Queering the Taste for Capitalism Alana Bridget Scully
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Queering the Taste For Capitalism Alana Bridget Scully Setting the Scene Early in season one of the Netfix reboot of reality show, Queer Eye, the ‘Fab Five’ are driving through Winder, Georgia on their way to meet their nominee, Cory, when their car is pulled over by the police.1 ‘Culture expert’ Karamo Brown, who is both gay and African American, is driving the car, and after being coldly rep- rimanded by the white police offcer for not having his license, solemnly reveals to the group: ‘I am very aware of this type of cop’.2 ‘Fashion expert’ Tan France— who is from the United Kingdom but of Pakistani descent—is heard agreeing from the backseat. The tensions rise as the police offcer returns to the car and asks Karamo to step out of the vehicle, prompting ‘grooming expert’ Jonathan Van Ness to take out his phone and begin flming the scene—a response that is shocking for the fact that it refects not only his genuine fear for Karamo’s safety, but that these types of precautionary behaviours are so common that they’ve become almost instinctive. Finally, the police offcer reveals his identity as Cory’s ‘nominator’; the tension quickly dissipates, and it becomes clear that the Fab Five were victims of a cruel practical joke. In the context of the series overall, this scene offers crucial insight into the program’s underlying agenda. The deliberate appropriation of contemporary political anxieties—in this case racial anxieties— is used not only for the sake of dramatic value, but to undermine and make light of the serious demands behind progressive politics. In other words, Queer Eye is far from the LGBTQIA+ friendly program that it presents itself to be, but is in fact complicit within a broader system that oppresses non-normative identities and upholds conservative values. Now in its fourth season (and renewed for a ffth), the Netfix reboot of Queer Eye oFFers interesting insight into the complex, oppositional and yet in many ways mutually constitutive relationship between queerness and capitalism. While the show’s premise operates under the progressive guise oF promoting LGBTQIA+ rights, it is ultimately underpinned by a neoliberal emphasis on individual selF-actualisation and the myth oF the ‘American Dream’. Typical of 149 the makeover genre, Queer Eye’s story arc involves the ‘experts’ (in this case a group of gay men colloquially referred to as the Fab Five) guiding a clue- less nominee through a process oF transFormation, making them appear more attractive, successFul or socially competent. This article will unveil the ways in which Queer Eye exploits queer culture, positioning the gay man as a conduit through which capitalist ideologies can be promoted. Using John D’Emilio’s work in tracing the origins oF the contemporary gay identity as emerging through capitalism, I will argue that Queer Eye perpetuates the stereotype of the gay man as an arbiter oF taste, using him to restore order and vitality to the domestic realm.3 Drawing From theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard, I will also account For the show’s distinct lack oF discussion around class; instead, Queer Eye emphasises gender, sexuality, and, to a lesser extent, race, in an eFFort to obFuscate socio-economic inequality. Unlike the original which Focused solely on improving straight men, this remake proves that no identity group is impervious to the Fab Five’s makeovers, revealing neoliberal- ism’s ever-broadening reach and capitalism’s voracious ability to co-opt what were once counter-cultural movements. Neoliberal Caricatures of the Modern Gay Identity Queer Eye capitalises on the dangerous supposition that the gay man is natural- ly more inclined to possess stronger and more refned material urges, endowing the Fab Five with the role of ‘expert’ in the areas of fashion, grooming, culture, food and design. Tania Lewis outlines the evolution of the term ‘expert’ in the West as having undergone a shift through the ‘informationalisation’ of everyday life, creating a marketplace which valued unqualifed life skills such as fashion or grooming and thus raising the status of self-proclaimed ‘style gurus’ to the likes of doctors or psychologists.4 Borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu (1979), Lewis likens the role of the expert in makeover television to his notion of the ‘cultural inter- mediary’—the expert becomes an important class mediator, helping educate those with ‘poor’ taste by imposing bourgeois standards that are offered up as the cultural norm.5 Within the context of Queer Eye, the Fab Five’s expert status is in part validated through their sexual identity, according to the pernicious as- sumption that gay men inherently have a keener sense of taste, style, or affnity with bourgeois standards. As Katherine Sender writes: ‘The show deploys gay men’s longstanding reputation not only as affuent but as having great taste in order to court both gay consumers and heterosexuals who want to be associated with the positive attributes of the gay market’.6 150 Issue 2 Queerness thus carries a ‘cultural expertise’ that can be leveraged to appeal to a broader consumer base and comply with the capitalist agenda.7 In his 1993 essay Capitalism and Gay Identity, D’Emilio oFFers his own explanation oF the origins oF certain stereotypes about the gay male identity, arguing that the modern conception oF homosexuality has a time-honoured relationship with capitalism.8 Drawing From Michel Foucault’s (1978) thesis on sexuality as a product oF history, D’Emilio challenges the myth oF the ‘eternal homosexual’, instead arguing that the gay and lesbian identity category emerged as a result of capitalism’s ‘material conditions’.9 10 According to D’Emilio, the changing nature oF labour practices alongside various wars between the 19th and 21st century ruptured the interdependent Family unit, prompting individuals to move outside their rural heteronormative Family structures and into metropolitan communities where same-sex desire could be more openly expressed. These newFound communities emerged during a time when capitalism’s ‘material conditions’ also saw the incipience oF advertising and consumer culture, morphing identity into something which could be marketed and purchased, and position- ing sexuality as central to one’s identity. As Lauren Berlant writes, ‘sexuality is the modern form of self-intelligibility: I am my identity; my identity is fundamen- tally sexual; and my practises refect that’.11 This interlocking web oF relations between identity and capitalism, and sexual persuasions and identity, created the conditions for sexuality to ‘meet up’ with national fantasy, forming an import- ant basis From which to critique Queer Eye, the Fab Five, and to explore the show’s implicit messages.12 Despite attempts to distance the program from both the original series and the makeover genre as a whole (the tagline proudly claims the show is ‘more than a makeover’), sexual and gender identities remain central to the Netfix reboot of Queer Eye. As such, the show capitalises on the stereotype of the gay man’s cultural cache, fxing him within the genre’s traditional role of ‘expert’. As Yar- ma Velázquez Vargas notes, the Fab Five should thus be read as ‘normative fg- ures’, transforming queerness itself into a ‘product available for consumption’.13 Queer Eye is an example of the complex terrain that emerges when sexual identity overlaps with the neoliberal impetus to promote and sell, exposing the potential incompatibility between queerness and neoliberalism. The Resignation of Queer Politics: Queerness made compliant Throughout each episode, Queer Eye’s claims of championing queer rights are undercut by their insistence on upholding normative values, implying that the 151 Queering the Taste for Capitalism Alana Bridget Scully only acceptable form of queerness is one that subscribes to a homonormative standard. In her book The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neolib- eralism, Lisa Duggan defnes the term ‘homonormativity’ as: ‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institu- tions—such as marriage, and its call for monogamy and reproduction—but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’.14 The notion of a ‘depoliticised’ gay culture rooted in ‘domesticity and consump- tion’ perfectly illustrates the performance of queer identity in Queer Eye, where the Fab Five are not only expected to revive the domestic realm, but are si- lenced when they voice their grievances about institutions or traditions that have directly contributed to their subjugation. In Episode Five of Season One, ‘Camp Rules’, the Fab Five ‘remake’ Bobby Camp, a devout Christian and father of six.15 The episode culminates with a celebration of the parents’ marriage, ‘giving the bride the reception she never had’.16 Despite design expert Bobby Berk’s clear discomfort with the Church, based on his negative lived experience, the episode portrays a simplistic and superfcial reconciliation, suggesting both parties had mutually found a resolution. This depoliticisation of a deeply political issue both dismisses Bobby’s individual trauma as a result of institutional exclusion, at the same time as it deliberately masks society’s violently heteronormative agenda. This is not an isolated occurrence. Throughout all seasons, the Fab Five are con- tinually forced to resign their queer politics in favour of a ‘happy ending’ that negates their identity and lived experience. As Vargas notes, the nature of the show demands that the gay men ‘negotiate and construct [their] values and identity’ in accordance with a strictly heteronormative capitalist agenda.17 In other words, Queer Eye’s homonormative expression of gayness makes possible the very heteronormative structures they claim to be challenging. Similarly, Queer Eye deploys conversations about race in an attempt to main- tain the show’s progressive Façade, while Failing to acknowledge the underlying structural inequalities that position racial minorities as more vulnerable to dis- crimination.