hegemonic power to keep you oppressed so stop fucking trying lol -- but the latter is still just, well, dull. "i want to read stories about lesbians getting happy endings" who GIVES a shit if the tragic, violent ending or whatever is meaningful or compelling or cathartic? characters are not real, they are not me, i don't need to be spoonfed the fact of my humanity vis-a-vis a jewish butch lesbian having a nice day or something. i want things to be interesting, lol. one of the reasons that 'straight' narratives can often resonate more with me than at least mainstream 'lesbian' narratives is that writers, filmmakers, etc are given particular freedoms to create far more nuanced narratives without the burden of a 'representation' anxiety hanging over their heads, making the narratives more, like, interesting, whereas these mainstream lesbian pieces are so ... toothless. they're dull. flat. i don't care.
'representation' also falls into the trappings of a number of logical fallacies that end up glossing over huge swathes of structural violence. under the logic that governs a representation-based approach, more representation, or visibility contributes to some kind of demystification or normalisation of particular identity or community formations (which 1. assumes that those identity/community formations ontologically exist and are meaningful, i personally do not believe they are, and 2. see above my point about how representation becomes marketing oneself), which then in turn leads to ... more ... rights? besides just being a totally inane sense of how anything works, it elides the fact that what people will call 'representation' in practice often describes hypervisibility, a media tool most often deployed as a means of essentially throwing vulnerable groups to the wolves. hypervisibility is a huge, huge tool of transmisogyny, for example, and you hear trans men/tme people bitch about how trans women/tma people are 'overrepresented' in media as though that alleged 'overrepresentation' isn't putting them in significant danger. that's one major example of how 'representation' as a framework fails. representation = visibility = greater surveillance, paranoia, vulnerability. like not to be a communist about it but the state and those who power it literally are not your friend, and this includes the media that 'represents' you. that may sound dramatic but my essential point is that the rubric of 'representation' as a means of assessing a piece of literature or media's value assumes that what passes for 'representation' is always A Good Thing, when it often very much is not.
there's another pitfall where this clamour for 'representation' can often force writers to do a clumsy, half-assed job of writing a character with particular marginalisations, with no thought whatsoever put into how those marginalisations might reshape their narrative. and what you end up with is not a narrative that has anything meaningful to say and certainly not one that speaks to the people it purports to 'represent.'
and like, i don't think there's a cut-and-dry single framework that's the 'right' way to approach anything. i think that removing yourself as an individual from a narrative and approaching it as a closed circuit in its own right rather than something that you are seeking to penetrate and locate yourself within is a good start. i think just, in general, detaching yourself from a narrative such that you don't need it to be telling you something about yourself, and instead trying to ask questions about the themes it engages, the cultural moments it responds to, the position it takes up within a broader historical framing and the hegemonic forces that it either resists or capitulates to, the biases that might have shaped the way a particular character was written or a particular narrative played out, are all far more productive than asking about representation. like, i think just getting familiar with the process of picking apart a piece and understanding how it came to be the way that it is, what it set out to do and whether it accomplished this, is just going to allow you to get so much more depth out of your reading of it than just, representation anxieties.
i think we'd do so much better if we could talk about stories about particular groups and particular experiences without troubling ourselves with 'representation,' i really do. like, i think good, conscientious readers/viewers should be capable of distinguishing between a portrayal that falls into bigotry and one that doesn't, or does but in an interesting way or a way that we might play around with in our interpretation (sheridan le fanu's carmilla, for example, is wildly homophobic, and also a seminal lesbian text), and assess our responses to a piece without trying to turn our identities and lives into products or appealing to the necessity of self-identification and self-projection when we do so.
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