"Straight People Are Looking at You:" Heterosexual Privilege and Homonormativity in American Visual Texts
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"Straight People Are Looking at You:" Heterosexual Privilege and Homonormativity in American Visual Texts by Nancy Blair A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn Alabama August 3, 2013 Copyright 2013 by Nancy Blair Approved by Marc Silverstein, Chair,Professor of English Jonathan Bolton, Professor of English Susana Morris, Assistant Professor of English George Plasketes, Professor of Communications and Journalism Abstract My dissertation deals with the topic of representations of gay men in such American popular texts as film, television, and mainstream theatre. I advance the argument that while the 2000s have seen a dramatic rise in the number of gay people, primarily white men, depicted in these texts, this growth has had many consequences that actually serve the interests of the heterosexual majority far more than the gay audiences that consume these texts. Gay men in popular film, television and drama are often presented either as saints, who either die or suffer profoundly in order to teach the straight audiences lessons, or as victims that need to be saved from their (often gay) oppressors. Texts that include these portrayals advocate not acceptance of sexual diversity, but tolerance, which reinforces inequality rather than challenging it. While these representations reflect straight creators and audiences' desire to both disavow and cling to the privileges they enjoy at the expense of gay people, they are also the result of gay creators and audience's insistence on "positive representations." I argue that these representations are part of the political stance theorist Lisa Duggan calls the "new homonormativity," which homogenizes gay people by shoring up the mainstream values of monogamous marriage, child-rearing, and consumerism. The spokespersons for this view are primarily white, male, and middle class, and show little interest in the ways in which gay identity intersects with race, gender, and class. Many queer theorists have recently argued in favor of a more intersectional approach to gay politics and theory that considers how all of these subject positions impact each other, and my methodology is strongly shaped by this ii approach. While most of the texts I consider are mainstream and strictly conform to the new homonormativity, I also examine texts from the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s that stressed both diversity and resistance to the limitations posed by positive representations to suggest a more progressive direction for current mainstream representations. In my reading of these texts, I argue that mainstream texts cannot meaningfully advocate for equality between gays and straights until gays are represented with the same racial, political, and ideological diversity as their straight counterparts. ii Table of Contents Abstract . ii Introduction . .1 Chapter One . .25 Chapter Two . .65 Chapter Three . .94 Chapter Four . .125 Conclusion . .162 References . .185 ii Introduction "Straight People are Looking at You" My project enters three separate and yet intimately connected fields of study: the representation of gay men in mainstream texts, the politics of the gay and lesbian movement, and queer theory. I argue that in spite of tremendous growth in the number of gay characters in mainstream films, on television, and in major theatrical productions, there has been little progress in representing the diversity and complexity of gay people's lives. This is largely due to the assimilationist politics of many of the gay creators who produce these texts, part of which includes an anxious desire to please mainstream audiences by shoring up dominant values that privilege heterosexuals, whites, and men. In advancing my critique, I draw on the work of queer theorists, critical race theorists, and popular culture critics to demonstrate the need for a more intersectional approach to representation that includes not only more attention to race and class but to a variety of political views as well. One text that raises the issue of intersectionality is a 2009 performance at Washington D.C.'s Warner Theatre by well-known black lesbian comedienne Wanda Sykes. In "I'ma Be Me," Sykes draws satiric humor from the pressure placed on black Americans by white culture to be "dignified." She describes scenes from her childhood in which her mother pressured her to be very self-conscious about her behavior in public under the admonition that "white people are looking at you." Sykes confesses that she is still aware of being the object of a white gaze that will form stereotypical conclusions about her, and comically hyperbolizes that this gaze prompts her to buy pre-sliced watermelon at the grocery store's salad bar, rather than whole watermelons in the produce section. Her humorous spin on these incidents highlights the irony of the pressure being placed not on whites to resist thinking in stereotypes but on blacks to 1 avoid making those stereotypes seem justified. While Sykes only discusses the pressure of the racial gaze, her observations could just as easily apply to her sexuality.1 Given that most of her comments on her lesbianism center on her wife and their children, focusing on what she has in common with the straights in her audience, rather than how she is different, she may be more aware of the straight gaze than is initially clear. I have adapted the title of my dissertation-- straight people are looking at you--from this piece because queer people, like Sykes, are also put under pressure from various forces including popular culture, the gay mainstream, and the dominant, heterosexist culture at large to behave in ways that the heterosexual majority deem acceptable, without regard for their own variances and desires . There is nothing new about this pressure, or the problems that come with it. Writing in 1955, James Baldwin, another gay person of color, described the "smile-and-the-world smiles- with-you-routine" that African-Americans were compelled to perform in order to make white Americans "like" them. Baldwin explains that this routine "did not work at all. No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted"(1807). There are risks inherent in simply substituting "black" and "queer" in any discussion of oppression or civil rights movements, and I have no desire to trivialize or generalize the histories or current lived experiences of either group. However, both groups not only have a long history of representation in mainstream American film, television, and theatre, both have been subject to the pressure of assimilation and the pain of denigrating stereotypes. Equally 11 Sykes does compare her experience of her sexuality to her race in another segment in the same special when she comically substitutes blackness for gayness as she describes the process of coming out. In this scenario, her mother asks her if hanging out with black people or watching Soul Train has made her think she's black, highlighting both the differences between the two subject positions (most black people have black parents while most gay people have straight parents) and the ridiculousness of the notion that identities are produced by peer pressure. 2 troubling is the fact that individuals in whom these identities overlap are often either erased or silenced in these representations My project focuses on the way in which popular representations of gay people and the ideology of the gay and lesbian mainstream continue to privilege heterosexual approval of gay people over a politics that fully accounts for the complexity and diversity of gay people's lives. I discuss films, television shows, and plays created by both gay and straight artists for audiences that are predominantly straight. In conceiving and promoting each of these texts, creators must navigate between the two goals of educating this audience about an identity with which it is largely unfamiliar and offering the pleasure of identification with attractive characters. My contention is that far too much weight is given to the latter concern. In most mainstream texts, audiences are encouraged to identify and sympathize with characters that reflect the values of the dominant culture: white heterosexual men. Gay characters similarly work to shore up these values through their dependence on and desire to please the straight heroes. While these texts place much emphasis on the role gay-friendly straights play in gay people's lives, they rarely recognize the other side of this kind of representational politics, which is straight heroes' dependence on gay powerlessness and victimization. If gay people are presented as empowered and able to take care of themselves and each other, straight tolerance is neither necessary nor virtuous. The truly educational texts would be those that call attention to the fact of straight privilege and the ways in which it depends on gay subordination, but such portrayals are rare outside independent queer film and cable shows such as Showtimes Queer as Folk and The L Word. 3 Most of the texts I explore are part of the mainstream, which means that were conceived and marketed for a wide audience, but particularly an audience that shares the privileges that continue to be attached to whiteness, heterosexuality, and maleness. Since a vast array of texts fall into this category, I have imposed several limitations on my objects of study. My project is devoted entirely to works of fiction because, while these are not the only texts that privilege dominant values over minority values, they are the ones that most transparently reflect the desires of both creators and audiences. Among these fictional texts, I only look at those that purport to present serious messages advocating gay equality, or at least tolerance; therefore, I omit texts that use gay characters only for comic relief without offering any kind of political commentary, as well as texts that include straightforwardly homophobic portrayals of gay people.