Thirty-Two

WALKING IN OUR HEELS? MEDIA, IDENTITY, AND PEDAGOGY

Christopher La Barbera

For years, daytime television has been battling the popularity of Barbara Wal- ters’ hit talk show, The View. The View is lauded by pop culture critics as the show that has “single-handedly resurrected ABC’s morning television . . . elevating the importance and entertainment value of good old-fashioned ‘girl talk.’”1 Probably less well known are NBC’s numerous attempts to dethrone the daytime diva by imitating The View. Out pours a string of talk shows ad- dressing dating, marriage and issues of gender and sexuality, aimed primarily at an audience of women. The View’s competitors, which all flopped, were frequently hosted by the highly memorable and highly campy stars of yesteryear. They included Men Are From Mars/Women Are From Venus, hosted by Cybill Shepherd, and Later Today, co-hosted by none other than Mrs. Brady herself, Florence Henderson. These shows explicitly claimed to be “politically incorrect,” and marched a rainbow of gender, racial, and sexuality cameos across the screen toward the end of discussing women’s “relationship issues.”2 One of the most suspicious replies to the popularity of The View is seen in the short-lived 2002 series, The Other Half. The Other Half was scheduled on NBC parallel to The View’s time slot, and was co-hosted by four men: Dick Clark, Danny Bonaduce of Partridge Family fame, Mario Lopez, also known as Slater from Saved by the Bell, and a Harvard-trained plastic surgeon and sometimes-professional model by the name of Dr. Jan Adams. The intent of the show was to understand “the world of women through the eyes of men.”3 The Other Half, from the get-go, was off to a queer start. The first epi- sode introduced the four celebrities by having them walk out onto the set wearing high heels. The shot cuts to a studio audience of women, laughing uproariously as the parade of men uncomfortably take their seats in front of the cameras. Dick Clark explained the reason behind their stiletto intro: they were simply “trying to understand women’s experience, from a man’s perspective.” To ease the blatant queer innuendo of the act, Clark followed up with an af- firmation of the group’s heterosexuality, stating, “Don’t get us wrong, we are a group of guys who really love women.” The men reiterated their “love for women” by dressing up as the cast of The View for their Halloween show, reverting to drag as a way to pull ratings. 276 CHRISTOPHER LA BARBERA

Even with these enticing moments of gender crossing, it shouldn’t be surprising that The Other Half was not well received by audiences. Pop cul- turists noted how it was quickly losing to The View, failing to reach a loyal audience. With overproduced segments, lackluster celebrities, and a fluctuat- ing flurry of guest hosts, The Other Half never escaped from (what one re- viewer called) its “schizophrenic state.”4 Let me first admit I am haunted by the specter of Dick Clark in those pumps. For the community of scholars vested in philosophic questions of gender and sexuality, we must not let these cultural images die unexamined. Philosophers should be the catalysts for critical readings of our visual world, and these new questions are most useful when speaking to an audience of increasingly media-addicted students. Looking back to the introductory scene from The Other Half, there are too many questions for critical inquiry. For instance, how does Dick Clark walking in heels help him, or anyone, to “understand women’s experience?” Can womanhood be reduced to the act of wearing high heels? Does Dick dare suggest that cross-dressing is the final frontier to resolve misunderstanding between the sexes? Also, what is so powerfully haunting about a hodgepodge of male celebrities using drag as a way to regain public affection? I hope to grant theoretical potency to these questions by using my own experience teaching drag as one way to raise issues of gender and sexual iden- tity to students in philosophy. Drag has received some academic attention, but its use in higher education can raise eyebrows, or worse, theoretical criticism. First, drag in cases where men impersonate women has been criticized as de- rogatory to women, perhaps secretly rooted in misogyny or a mockery of femininity by (primarily) gay men. This view is aligned with Marilyn Frye’s work in The Politics of Reality, in which she writes, “as I read it, gay men’s effeminacy and donning of feminine apparel displays no love of or identifica- tion with women or the womanly…It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom femininity is the trappings of oppression.”5 Others hold that drag might be a practice of liberation, a performance that reveals the imi- tative nature of gendered codes. This position is introduced by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter. She writes, “all gender is like drag, or is drag... ‘imita- tion’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its binarisms.”6 There are also broader questions of teaching any queer material or queer theory to the philosophy classroom, and how that material may speak to often large, and sometimes diverse student populations. Philosophy, like the law, has often been thought to be guided by pure “Reason” (nota bene: capital “R”). As such, philosophy values objectivity and has been less than kind to particularity. A clear case in which this holds sway is in jurisprudence: the legal tradition’s reasonable person standard essentially upholds that what is legally and morally correct is what “any reasonable person” would be expected to do in the circumstance. This standard assumes all subjects to conform to a universal, and deliberately ambiguous, standard of rationality. Differences in