Popular Culture and Queer Representation: a Critical Perspective
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Dines10.qxd 7/26/02 2:11 PM Page 98 10 POPULAR CULTURE AND QUEER REPRESENTATION A Critical Perspective ◆ Diane Raymond ueer” is a category in flux. Once a term of homophobic abuse, “Qrecently the term has been reappropriated as a marker for some gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (glbt), and other marginalized sexual identities. In addition, “queer theory” has emerged in academic scholar- ship to identify a body of knowledge connected to but not identical with lesbian/gay studies. The term is itself open-ended, and its advocates argue that its fluidity is to be embraced rather than “fixed.” Though there is no consensus on the term’s meaning (and who is included and who excluded), there is general agreement that the “queer” is politically radical, rejects binary categories (like heterosexual/homosexual), embraces more fluid cat- egories, and tends to be “universalizing” rather than “minoritizing,” to use literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1990) distinction. That is, queer theory reads queerness throughout the culture and not simply as a fixed, clearly demarcated category. Further, queer theory problematizes certain sorts of questions that have been standard in gay and lesbian theory. Queer theory, for example, tends to be interested less in whether homosexuality is a result of nature or nurture and more in what function the question of causation serves in the culture and in ideology. Queer theory emerged as one of the many oppositional discourses of the 1960s and 1970s, including postcolonial, feminist, and multicultural 98 ◆ Dines10.qxd 7/26/02 2:11 PM Page 99 Popular Culture and Queer Representation ◆ 99 theory. Unlike their earlier theoretical was to look at “queerness” in acts of forebears like Marxism and feminism that production or acts of reception. Making demanded exclusive theoretical allegiance Things Perfectly Queer looks especially or hegemony, these theoretical positions at same-sex relationships—between Lucy remained open to multiple ways of combin- and Ethel, Jack Benny and Rochester, and ing perspectives and subverting monocausal Laverne and Shirley, to name a few—as explanations for oppression. Indeed, in offering to viewers a buried, yet undeniable, queer theory and a number of others, queer pleasure. hyphenations became common and hybrid This chapter takes a somewhat different theories borrowing from a variety of views approach from that of Doty. Though I promised rich opportunities for analysis. agree with Doty that there is no unambigu- Regardless of their specific differences, ous meaning in a cultural text and that the these marginalized views sought to move reception positions that audience members the “margins” to the “center”: “This way occupy are culturally and historically of seeing affirmed otherness and difference, grounded, I want to look at denotation and the importance of attending to margin- rather than connotation. At the time that alized, minority, and oppositional groups Doty wrote his analysis, connotation was and voices previously excluded from the about all that queer viewers had available cultural dialogue” (Kellner, 1995, p. 24). In as a source of pleasurable viewing. But addition, these theoretical perspectives today, as the section below points out, tended, unlike earlier theoretical approaches prime-time television is rife with gay and to culture like the Frankfurt School, to lesbian (if not bisexual and transgender) reject any strict dichotomy between high characters offering the potential for new and low culture and to reject any vision of sorts of analysis; that change is significant popular culture that constructed it as and has occurred since Doty’s work monolithic and viewers as passive dupes. appeared. I want to suggest that this The relationship between viewers and cul- new cultural phenomenon should not be tural artifacts, including popular media, uncritically valorized as an unambiguous was, according to these postmodern views, symptom of heightened cultural tolerance more complex, culturally mediated, and and inclusion. Rather, while I do not wish open to a mix of possible “readings.” to minimize the benefits of such shifts in A number of queer theorists have used cultural consciousness, I want in addition these foundational principles to analyze to offer somewhat more suspicious readings media from a queer or non-dominant per- of these themes and trends. spective. Alexander Doty’s 1993 book, More specifically, I want to look at three Making Things Perfectly Queer, for exam- recurring patterns or tropes that I have ple, used queer theory to offer new ways identified in situation comedies. The first to read mainstream television. There he pattern—the increased appearance of glbt argued that “ghosts,” to use his term, major or supporting characters—acknowl- inhabited cultural texts and that those edges the very real changes that have ghosts ought to be driven out of their occurred in the constitution of the charac- closets. Like Sedgwick, Doty suggested that ters populating television’s worlds. The cultural texts offer the potential for queer remaining two tropes—that of the “gay readings that focus on connotative rather pretender” and that of the “straight- than denotative meaning, that is, that seek mistaken-for-gay”—have less to do with to find credible readings hidden in a text the actual diversity of characters we see and that a culture of homophobia and hetero- more with how gayness itself is understood sexism bars us from seeing. Though some and metaphorized. All three offer the texts certainly contain explicit themes or potential for subverting heterosexist norms characters marked as queer, Doty’s concern and assumptions. I shall argue, however, Dines10.qxd 7/26/02 2:11 PM Page 100 100 ◆ A Cultural Studies Approach that how these shows resolve tensions often homogeneity of any group, including this results in a “reinscription” of heterosexual- one. ity and a “containment” of queer sexuality, Given my own theoretical overview, I that is, that the resolution these programs must insist here that my conclusions can be offer enables viewers to distance themselves tentative at best and are meant to suggest from the queer and thereby to return to more complex ways of reading rather than their comfortable positions as part of the determinative readings themselves. Thus, I dominant culture. Such a dynamic enables am not suggesting here that I have discov- power to mask itself, making it all the ered or deciphered any truth residing below harder to pin down and question. Thus, the surface of these popular texts. Indeed, where Doty attempts to “queer the this essay will be successful if it enriches my straight,” my approach suggests how what readers’ abilities to create meanings differ- might seem to be “queer” can come to be ent from my own suggested ones in the normalized in mainstream culture. popular cultural texts they read. Further, In making this argument, I shall rely given the truism that no social group is mostly on feminist and queer theory, and the homogeneous and that even a single indi- second section of the essay will outline vidual occupies multiple subject positions, I briefly the conceptual underpinnings of in no way mean to imply that my readings those views on which my analysis depends. It here are “queer,” generalizable to any par- is important to distinguish queer theory as ticular group or sort of person, or noncon- an academic field from the glbt “commu- troversial. To put the point more simply, nity” and to acknowledge in this context there is no “correct” queer reading, no one that gays and lesbians are not a homo- queer reading, and no unchanging queer geneous group with a singular, uncompli- perspective. cated sense of identity. The search for This chapter does not take issue with the identity always occurs on contested terrain claim that the increasing visibility of gays and the struggle to find a voice takes place and lesbians in the media has important in a dynamic relationship with the domi- direct and indirect positive effects, not least nant culture where signs and signifiers can of which has been the new availability of be appropriated and reappropriated in an role models and cultural icons for younger endless chain of interpretation. Thus, glbt people, the attention to homophobia meaning is rarely predictable and never and hate crime, the growing recognition of fixed. Further, queer viewers and readers, demands for civil rights for glbt people, and however much they resist dominant mes- the public’s seeming greater comfort with sages about sexuality, the family, and love, “out” glbt celebrities. Having acknowl- nonetheless are constituted by dominant edged such changes, I want move beyond ideology’s messages about these practices. them here to complexify the issue of repre- Such readers, then, are neither completely sentation, more specifically the representa- autonomous beings severed from social tion of glbt people in a period in which gays relations who invent their own readings of and lesbians (if not bisexuals and transgen- texts nor are they completely submerged dered individuals) seem to be everywhere in in social structures, blindly responsive the media—situation comedies, dramas, to group norms. As feminist theorist People magazine, MTV, even the hit reality Jacqueline Rose (1986) has noted, “The show Survivor. relationship between viewer and scene Despite the occasional mention of a is always one of fracture, partial identi- drama, my focus here is on comedy, the fication, pleasure and distrust” (p. 227). arena where images of glbt people appear Finally, debates within the glbt community most frequently. To attempt to explain in remind us that gender, race, class, age, and any persuasive way why such is the case other variables of identity undermine the would take me far from my topic. But Dines10.qxd 7/26/02 2:11 PM Page 101 Popular Culture and Queer Representation ◆ 101 I might briefly conjecture two possible their virtual absence in popular media, explanations.