Queering the Taste for Capitalism Alana Bridget Scully

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 neoliberalism’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

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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 positioning 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 important 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

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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 institutions—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 consumption’ 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 discrimination. In Episode Three of Season One, ‘Dega Don’t’, culture expert Karamo Brown attempts a conversation with nominee Cory, a white police offcer and ex-marine, on the politics of Black Lives Matter, and presents his personal experience as an African American man in the USA.18 The discussion is framed in such a way that equalises their grievances—Cory remains steadfast in his ‘Blue Lives Matter’ rhetoric, stating that, much like African Americans, ‘all police don’t

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want to be lumped into being the bad guy’.19 Karamo is therefore left with little alternative than to concede the politics of Black Lives Matter, offering the gener- ous claim that ‘we’re both dealing with the same pain, on two different ends’, and suggesting that what is needed to overcome the political impasse is simply to ‘sit down and have a conversation’.20 While Queer Eye makes some effort to engage with politically fraught topics, the show’s reluctance to delve beyond the surface level of the debate obscures underlying structural inequalities, undermining the political demands of movements such as Black Lives Matter. As a result, state instruments responsible for enforcing a rigidly white and heteronormative agenda, such as the police force and the Church, are normalised. Cory and Karamo’s conversation is something that Iris Marion Young would describe as potentially creating the conditions for violence, where Cory’s views are protected from any real critique and Karamo must quell any visible frustration. As she argues, the vio- lent acts are perhaps less relevant to the ‘social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable’.21 Queer Eye’s ongoing depoliticisation of queer, racial or class tensions not only reveals the program’s inherent homonormativity, but also places the show outside various defnitions of ‘queer’ itself. According to Anna Marie Jagose, queer political effort can be measured by ‘the extent to which is smashes the system’.22 Similarly, Rosemary Hennessy argues that the queer project is an:

‘effort to speak from and to the differences and silences that have been suppressed by the homo hetero binary[…] including the intricate ways lesbian and gay sexualities are infected by heterosexuality, race, gender and ethnicity’.23

Acknowledging the ways in which sexualities intersect with race, gender and ethnicity is therefore a pivotal consideration for queer politics. Though Queer Eye gestures towards political discussions, the show uses the tension to further the narrative, and ultimately acquiesces to capitalist heteronormative ideologies.

Performing Taste and Obscuring Class

Despite the obvious socio-economic diffculties experienced by many of the nominees and their families, Queer Eye offers no recognition of class or poverty. It instead focuses on the neoliberal myth of upward mobility through the acquisition of material items. The concept of self-actualisation through material improvement is central to the makeover genre, where the onus is diverted away from social welfare and state governance, and onto an individual’s respon- sibility to invest in self-improvement.24 Queer Eye in particular focuses on the

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cultivation of cultural capital, enforcing symbolic markers of taste or class ranking. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital exists in three forms: the embodied state, involving one’s mannerisms, accent or style of speech; the objectifed state, meaning material items or goods; and the institutionalised state, which refers to one’s qualifcations or titles that refect importance or authority.25 The individual’s conception of taste or their capacity to distinguish between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ is not something inherently ‘known’ but is learned through educa- tional processes that reproduce conceptions of taste and reify class divisions.26 As Bourdieu writes, ‘the ‘eye’ is a ‘product of history reproduced by education’.27 Queer Eye clearly exposes this process of education, as the Fab Five ‘teach’ each nominee in the areas of culture, fashion, grooming, food and design, there- by elevating their ‘habitus’ to align with bourgeois standards. In Episode One of Season One, ‘You Can’t Fix Ugly’, the nominee, Tom, is a garbage truck driver who lives in a basement in Dallas, Georgia.28 His habitus (including his style of dress, working class manner of speaking, ‘cheap’ choice of television entertainment and unkempt domestic space) are markers of ‘poor’ taste that suggest low socio-economic status and potentially even poverty. As the Fab Five ravage through his domestic space in the beginning of the episode, they comically reveal each item of clothing or food in a manner that Lewis describes as an attempt to ‘mobilise class shame’—their disparaging comments help to ‘govern at a distance’ and embarrass the nominee, making them more ‘accommodating’ to the proposed mobility.29 However, this process also conceals any open acknowledge- ment of class. In his writing on poverty, Baudrillard states that poverty is not found in the ‘slums or shanty-towns, but in the socio-economic structure’, arguing that ‘this is precisely what has to be concealed, what must not be said’.30 Queer Eye cleverly depicts poverty through a neoliberal lens, shifting focus away from structural problems and instead onto the individual, thus implying that it is because of the nominee’s personal failings that their lives are in an ostensible state of disarray.

Episode Five of Season Three, ‘Black Girl Magic’, offers interesting insight into Queer Eye’s approach to the intersection of sexuality, race, gender and class through 23-year-old African American nominee, Jess, their frst lesbian candi- date.31 Since being ‘outed’ as a lesbian at 17, Jess was estranged from her adop- tive parents, dropped out of college due to unmanageable debt and now works as a waitress at a Greek restaurant. She lives in a share house with her friends (the interior is decorated with furniture they found abandoned on the street) and states that she often eats only pre-packaged noodles for dinner due to fnancial limitations. Despite these obvious markers of poverty and societal exclusion based on a deeper web of structural inequalities, the Fab Five continue

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to critique her house and lifestyle for its lack of taste, as Antoni proclaims: ‘she’s a super pretty girl and she presents so nicely, but then you see her bedroom!’.32 The Fab Five guide Jess through her makeover process by focusing on ‘salva- tion by objects’, as Bobby redesigns her living space to ‘make her feel more adult’.33 However, their makeover process also crucially involves an overempha- sis on some aspects of her identity, following the narrative of her black, lesbian identity without addressing her immediate and impenetrable class barriers, such as fnancing her college education or amending her debt. By privileging superfcial representations of class mobility and ‘love yourself’ rhetoric, Queer Eye distracts from a critique of Jess’ material conditions, including the importance of equal access to education, healthcare, food, or addressing minimum wage and workers’ rights. In this sense, Queer Eye refects today’s economic, political and cultural climate, where the neoliberalism emphasis on the individual through identity politics helps divert attention away from the structural causes of increas- ingly present class struggles.

In Conclusion: On ‘Camp’

Queer Eye conceals issues related to class not only through the deployment of shame and identity politics, but also through the Fab Five’s performative dis- plays of ‘Camp’. According to Susan Sontag:

‘Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious’. 34

The use of Camp in Queer Eye transforms ‘serious’ social barriers such as mental health, poverty or racial discrimination into a ‘frivolous’ display of entertainment. The Fab Five’s campiness is also a useful subversion of the typical role of ‘expert’ within the genre, where the seriousness is swapped out for a light and playful approach. Furthermore, the famboyant and excitable way in which the Fab Five explore the nominee’s house effectively ‘disrupts domestic order’.35 Here, the Fab Five destabilise normative masculinity, revealing that men too can be subject to self-improvement agendas. However, while extending neoliberal demands onto all individuals (as Queer Eye does in its inclusion of transgender men, gay men, lesbian women and people of colour), there arises a question: for whose bene- ft? Queer Eye promotes an element of sameness across all of the lifestyles and identities formations that feature in the show, each bound together through the idea that self-improvement and self-reliance through the rebranding of identity will resolve issues related to career, relationships, mental health or even poverty.

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The 2018 reboot of Queer Eye offers a compelling insight into the complicat- ed network of demands placed upon queer subjects who, while attempting to express their queer politics, become proponents within a blatantly capitalist agenda. Despite purporting to appear different, more ‘authentic’ or more politically savvy, the Queer Eye remake perpetuates the original series’ underlying neoliberal messages. The show further entwines the gay identity with capitalism and leverages queer politics in an effort to appeal to the cultural zeitgeist and therefore achieve steady ratings. Despite making some mild adjustments that challenge the makeover genre conventions, Queer Eye continues to support its overarching messages. Ultimately, Queer Eye is complicit within a broader system that oppresses non-normative identities.

1 David Collins, Michael Williams, Rob Eric, Jennifer Lane, Adam Sher, Jordana Hochman, David Eilenberg, David George, ‘Dega Don’t’, Queer Eye, season 1, episode 3. Created by David Collins, screened February 7, 2018 (USA: Netfix, 2018), Netfix. 2 Ibid. 3 John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin, (New York: Routledge, 1993). 4 Tania Lewis, Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2008), 2–3. 5 Ibid, 8. 6 Katherine Sender, ‘Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 2 (2005): 131–151. 7 Ibid. 8 John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, 1993. 9 Ibid. 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 105–106. 11 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 17. 12 Ibid., 18. 13 Yarma Velazquez Vargas, A Queer Eye for Capitalism: The Commodifcation of Sexuality in American Television (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 27. 14 Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 179. 15 David Collins, Michael Williams, Rob Eric, Jennifer Lane, Adam Sher, Jordana Hochman, David Eilenberg, David George, ‘Camp Rules’, Queer Eye, season 1, episode 5. Created by David Collins, screened February 7, 2018 (USA: Netfix), Netfix.

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16 Ibid. 17 Yarma Velazquez Vargas, A Queer Eye for Capitalism, 3. 18 David Collins, Michael Williams, Rob Eric, Jennifer Lane, Adam Sher, Jordana Hochman, David Eilenberg, David George, ‘Dega Don’t’, Queer Eye, season 1, episode 3. created by David Collins, screened February 7, 2018 (USA: Netfix, 2018), Netfix. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Iris Marion Young, ‘Five Faces of Oppression’, in Diversity, Social Justice and Inclusive Excellence, eds. Seth N. Asumah and Mechthild Nagel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 61. 22 Annamaria Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 61. 23 Rosemary Hennessy, ‘Queer Theory, Left Politics’, Rethinking Marxism, 7, no. 3 (1994): 99. 24 Laurie Oullette and James Hay, ‘Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (2008): 471–484. 25 Pierre Bourdieu, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 48. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 David Collins, Michael Williams, Rob Eric, Jennifer Lane, Adam Sher, Jordana Hochman, David Eilenberg, David George, ‘You Can’t Fix Ugly’, Queer Eye, season 1, episode 1, created by David Collins, screened February 7, 2018 (USA: Netfix, 2019), Netfix. 29 Katherine Sender, ‘Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 2 (2005): 131–151. 30 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Social Logic of Consumption’, in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1998), 49–68. 31 David Collins, Michael Williams, Rob Eric, Jennifer Lane, Adam Sher, Jordana Hochman, David Eilenberg, David George, ‘Black Girl Magic’, Queer Eye, season 3, episode 5, created by David Collins, screened March 15, 2019 (USA: Netfix, 2019), Netfix. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 288. 35 Tania Lewis, Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise, 20.

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