How Netflix's 'GLOW' Trounces Historical Tropes

This season, GLOW continues to prove that it’s more than ’80s nostalgia.

In Season 1 of Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s Netflix show, which premiered in 2017 and is based on the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling circuit of the 1980s, viewers were introduced to a diverse cast of women. Via a Saturday morning wrestling show, these women embody a variety of personas. Crucially, these identities are steeped in stereotypes. For instance, there’s Arthie “Beirut the Mad Bomber” Premkumar (Sunita Mani), an Indian American whose finishing move is “The Beirut Bomber.” There’s also Jenny “Fortune Cookie” Chey (Ellen Wong), a Cambodian immigrant with a Chinese moniker. While these portrayals ostensibly offend, they’re meant to subvert, as the show charts the women’s increasing agency over their lives both in and outside the ring. This subversion is perhaps sharpest in GLOW’s second season, released this month, through the character of Tammé Dawson (Kia Stevens), a food stamp-toting “angry black woman” who goes by—that’s right—Welfare Queen.

In the fourth episode of Season 2, “Mother of All Matches,” Tammé battles against Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan (Betty Gilpin). In her personal life, Debbie is reeling from a divorce, but her wrestling alter ego is meant to be a foil for that: the all-American girl next door, with big blonde hair, red lipstick, rosy cheeks, and hokey phrases like, “Persecuted by the English, we will persevere!” She’s also meant to stand in contrast to the seemingly money-hungry Welfare Queen in their good-versus-evil throw-down. As the match begins, Welfare Queen saunters onto the stage with a fur coat, gaudy jewelry, and a bucket of fried chicken—the ultimate caricature. She then provokes the crowd by leaning even more into the stereotype: “You like my coat? Thank you for it, because I bought it with your taxes.”

Liberty Belle wins, but the emotional crux of the match actually comes after the body slams have ended. Before Liberty Belle leaves the ring, she declares: “I would like to dedicate my victory to all of the mothers out there—even you, Welfare Queen. I know you’re a mother, too.” She continues: “No, y’all, it’s true. She has many, many kids. But I have hope in my heart—I believe even the worst among us can be transformed. That’s why I got Welfare Queen an entry-level position at my favorite fast-food restaurant. Who wants Welfare Queen to get a job?” The crowd shouts in agreement: “Get a job!” Liberty Belle then places an apron around Welfare Queen’s body and a broom in her hand. It’s a humiliating scene, dusted with the belittling behavior of a white savior, and it becomes more heartrending when Welfare Queen meets the eyes of her son, Ernest, in the audience. At one point earlier in the show, he said of his mother’s persona, “Sounds like you’re playing a minstrel character on public television.”

And yet, here, the scene works as a form of subversion because viewers know that Tammé isn’t her stereotype—that Welfare Queen is a gross mischaracterization. Ernest, for one, is a product of his mother’s hard work. At the beginning of the episode, Tammé connects with a drive-through worker at least partly because she herself knows what it’s like to work long hours for little pay, and all while raising a child on her own. Ernest, too, defies society’s expectations for young black men: He’s the recipient of a scholarship to Stanford University, where he’s a medical student. Viewers see images of a worn-out Tammé driving many hours, from Los Angeles to Stanford’s campus in Palo Alto, to see her son for only three hours. Theirs is a relationship between a doting, protective mother and an equally protective son. “I can’t believe you did that. Wrestling. You threw a white girl across a ring,” Ernest says after the match. It’s a line delivered not with contempt or embarrassment—but with pride.

Notably, GLOW’s contrast of fact and fiction—of perception and reality—mirrors the real-life concept of the welfare queen, a term popularized during the Reagan years to describe a spectral public aid scammer. The original welfare queen, noted Slate’s Joshua Levin in 2013, was Linda Taylor, a fair-skinned woman who could pass as various racial identities and who, in the ’70s, was accused of welfare fraud, among other crimes. Despite the lack of evidence that welfare recipients, as a group, fraudulently hemorrhaged money from the economy, the term “welfare queen” was increasingly deployed to claim just that—and it maligned black women in particular. This narrative has, over the years, shaped policy on poverty alleviation, and its implications can still be felt decades after Ronald Reagan first used it on the campaign trail. Today, when political candidates decry the excesses of welfare and people who supposedly profit from its inefficiencies, images of black women—with many kids, untethered to a stable job or a nuclear family—come to the fore. That Flahive and Mensch’s reimagined character pushes back against this historical demonizing makes Tammé all the more clever.

But GLOW’s resonance in the America of 2018 stretches even further. In light of President Donald Trump’s penchant for basing policies on stereotypes, it’s important to remember the damage that can be inflicted through flimsy narratives—ones fueled by false perceptions. Take Trump’s signing this year of an executive order to limit financial assistance by imposing work requirements, which in many ways reinforce the Reagan-era bias against low-income black people, especially black women. As the writer Bryce Covert wrote for the New York Times earlier this year, “work requirements have never been about helping the poor or unemployed. They’ve always been about punishing black people.” She adds that the exemptions some states are adding to these requirements, based partly on people’s geography, “would, in effect, spare white, rural residents from work requirements but not black ones in urban areas. These proposals have turned the subtext that was there all along into legible text.”

This isn’t to say that Welfare Queen, the character, is perfectly nuanced. It’d be interesting, for instance, to see the show grapple with the fact that America often expects “worthy” people to be pure: affable, loving, fault-free—like Tammé and Ernest. And of the 20 episodes so far, “Mother of All Matches” is really the only one in which viewers must reconcile Tammé and her onstage persona. Although Flahive and Mensch’s writing in this episode is a turning point in the show, it remains to be seen where they’ll take Welfare Queen in the third season, and how she’ll develop. Sure, the show pokes holes in the welfare queen trope, but what’s next? To meaningfully surface this stereotype only to quickly move on would be a missed opportunity—both for the show and for its viewers. Early in Season 2, Arthie reinvents her character Beirut, transforming her from a bomb-wielding person of Middle Eastern heritage into an elegant dancer. Tammé deserves this sort of reinvention—this agency—too.