community/identity/difference

So, I went to see my super­visor, and he said: stop wor­ry­ing about your abil­ity to do this and just start doing it. Grumble.
So, we’ve nar­rowed the texts down to _Walking on Water_ and _Secret Life of Us_ as the key texts, with com­par­is­ons to _Head On_ and prob­ably over­seas texts like _The Wed­ding Banquet_. I was also v chuffed to hear the line in _Bend It Like Beckham_, when one of the guys comes out to Jess and she says “But you’re Indian…”.
Anyhow, the thing is now to artic­u­late the ways in which the two key texts enun­ci­ate cul­tural prac­tices without expli­citly address­ing iden­tity and how this is a dis­curs­ive evol­u­tion from the mid-nineties text which was still caught in an agon­istic engage­ment with iden­tity. That actu­ally reads pretty well… maybe my super­visor is right?
My con­cern is that I haven’t yet worked out if this new con­struc­tion is a pos­it­ive polit­ical ges­ture (a uto­pian play of post-iden­tity prac­tise?) or a reter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion of dif­fer­ence as harm­less, thus neu­ter­ing its polit­ical poten­tial. My super­visor says I don’t need to know that and that the whole point to some extent is that I’m explor­ing that tension.
To give you some insight into what I’m gab­ber­ing on about, take a look at the offi­cial char­ac­ter bio of Chloe from _Secret Life of Us_. At no point does her eth­ni­city or sexu­al­ity get stated although the images are of her kiss­ing Mir­anda, and her eth­ni­city is visu­ally obvi­ous, though not cul­tur­ally present. So in some ways, this is a pos­it­ive move: she’s just another one of the gang, it seems like her sexu­al­ity and eth­ni­city are incid­ental. But look at the poll on the side: Is it inev­it­able that Mir­anda will break Chloe’s heart?
Why? Does­n’t that mobil­ise all of the ste­reo­typ­ical assump­tions about Mir­anda as bi-curi­ous and place Chloe as some­how more essen­tially fixed in her iden­tity? I haven’t yet trawled through the tapes to hear whether the L word is actu­ally ever said (like the G word is, repeatedly, in Buffy – Willow says ‘gay now’, which is in itself a fas­cin­at­ing moment, given the tem­poral qualification).
But my major fear is that everything I’ve just writ­ten is not ‘real’ ana­lysis and cer­tainly not H1-level post-struc­tur­al­ist ana­lysis and I feel like I don’t know *how* to do such analysis…
Penny??? Coffee, soon???