Article No. 12
The Importance of Community-Based Media for
Building and Sustaining Lesbian Subcultures: The Role of Montréal’s
Dykes on Mykes Radio Show
Marie-Claire MacPhee
The Simone de Beauvoir Institute
and
Mél Hogan
Department of Communication Studies
Concordia
University
www.nomorepotlucks.org
www.ckut.ca
Abstract
This paper was
originally written for and presented at the Lesbian Lives XIII:
Historicizing the Lesbian Conference in Dublin, Ireland in
February 2006. The essay considers the history of Dykes on Mykes,
a groundbreaking, lesbian and queer community-based radio program in
Montréal, Canada. The authors, who are the show’s current hosts and
technicians, collected data by examining the show’s archives and
conducting individual and focus group interviews with Dykes on
Mykes’ past and present hosts. These data reveal that changes in
Dykes on Mykes’ programming and foci correlate closely with
contemporary cultural and social developments among lesbian
communities in Montréal.
Alternative Radio: Dykes on
Mykes
Dykes on Mykes
was created in 1987 shortly after CKUT, Montréal’s Community Radio
Station, was founded. At that time CKUT was launching new programs
and the station issued a call for program proposals. Local GLBT
community activists responded by pitching the idea of hosting both a
weekly dyke radio show and the men’s Homoshow. Today, almost
20 years later, Dykes on Mykes is the longest running
Anglophone lesbian and queer women’s radio show in Montréal.
Dykes on Mykes
never had a formal mandate but its unwritten goal was to serve the
lesbian-queer community and give voice to local Anglophone lesbian
culture. Dykes on Mykes aired lesbian and queer women’s
perspectives on politics, music, arts and culture. The show also
promoted local artists and activists and provided Montréal’s lesbian
and queer women’s community a forum where they could discuss all of
these topics. This created a public space for lesbians and queer
women. As lesbian and queer women’s performance of their identities
shifted over time, Dykes on Mykes’ character also changed,
yet the show never deviated from its original goal of providing a
political and cultural outlet for the community.
Queer Media Activism
As
Dykes on Mykes
and other
community-based queer media provide their audiences political and
cultural outlets they also enact a form of media activism that Larry
Gross identifies in his book, Up from Invisibility (2000):
Ultimately, the most effective form of resistance to the
hegemony of the mainstream is to speak for oneself, to create
narratives and images that counter the accepted, oppressive, or
inaccurate ones. While many groups and interests are ignored or
distorted in the media, not all have the same options for
resistance. The opportunities for resistance are greatest when
there is a visible and organized group that can provide
solidarity and institutional support for the production and
distribution of alternative messages. (p.19)
Media
activism plays exactly this role in queer Canadian history and
rights movements, for queer media provide positive alternatives to
mainstream representations of GLBT populations and provide
these populations mechanisms that foster community building. For
instance, queer radio resists hegemonic forces by facilitating
discussion on issues of particular interest to dykes, issues that
are underrepresented or misrepresented in mainstream media.
Additionally, queer media’s collaborative nature—its incorporation
of multiple stakeholders into production and other roles in
communicative processes—challenges mainstream media’s established
structure. If “doing” radio means establishing and maintaining
links with a wide range of community members, “doing” queer
radio means constructing as participants its diverse
audiences, such as queer academics, youth, mothers, artists, and
community organizers.
Radio
also is an excellent tool for mobilization, networking and community
building; hence, queer radio performs these functions for LBGT
populations. Moreover, like the Internet, radio is a public medium
that accommodates users’ private needs and interests. Queer radio,
for example, disseminates information to people who are closeted, in
the process of coming out, or merely interested in queer women’s
culture.
Dykes on Mykes, which employs
all these elements of queer media activism, contributes to
creating and sustaining queer identities and community among
Anglophone lesbians and queer women in Montréal.
The Challenges of Representation
In October 2005 a focus group attended by past and
present hosts of
Dykes on Mykes
yielded data that confirm the activist nature of
Dykes on Mykes.
Questions were open-ended and triggered discussion that lasted over
four hours. This session revealed that an ideological shift
demarcated
Dykes on Mykes’
founding and present generations and that this change parallels a
similar generational split among Montréal’s
Anglophone lesbian and queer women.
These shifts were highlighted when focus group
participants deliberated on the nature of their target audience and
the character of “dyke content.” When asked about target audience
Dykes on Mykes’
early hosts unequivocally stated that their guests were lesbian
identified and that the show’s content was interesting to dykes. One
previous co-host explained, “We have one hour of air time every two
weeks—so let’s make it lesbian!” She added that to “make it
lesbian” meant interviewing lesbians. But these interviews rarely
centered on guests’ sexual identity. Rather, they spotlighted
lesbians’ jobs, hobbies, and cultural production. The rationale for
taking this focus was that if you were on the show there was no
mistaking who you were. As one ex-host pointed out, “There is
nothing ambiguous about the name of the show.” Significantly,
bringing attention to what lesbians were doing in the world
primarily served to demystify lesbian lives during this early phase
(the 1980s) of Canada’s LBGT rights movement.
Focus group participants’ answers to the question,
“Who is listening?” illustrate how former hosts conceptualized their
audience when they were producing
Dykes on Mykes.
One ex-host said:
Before I got
involved in the show, when I first moved to the city, in my first
summer here, I was just coming out and I listened to it every
Monday. I listened to you (points to former host). And at the time
there was a section called “Helen’s Pick-Up Tips.” She always
recommended that going to the “tam tams” on Sundays would be a great
place to meet girls, so I did.
This speaker also
noted that hosts used to make announcements: “Before e-mail, we
would announce everything and people would sit there with their
pencils and paper and call in with questions.”
Another
participant agreed with her and said:
It’s true, with the Internet, there
are now so many ways of getting information. . . . But one thing
that I know for sure is that over the years there were people who
listened to the show when they were closeted, and it helped them
come out. Once they moved to the city and closer to the action they
tended to drop us. But there was a fringe period when we were
really, really important in their lives. And you have to keep in
mind that this was before the Internet, when radio was more
powerful, and we were probably their only source of lesbian cultural
information. We never really knew who was listening, but we knew
that somebody was. I stayed in this town and ran into people that
listened to the show, and at some point I began to understand that
when people were confused about their sexuality, there was something
really relevant about having a voice on air that they could tune
into and listen to while trying to figure out their sexual
orientation.
A third interviewee
added:
Yeah, people are out
there. Dykes on Mykes not only reflects a sense of community,
but it is that community. I remember once, years ago, I was
tuned in and you were talking about the Boudoir. There were actually
people on the radio talking about this party. It was so cool. It
gave a weight to the lesbian community for me. It anchored it. And I
knew that there were other people around the city sitting in their
kitchens listening to the same show. You’d always ask what people
were wearing. Fashion was definitely the highlight. . . . And it
meant that if people were flipping through the radio in their cars,
or whatever they were doing, they were flipping past a station where
people were talking about lesbians, about what lesbians do, and
about their own experiences as lesbians, and there was nobody
saying, “Shhh, don’t say that.” It was just there. And knowing that
I was okay, and that everyone in my community was okay was one
thing, but knowing that it was just out there for people to consume
or not consume as they wished was something that was very powerful.
. . .You’re not going to find dyke stuff on other radio stations.
You’re just not.
An
entirely new crew joined
Dykes on Mykes
in 2004 and they conceptualized the show’s target audience
differently. They made fewer assumptions about their audience and
the character of “dyke content” than previous hosts. As a result,
Dykes on
Mykes
departed from the identity politics practiced by the former
generation. The new hosts still privilege having lesbians and queer
women as guests but they are pushing for a broader understanding of
what the community wants to hear.
While
the current staff has not rejected
Dykes on Mykes’
early practices they balance what previous hosts built during the
show’s first 17 years with more explicitly political perspectives.
Hence, the show now 1) maintains a distinct lesbian identity while
also expanding and complicating the concept of lesbianism and 2)
resists all forms of oppression (not just homophobia and
heterosexism). The show also serves as a bridge between GLBT
identities and a more diffusely defined queer identity.
Lesbian and Queer Content
Such a bridge is needed in part because a queer
identity movement is emerging in Canada that opposes mainstream
straight culture
and
the GLBT rights movement’s agenda of normalizing homosexuality.
Normalization and working “within the system” have been the
hallmarks of the Canadian GLBT movement, which has led the
international struggle for equal rights and access to marriage. The
GLBT movement often relies on strategies that are grounded in
crisply defined, essentialized definitions of GLBT identity that are
predicated on sexual practices and biological determinism. In
contrast, the queer perspective is that sexual identity is
politically grounded and does not reflect or depend on sexual
practices. Hence, one of the ideological differences between these
two movements hinges on their explanations of sexual identity. This
creates vast divisions between the social, political and cultural
activities and beliefs of GLBT and queer communities, especially
with regard to how lesbians and queer women relate to these
communities. For instance, lesbians tend to weave in and out of
mainstream GLBT culture while queer-identified women take a
political position against the mainstream whether is gay or
straight.
Focus group participants considered these competing
perspectives on subject constitution when asked, “What is
Dykes on Mykes
about?”
One
ex-host said, “Ideally
I would like us to play specifically lesbian or queer music on the
show. Sometimes we want to cover an issue, but we don’t have a queer
spokesperson for a subject and that’s fine, but at some point our
show topics should relate back to dykes.”
Another agreed, and stated, “Yeah, for me it’s a
prerequisite . . .”
Someone else had different opinion:
I fear assumption. I
fear checking people at the door. What if we have queer, bi, or
trans, people talking about topics of interest to the dyke
community? We focus on catering to a dyke audience, but our audience
base is expanding to include queer and trans identified people. I
think that, yes, we should have dykes talking about stuff that is of
interest to us, but I do get weary.
A different interviewee offered, “Okay, yeah,
I wouldn’t want to have a situation where it was
strictly lesbians. But I would also hate to see it get to a point
where it’s enough that we’re queer. . . . It’s harder to maintain
the lesbian voice. And there’s added pressure to keep the lesbian
voice.”
One of the participants then asked, “What about separation? Aren’t
we all on the same team?”
Another
quickly answered:
No.
We’re not all on the same team. We’re not fighting for the same
things or coming from the same place. I think that’s what makes
the show interesting. It’s not a generic queer voice. Generic
queer ends up being gay male. And it’s part of CKUT’s and
Dykes on Mykes’ responsibility to cover stuff that’s not
going to be covered anywhere else, and, as we know, issues about
the Anglophone lesbian community simply are not covered anywhere
else.
The varying concepts of lesbian and queer identities
that catalyzed these comments challenge the current
Dykes
on Mykes
hosts and technicians and offer them opportunities to expand how the
show defines audience and community. The new staff deliberately
resist embracing certainties about sexual identity or assumptions
about their target audience. This distinguishes them from
Dykes on Mykes’
founding generation and to some degree aligns them with queer
activists. It also enables the new hosts and technicians to use the
show to bridge differences between lesbian- and queer-identified
female audiences, for ironically the new hosts’ commitment to fluid
notions of sexual identity prevents them from rejecting the
possibilities and realities of LBGT (versus queer) identity.
Dykes on Mykes
Archiving Project
Tracing the history of
Dykes on Mykes
reveals the role that lesbian and queer women’s perspectives have
played in the show. This history indicates that there have been
various shifts in the show’s areas of interest and its hosts’
ideological assumptions. Despite these changes
Dykes on Mykes
has always addressed issues that otherwise would have been
overlooked on most community radio shows. There is no doubt that
Dykes on Mykes
simultaneously creates and documents Montréal’s
lesbian and queer communities. In other words,
Dykes on Mykes
raises questions and confronts challenges while also recording,
documenting and mapping political and artistic shifts in the lesbian
and queer community in Anglophone Montréal.
Keywords:
community, radio, lesbian, queer, women, media, activism,
representation, archives, history.
References
About the Authors:
Marie-Claire
MacPhee is a student and staff member at the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute for Women’s Studies at Concordia University in Montréal,
Québec. She is an activist whose work focuses on community-based
research and media. She is a Communications Assistant for the
Canadian Women’s Health Network, a co-host and co-technician for
CKUT Community Radio’s Dykes on Mykes, and a researcher for
nomorepotlucks.org. Email: mcmacphee@gmail.com
Mél Hogan
is an M.A . candidate in Media Studies at Concordia University. She
is working on a SSHRC-funded project that examines the preservation
of Digital Photography and social networking software. She also is a
queer community activist, a technician for
Dykes on Mykes,
the founder of
nomorepotlucks.org, and a freelance graphic designer.
Email:
info@melhogan.com. Website:
www.melhogan.com
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