THE GOOD BI: QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY, EXCESS AND NON-MONOSEXUAL REPRESENTATION

AS 3C- A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University WoMyf In partial fulfillment of •WZPr the requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

Women and Gender Studies

by

Allegra Laurel Hirschman

San Francisco, California Copyright by Allegra Laurel Hirschman 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read THE GOOD BI: QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY, EXCESS

AND NON-MONOSEXUAL REPRESENTATION by Allegra Laurel Hirschman, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Women and Gender

Studies at San Francisco State University.

Associate Professor

Nan Alamilla Boyd Ph.D. Professor THE GOOD BI: QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY, EXCESS AND NON-MONOSEXUAL REPRESENTATION

Allegra Laurel Hirschman San Francisco, California 2015

In this thesis I apply a queer phenomenological lens to the CBS serial legal drama The Good Wife (2009-present), theorizing bisexuality as an embodied practice, epistemological frame, and representational mode. Using the notion of “spoiling” - refusing to keep narrative secrets, challenging monosexual happiness scripts, and defying temporally-based ideas of identity - I explain how bisexuality has been cast a spoiler within political and cultural representation. I argue that triangulations offer points of contact that unsettle temporal demands of identity and progressive notions of minority visibility, and that the courtroom as a bisexual space reveals how many of the tropes associated with bisexuality (opportunism, switching sides, ambivalence) are normalized in characters with social and political capital. By centering explicitly and ambiguously bisexual secondary characters, and reading layered political and legal plotlines in The Good Wife I explore bisexuality materially and metaphorically to consider what bodies are deemed worthy of representation, both in its legal and media connotations. By exposing the limits of positive representation and of visibility as a bisexual politics I suggest the contingency of all desire and identity.

is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It took a village to help me write this thesis while raising a child. I am extremely grateful to my family for childcare, reading drafts, and dutifully becoming addicted to watching

The Good Wife. My wife, Shellie made finishing this possible, in so many ways including bringing our daughter to visit me at regular intervals in a variety of coffee shops, editing countless drafts and keeping me sane. This would not have been possible without the support of the WGS faculty. I am grateful to Professor Evren Savci for our casual discussion about The Good Wife which became the seed for this project and for convincing me that it was both a possible and valuable pursuit. Professor Nan Alamilla

Boyd guided me through this entire graduate process and challenged me in the most specific, terrifying and generative ways. Professor Jillian Sandell has been an inspiring teacher and mentor who gave me much needed focus and guidance from inception throughout this whole process. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Spoiler Alert...... 1

Triangulations: Genre, Queerbaiting and Bi-Temporality...... 42

Irreducible Desires and Identities: The Legal System as a Bisexual Space ...... 68

Conclusion: Programming the Bisexual Look...... 93

Works Cited...... 102 1

Introduction: Spoiler Alert

I have the impulse to begin with a spoiler alert, despite understanding that any successful introduction would, by definition, include a sneak peek of what is ahead. Some of the things I will spoil are plot arcs from a primetime television show, CBS’s legal drama The Good Wife. Even if they don’t thoroughly spoil things, previews heavily mediate the rest of a viewing experience. Certain picked out moments, edited just so, become embedded in memory and we watch for them; we guess at their timing and circumstances. In my search for context as a viewer, I wonder if I will laugh again when I re-hear a one-liner within a full scene, will I be as touched by a relationship when it is not in montage form? Despite their brevity, previews, even the less edited “scenes for next week” on television, have an immense impact on the full-format viewing experience.

Introductions play by a similar set of rules. Both should be compelling and informative; they should tell the reader/viewer where they are headed without giving everything away.

I am interested in the ways bisexuality is cast as a spoiler in relationship to academic, political and representational frameworks. I trace these failed relationships to see how various forms of bisexual exclusion, and conditional inclusion, share overlapping justifications and where these roots deviate. The insistence that bisexuality continues to be named at all, spoils some optimism about how “Queer” can function as a blanket identity term, as a corrective to binary logics, as the label that rejects labels. In mainstream media, bisexual characters are most often depicted as spoiling their relationships and the relationships of others. The ways bisexuality is typically imagined 2 connotes spoiling in another sense of the word. People are spoiled when they are given too much, which is evidenced in them asking for too much. Bisexual desire is figured as excessive, and bisexuality becomes a placeholder for various forms of excess. Rather than bemoan this placement and the seeming impossibility of successfully rendering bisexuality visible, I take up excess as a key analytical tool that reveals some of the limitations of visibility as a political end goal. As a show with both explicitly and ambiguously bisexual characters, as well as layered political plotlines The Good Wife offers a means to explore how bisexuality’s representability (and lack thereof) can be evidenced in political, academic and pop-cultural spaces.

In addition to plot lines, this paper runs the risk of spoiling some other good things. In Stigma: Notes on the Management o f Spoiled Identity Erving Goffman outlines the particular pressures that are put on stigmatized individuals in order to manage their place in society:

The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is

heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he

must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able

to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate

naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have

not quite extended to him in the first place. A phantom acceptance is thus allowed

to provide the base for a phantom normalcy. (78, emphasis in original)

This passage encapsulates some of the expectations put on queers to exhibit pride and self-love despite adversity, as well as the ongoing pressure to remain invested in other 3 normalizing projects like marriage equality. I read certain forms of LGBT representation as bolstering or even giving form to this phantom acceptance and attendant normalcy. In his theory of the social actor, Goffman asks how identity is performed and received, specifically in terms of what makes a social actor read as more or less authentic. Since the mainstream LG(BT) movement has relied on claims of authenticity based on the inability to change, it is not surprising that bisexuals have been left out of most popular discourse while transgender rights have been conditionally included when they align with gender and mind/body dichotomies. Since “choice” has been framed as expressly conservative, certain identities have become less ideal examples for which to champion rights. Monosexism - the socially embedded belief that we all are, or should be, only attracted to people of one gender - continues to structure most discourse on both sides of the gay rights debates. Considering bisexuals as stigmatized from several directions turns our attention to the (emotional, political, social) work the stigmatized individual is asked to do to maintain their marginal location. The characters I track in this inquiry are inexpert at managing their stigma, and in failing, they serve to expose some of the impossible expectations placed on non-normative bodies.

In Judith Butler’s early optimistic imaginings of queer as a less consolidating rallying point for lesbians and gay men, among its other yet to be seen potentials, she includes the phrase: “bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with anti-homophobic politics” (228). For Butler to make this discursive choice is worthy of exploration since it is reliant on the same conventional categories of sexuality that her work ceaselessly troubles and it positions bisexuals as potential allies’ outside of homophobia's reach. This passage shows how, even at its moment of inception, Queer was coming undone- at least insofar as it could concurrently function as an umbrella term

and a post-structuralist undoing of identity. To signify this different usage, and my

preference for utilizing queer as an epistemological tool rather than identification, I do

not include the Q, in LGBT when referencing political movements or representation.

By casting a critical lens on LGBT representation, it is not my overall intention to

spoil anything. I do want to think about what we ask for when we ask for positive

representation as opposed to what we might get in return. Lauren Berlant describes

"Cruel optimism" as a "relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility"

(24). The cruelty is manifest in the sustained attachment to what an object can offer, even

as that object itself limits what optimism hopes it can overcome. The optimism around

media representations of non-normative bodies, desires, and actions sometimes overlooks

the role representation plays in continuing to define normal. Although this project

participates in a growing effort to pay more attention to characters that refuse the

hetero/homo divide without demanding they pick a side, I do so with marked

ambivalence and attendant anxiety. Also refusing to pick a side, I remain hypervigilant to

the dangers of visibility and legibility while remaining drawn to depictions of non­

monosexuality in the media and what they might offer. As a filmmaker whose work has

been primarily screened at LGBT film festivals and a curator for a “bisexual shorts”

program, I am actively engaged in representational modes.

While perhaps not optimistic, I remain invested, personally, politically, and

artistically in what representation does and what we can do with representation. Stuart Hall expands on this when he says: “I acknowledge that ‘spaces won’ for difference are few and far between; that they are carefully policed and regulated. I believe they are limited ... I know what replaces invisibility is a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility. But, it does not help to name-call it ‘the same’ “(28). As Hall’s words suggest, specific moments of representation warrant their own investigations that may not simply rehash the same regulatory and oppressive structures of other modes and cultural moments. The Good Wife offers many examples of “spaces won” for bisexual representation as well as spaces lacking and spaces in between all of which demonstrate the ways visibility is, at once, regulated and regulating.

When something is spoiled it is not good anymore. The fact that it can be spoiled at all implies that it didn’t start out bad, it was good, or held such potential.

Representation is often discussed in dichotomous terms; there are good or bad portrayals that move politics forward or drag it backward. There has been an explosion in the world of LGBT representation in mainstream television in the last two decades. These nods to a potentially diverse viewership are certainly sought after by many members of the LGBT community, and serve to bolster, at least in part, the progress narratives of prime time television and the mainstream gay rights movements. Representations of minorities and

sub-cultures in film and television have a much longer, though perhaps subtler, history than a glance at just the last two decades permits; current representations are often charged with correcting the follies of past representation in order for mainstream media to earn its badge of progress. Representation however, is always also creating something, and interacting with someone. The hopes that representational visibility creates new 6 social and political realities within the mainstream can sometimes ignore the limitations of visibility in expressing the partial and contradictory experience of subjectivity.

Phenomenology is one way of understanding perception as an interactive relationship that offers a means to explore what is at stake in representation as well as the stakes that representation put down.

The Excess I Bring to the Table

In phenomenological understandings of perception, excess is understood as that which is beyond view or outside of the representational necessity of an object (Merleau-

Ponty 460/ The perceiver also carries their own excess - associations, feelings, assumptions, theories - that impact how an object is perceived. The rest of this chapter will provide a sense of the excess I bring to my perception of things, which is why I begin with the sociologist Erving Goffman who, in many ways, brought me here. As an undergraduate Sociology major I was introduced to Goffman’s dramaturgical approach before I learned about Judith Butler’s performativity, and it was his theory of the social actor that began to undo my previous understandings of authenticity and identity. It is not surprising that the first time I was introduced to social construction and post-structuralism it was around a table, and it is also, I assume, not surprising that the table itself was brought into our discussion.

The table in question was a solid oak with layers of dark stain covering decades of pens being pushed too hard through notebook paper. The table and I were in an undergraduate class at Bard College, a tiny Liberal Arts school in upstate New York. The table had a solid presence and was nothing like the folding laminated wood grain ones I 7 remembered from California public schools. My presence, and that of my classmates, was feeling decidedly less solid. After a lecture on Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu the class was experiencing some form of an uprising. As college freshmen desperately trying to prove our authenticity, we were taking this all very personally. One student stood up,

“We can all agree that this is a table.” “Exactly, the Professor said, “we all need to agree.

That is what makes this a table.” Microphone dropped.

When I think about some of the most prevalent and generative tensions within queer theory and Women and Gender Studies, I return to the impulse to grab onto

something tangible, to never entirely lose focus on materiality even as we enter into

theoretical terrain that insists that everything we name and know, even our bodies, are

reliant on discourse to gain their meaning. The separation of outside and inside is a

popular fiction, one that can obscure the way external forces are experienced internally.

What I find most compelling about phenomenology is that it holds a place for

experiential knowledge, by taking seriously how bodies are experienced in conscious and

external spaces, while also recognizing how objects, including bodies, gain meaning from

the outside.

Most recently, I was brought back to that table by Sara Ahmed’s Queer

Phenomenology where she takes up tables as a means to imagine how certain objects

come in and out of reach, thus conditioning what we see as possible. She introduces the

familial table as reflective, a place where those who are differently oriented become

alienated from the vision of a happy family which “can allow you to see what that picture 8 does not and will not reflect” (Promise o f Happiness 67). Bisexuality is often off the table, even as alternate tables gather prominence.

Michel Foucault shed light on how certain discourses gain such dominance in meaning-making that they operate as 'truth' coming to define individuals, collectives and the institutions set out to govern them. When Foucault outlined the process of medicalization and confession by which the homosexual became a “species” he indicated that bisexuality was “spared the rigors of this ‘never-ending demand for truth’” (8).

Whether or not this claim could be refuted, it poses an interesting structure for looking at discourse on bisexuality over time. What if it is possible for bisexuality to concurrently be “spared the rigors” of various academic disciplines, truth seeking or otherwise, while simultaneously remaining plagued by, and falling short of, “the never-ending demand for truth?” This ambiguous placement of bisexuality brings up important questions in terms of what it means to be “spared” and what is gained and lost in the process of becoming visible. This chapter will offer background as to how and why queer theory has not addressed bisexuality while exploring how phenomenology may offer a means to theorize bisexuality as an identity and an epistemological frame. This next section explores what could emerge theoretically if queer theory could consider bisexuality as oriented without that already being grounds for exclusion.

Shifting Grounds for Bisexual Exclusion: Proof, Excess and Gratuity

Disciplinary knowledge production, political movements, and media representations have rendered bisexuality excessive, impossible, obsolete and/or gratuitous. Historically, bisexual characters in mainstream United States cinema and 9 television have been scarce, but they have been rendered scarcer still through historical and current readings of non-heterosexual desire or behavior as ‘really’ indicative of gay or lesbian identity (Richter 274; James 231). Christopher James describes this process of bi-erasure as “appropriation without representation” (228). He explains that, “such appropriation often occurs when a theorist excludes bisexuality as a relevant category of sexual identity, yet claims behaviorally bisexual people or text with bisexual characters or content as queer, gay, or lesbian” (James 217). This project and current queer media studies owe an intellectual debt to the work that Gay and Lesbian studies did in rethinking representation, including the archival work of the book and corresponding film

The Celluloid Closet (Russo). However, the architecture of the closet metaphor itself relies on a monosexual blueprint that retroactively denies the possibility of bisexual representation, in part, by sketching out a progress narrative of gay and lesbian visibility overtime. Heather Love explains how the film version of The Celluloid Closet “presents stereotypical images as errors along the way to a more accurate and positive reflection of gay and lesbian existence” (16). She also suggests that the film simultaneously undermines its own progress narrative by including commentaries that do not squarely put the history of shame and pain in the past. Love’s work calls into question the linking of “accurate” and “positive” that situates gay shame as a thing of the past. While bisexuality is not named in Love’s project, her work reveals how gay and lesbian historiography resists ambiguity in an attempt to contain and label desire. Bisexual historiography can easily fall into these same patterns. As Clare Hemmings warns, “the search for inclusion of sexual and gendered subjects, ever the same, suggests the political 10 problem is one of omission rather than of structure, a failure of historical and cultural memory, rectifiable by ‘remembering’ (in this case) bisexuality and setting the historical record straight” (“A Feminist Methodology”). I seek to understand more fully the varied mechanisms of bisexual exclusion, not in an effort to right historical wrongs, but as a means to imagine what could emerge theoretically if bisexuality were considered as both experiential and epistemological.

While stereotypes about homosexuals, whether negative or positive, generally act to affirm a stable category that is gay or lesbian, the primary bisexual stereotype is a disavowal of the existence of bisexuality as anything more than a stopping point to a properly fixed identity. When bisexuality has been addressed in empirical social science research over the last forty years, it has been most commonly in an effort to prove whether or not it truly exists by “objectively” measuring sexual desire against self- proclaimed identification (Isgro and Gammon). When this conditional and precarious inclusion is set against the general absence of bisexuality from Gay and Lesbian Studies and later queer theory we can begin to chart the different means through which bisexual exclusion is justified.

The move from Lesbian and Gay Studies to queer theory in the 1990s, shifted focus from excavating a gay or lesbian history and proving an empirically grounded present, to deconstructing how identity and sexual object choice became specifically aligned in the first place. What remained consistent was the exclusion of bisexuality, although the grounds for exclusion shifted from excess to gratuity. In Lesbian and Gay

Studies, bisexuality was extraneous or counterproductive to the discipline’s quest for 11 proving an authentic lesbian and gay identity and history. On the other hand, the similarities between bisexual activists’ and queer theory’s challenges to normative structures of gender situated them as potentially gratuitous (Burrill). Queer theory could subsume the critiques of bisexual activists and academics as they could be successfully removed from their identitary basis. Bisexuality theorists have argued that queer theory’s lack of engagement with bisexuality has weakened the field from its foundational works to its modern forms (Callis 214). The most obvious explanation for this seeming neglect lies in queer theory’s generally anti-identitarian logics that have rejected and deconstructed normative notions of sexual orientation and gender identity (De Plessus

35). Queer theory nevertheless continues to conceptually engage with monosexual orientations, even if only to expose their own normative values, reproducing its own exclusions that still break down along certain lines of identity (Alexander; Callis;

Gurevich, Bailey and Bower). In general, theorists calling for bisexual inclusion have been careful to position their claims as outside of identity based logics. Gurevich, Bailey and Bower suggest that, “In situating bisexuality within an epistemological frame, we are referring to the ways in which bisexuality functions (or has functioned, or can function) in structuring the social architecture of culture, rather than to its property as a personal identity or to particular behavioral repertoires” (236). These pleas to queer theory on its own terms - if queer is an effort to bring the stability of identity categories into crisis - insist that bisexuality be taken up as a critical epistemological frame. Here bisexual epistemology acts as an intervention that can both work alongside queer theory and expose some of its foundational exclusions. 12 Along these lines, Foucault and Eve Sedgwick are credited with initiating and perpetuating the preoccupation with the binary co-construction of hetero/homo that can be seen as obscuring what Angelides sees as a trinary relationship of hetero/homo/bi

(200) or promoting an overarching binary of monosexuality versus any other sexual possibilities (Alexander 23). These divergent critiques present a question regarding how to situate bisexuality in relationship to other sexual identity constructs. Does bisexuality’s exclusion expose the shared assumptions of monosexual identities or, as Angelides suggests, is it already part of a mutually-constituted triad? Both of these interventions offer useful tools for examining modern western understandings of heterosexuality and homosexuality as already reliant on bisexuality even when it is omitted. While the construct of compulsory monosexuality may appear to offer bisexual epistemologies an inroad into an overarching critique of sexuality’s basis on a unitary object choice, this structure centralizes the dualism of hetero/homo that will always keep bisexual epistemologies “outside” (Gammon and Isgro). Though a key element of bisexual epistemology is the intervention into monosexual logics, a look at bisexual representation reveals the multiple ways bisexuality is essential in constructing, and representing, heterosexual and homosexual identities.

Bisexual epistemological interventions do not inherently preclude the intellectual utility of considering bisexuality as an identity, a set of practices or an experiential

standpoint (Alexander; Angelides; Callis). According to April Callis, bisexual identity is a fruitful location for Butler’s theory precisely because it offers similar “trouble” to

systems of gender. Butler’s theory of performativity stresses the impossibility of 13 coherence, legibility, or appropriate and stable alignment of gender performance and object choice (125). She argues that there is some specificity to bisexual identity that makes it suited to Butler’s framework despite Butler’s complicated rejection of specificity as a grounds for organizing and resistance: “To argue that there might be a specificity to lesbian sexuality has seemed a necessary counterpoint to the claim that lesbian sexuality is just heterosexuality once removed or that it is derived, or that it does not exist” (“Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 127, emphasis in original). If one were to apply this passage to bisexuality, which Butler did not, we could begin to unpack the reasons that bisexual activists and theorists remain invested in articulating a “bi” sexuality. Since the existence of bisexuality is continuously called into question, both conditionally and generally, by social scientific research and popular discourse alike, the burden of proof weighs heavily on bisexuals and bisexual theory. Before going too far down this road, it is important to note that Butler sets up this passage in order to question the utility of claiming specificity over non-existence and derivativeness, calling instead for a lesbian identity that reworks and redeploys its derivative construction, and in doing so, exposes the way heterosexuality is neither original nor uniquely specific. Rather than seeking specificity as a way out of the matrix of power wherein heterosexuality stands as origin, Butler suggests a reworking of lesbian sexuality that includes a certain inhabitance of the “bad copy” that can reveal the “good copy” as a copy nonetheless. Exploring how this theory might apply to labels other than lesbian raises important questions as to how/where bisexuals would be placed in this particular schema. If the evolving process of discourse and reverse discourse has rendered homosexuality and heterosexuality both as 14 origins, what would bisexuality be a bad copy of? As the title of this thesis implies, I am interested in exploring what would make a “good” bisexual in terms of the demands of positive representation, and perhaps competing demands that would make bisexuality a

“good” enough object of study.

This thesis considers bisexuality in spite of and because of the trouble that this word invokes. Bisexuality is understood as an affinity for both men and women that accepts and even promotes notions of gender difference, as a deconstructive lens that undoes gender, a useful fiction, an embodied practice of desire not limited by gender, or, most common in the media, an opportunistic and situational mode of exchange. Film

Scholar Maria San Filippo insists on the utility of the term bisexuality due to its

“historical and idiomatic specificity, both as a subjectivity and as an epistemology (taking these to be different if not necessarily conflicting), coupled with a willingness to explore and to question the contours of and rationale for that specificity” (17). Hemmings suggests that the specificity of bisexual subjectivity is, in fact, its partiality. She uses the example of a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man, whom she describes as embodying “two central tenets of contemporary subjectivity:”

Firstly, she provides empirical verification of Sedgwick’s reminder that gender of

object choice does not wholly determine subjectivity. Secondly, she dramatises

the temporal nature of all gendered and sexual subjectivity - in order for her

bisexuality to make sense to herself, she must give her subjectivity a conscious

history o f transition. Without making this history of transition and difference from

herself conscious she would be indistinguishable to herself from a heterosexual 15 woman. To become a bisexual subject then partiality, transition (and therefore

translation of one culture into another) must be placed at the centre of subjective

meaning. To argue otherwise, I suggest, is to elide the specificities that constitute

bisexual experience and give rise to bisexual knowledge. (“A Feminist

Methodology of the Personal,” emphasis in original)

Contingency and partiality are not unique to bisexuality, but, they become a useful way to begin to explore the contingency and partiality of all desire and subjectivity.

In Bisexual Spaces: A Geography o f Sexuality and Gender Hemmings elaborates on bisexual subjectivities by exploring imagined and physical spaces through the history of bisexual political organizing in the United States from the 1970s on. Tracing the desire to find a “home” and carve out a “space” common to many social movements, Hemmings also looks at the ways bisexual activists have celebrated the bisexual potential to remain in motion, not only without a space, but by actively destabilizing other categories of difference. The tension between seeking bisexual community space marked by commonality and legibility and maintaining the radical critiques some activists saw as the central, and essential, element of their organizing, came to a head at various historical junctures, and remains unresolved today. As recent social media campaigns such as bi­ visibility day illustrate, there is a movement for acceptance based on the grounds that bisexuality is as fixed an identity as any other presumably fixed identity. On the other hand, many factions of the bisexual/pansexual/omnisexual community continue to celebrate the deconstructive and even destructive potential of bisexuality to undo dominant dichotomous constructions of sexuality, gender, and desire. Hemmings’ 16 articulation of bisexual and sexual liberatory political formations as “spaces-in- difference” offers a way of thinking outside political organizing based on sameness and shirking multicultural diversity management that highlights difference only to neutralize it (Mohanty 204).

The histories of bisexual political organizing are marked by failure, political losses and weaknesses that offer more than mistakes to be avoided. Halberstam suggests that the “history of political formations is important because it contests social relations as given and allows us to access traditions of political action that, while not necessarily successful in the sense of being dominant, do offer models of contestation, rupture, and discontinuity for the political present” (19). Additionally, they offer fertile ground for interrogating what disciplinary knowledge production often leaves out. Being left out is one way things get spoiled. Whether bisexuality has failed to be a good object of study in the changing rubric of queer, sexuality, and gender focused disciplines or if, as many theorists cited above suggest, the disciplines have failed it, the relationship of bisexuality to academic disciplines is not a very successful one. An understanding of bisexual representation in relation to bisexual subjectivities and epistomology may neccesitate “a stroll outside of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming” as Halberstam suggests (7). This strolling may also take us backwards.

Recent scholarship on queer time suggests that nostalgia cannot just be cast aside as always conservative and manipulative (Padva, 6). Queer theory’s affective turn towards the past has made important interventions into progressive periodizing notions of 17 time while highlighting the tactile, sensory way the past can make itself felt in the present. By conceptualizing the past as something that can interact with the present, and time as not solely disclosed in consciousness, recent queer scholarship has extended and reworked what Merleau-Ponty was trying to get at in his changing understandings of time, “it is indeed the past that adheres to the present and not the consciousness of the past that adheres to the consciousness of the present” (The Visible and the Invisible, 128 emphasis in original). In other words, there is something about time that cannot be contained by consciousness. Elizabeth Freeman elaborates on the “interesting threat that the genuine past-ness of the past... sometimes makes to the political present” through the concept of “temporal drag” (63). Freeman uses the term drag both for its performative and tactile implications; it implies both a representational mode and the tangible weightiness of being pulled backwards. To say the present is haunted by the past, she argues, can obscure the interactive erotics and pleasure of such a revisiting. I retain an attachment to loss as a mode of resisting the seduction of progressive visibility politics as

I am already mourning the kind of visual erotics that are being left behind. Part of what is

appealing about Freeman’s erotohistoriography is that she suggests history is never left behind. Her move away from melancholy to “deeply embodied pleasures” can too easily

imply there is not pleasure in melancholy and vise/versa. Bisexual epistemology as offers an intervention into the lust/loss dichotomies of queer affect by offering an “also/and” approach for examining the pleasurable and painful elements of pastness.

Towards a Phenomenology of the Fence

Various critics of the poststructural turn, including some bisexuality theorists, 18 argue that its theoretical application implies an overarching rejection of identity categories and, as such, acts as a convenient philosophical justification for diverting attention from structural, and epistemological, inequalities that continue to exist along identity lines. Rather than reject the intellectual utility of deconstruction as some suggest, in Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others Ahmed attempts to locate the core of what queer theory is accused of leaving out: “[i]t does not explain how orientations can feel ‘as if they come from inside and move us toward objects and others” (80). She does not cast this feeling aside as an outdated plea for authenticity but rather seeks to find a way of describing sexuality as both impacted by external forces and

internally experienced “as if’ it is a force derived from within. To explore this process,

she meditates on how sexuality is experienced spatially, and how this both limits and

extends the possibilities of desire, access, and identification. Drawing from the

phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed considers how orientation is

oriented.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty questions the visible/invisible divide insofar as it relies

on perception as a totalizing framework by detailing how vision relates to consciousness,

physicality and space when he states that, “[t]his initial paradox cannot but produce

others. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them” (354).

The quest for representation may be rooted in this very paradox. The way one’s body is

experienced from inside and outside may also translate into representational demands or

desires. The initial paradoxical relationship, of at once possessing vision and being

visible, to others and oneself, also structures the relationship of interiority and exteriority. 19 Merleau-Ponty explains that, “to understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body - not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement” (353). Merleau-Ponty lays out a framework of perception that relies on an interdependent relationship between the perceiver and perceived, both characterized by different predilections towards excess and lack. The perceiver always lacks the ability to take in certain elements of the perceived; there is no way to have a complete and total vision of any object. This incomplete perception causes us to “fill in the blanks” a process reliant on dominant cultural scripts that allow us to see as we have seen before or according to what we already know. In much of his work Merleau-Ponty focuses on the potential for art to retrain the patterns of perception, in part by communicating in excess of what is representationally necessary.

Feminist phenomenology has suggested that the “body” imagined in phenomenology may be an implicitly male body, which impacts how space and visibility are theorized (Fisher 22). This work has made explicit how gender impacts this model of consciousness, that experiences itself as concurrently gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these categories. Orientation has generally been understood in dichotomous terms, falling along lines of hetero/homo that rely on a stable “sex” as a basis for attraction toward the same or different sex. Ahmed addresses the problematic of same sex desire’s reliance on sameness through a social constructionist lens: “The very idea of women desiring women because of sameness relies on the fantasy that women are the same” (96). She goes further to suggest “that the very distinction of same/difference can be questioned, especially insofar as the distinction rests on differences that are 20 presumed to be inherent to bodily form and to how bodies have already cohered” (97).

The lines of sameness/difference have been used to construct certain forms of lesbian desire as more “in line” with heteronormative models of attraction based on difference.

Ahmed thinks through this in relationship to the butch-femme dynamic that has, historically, been held as the most transgressive and assimilationist form of lesbian coupling: “This is not to critique butch-femme as an illegitimate form of erotic coupling

(though it might serve as a caution to avoid any idealization of one form of sexual contact over another), but to show how drawing “a dividing line,” can in its turn make other forms of sexual desire unlivable, even if that line does not follow a straight line” (99, emphasis in original). Although Ahmed is referring specifically to lesbian desire, the assertion that certain desires can be deemed unlivable even within deviant lines is useful in theorizing the location of bisexual desire in relation to “same” and “opposite” sex desire.

Here the social line is essential since, in some ways, bisexual desire can be understood as situated within competing social and familial lines. The rejection from lesbian and gay circles that bisexuals often recount can be seen as an enforcement of a certain social line (one that does not follow a straight line) that bisexuals can easily cross.

While the family line may make efforts to “straighten out” a bisexual member by only

“seeing straight,” other families may also feel confused or hurt if they have been accepting of a deviance, perhaps even went to the efforts of becoming “proud” or “happy for someone” only to have their good efforts spoiled by what they perceive as a “straight” partnership. Extending the affective implications of her queer phenomenology in The 21 Promise o f Happiness Ahmed “explores how we are directed by the promise of happiness, as the promise of happiness is what follows if we do this or that. The promise of happiness is what makes certain objects proximate, affecting how the world gathers around us” (14). As this passage implies, happiness offers a promise and a controlling force. Happiness figures “certain objects of desire as having unhappy consequences”

(91). Embedded assumptions linking monosexuality and happiness figure bisexual desire and the desiring of bisexuals as having unhappy consequences. The mandates of happiness offer a means to uncover the often unspoken expectations of “positive” representation.

The closet metaphor continues to structure popular discourse on the hetero/homo divide, while the spatial metaphors Ahmed uses of lines and deviations could offer a less dichotomous view of how sexual orientation is lived - there is never a decisive out or in and visibility is always susceptible to a straightening read. The “fence” adds a crucial dimensionality that elucidates the precariousness of bisexual identity and the critical framework of bisexual epistemology. Pramaggiore explains fence-sitting as:

an epithet predicated on the presumption of the superiority of a temporally based

single sexual partnership- is a practice that refuses the restrictive formulas that

define gender according to binary categories, that associate one gender or one

sexuality with a singularly gendered object choice, and that equate sexual

practices with sexual identity (3)

The identity of fence-sitter offers a particular situated knowledge and a practice of resistance to picking a side or, in Ahmed’s terms, falling in line. Rather than veering 22 away from Ahmed’s metaphor of lines it may be useful to ask how fences might follow, obscure, or segment lines? To better elaborate this hybrid of spatial metaphors it is useful to look at Ahmed’s description of tracing paper whereby straight alignments disappear through successful overlap and cohere into only one set of visible lines. “If all lines are traces of other lines, then this alignment depends on straightening devices, which keep things in line, in part by holding things in place. Lines disappear through such alignments, so when things come out of line with each other the effect is ‘wonky’ (66).

These wonky, queer or twisted lines remain susceptible to heteronormative corrections.

In fact, it is their visibility that makes them vulnerable.

The fence, as it adds a vertical element while taking a horizontal course will both come in and out of line with a straight path, at times disappearing from birds eye view, at other times casting certain objects as attainable while others are outside. Even as the fence is meant as a metaphor for indecision, it still implies a location from which certain objects are close and others far. A spatial mapping of bisexual orientation then, places the bisexual in and out of proximity with desired objects. Rather than rescue gay and lesbian desire from claims of contingency that undermine some supposed less contingent ideal - the gay and lesbian that always were gay or lesbian - Ahmed suggests the contingency of all sexual desire. Those who follow the straight path are just as reliant on what surrounds them as those who deviate.

Butler and later Ahmed consider Althusser's process of interpellation, how one answers a call as a process of becoming what that call commanded, as a way of situating sexual identity. In so far as all sexuality labels are performative words - those that both 23 describe and produce a thing - bisexual is both a being and a becoming (170). This

inquiry is animated by the rather unanswerable question: how is the bisexual hailed? Or rather is the bisexual ever (specifically) hailed? These questions lead me to look at how television functions, or could function, as a bisexual space, both representationally and through viewership. Theorizing a “bisexual look” as an aesthetic, a way seeing and a way of seeing oneself, relies on a certain investment in specificity while acknowledging the ambiguity, partiality and contingency, of such an effort.

Television Studies and the Experiential Self

The study of television is in a moment of flux. The object of study itself has always been more contested within the field than an outside view would assume.

Interdisciplinary since its inception, the field of Television Studies pulled from often competing humanities and social science disciplines such as Cinema, Cultural Studies,

Communications, Sociology and Psychology to name a few (Spigel 11). Recent changes in how media is produced, marketed and consumed, has presented Television Studies with the task of deciding what forms and formats of “content” fall under its view (Spigel

8; Turner and Tay 2). This thesis focuses on a rather classic example of television- a

serial drama with procedural elements on a major broadcast network- but even that genre

and format are going through a major transition as entire seasons are being released at

once in digital forms. The model of television as a weekly endeavor watched at once (at

least within timezones) no longer holds true, even for broadcast network shows.

Television Studies was formed around questions of what television watching did

to it’s viewers, particularly if/how and how much it’s content impacted the ideas and 24 behavior of children (Allen 4). Even early research shows at least two distinct approaches, one more optimistically oriented towards what television could do as an educational tool while the other asked what negative impacts it would have as it replaced other activities and even interactions (Allen; Spigel). When reception began to enter the picture, television consumption was understood as a much more active and complicated process than initial studies assumed. Raymond William’s concept of “planned flow” changed the field of television studies by looking at broadcast television “simultaneously as a technology and a cultural form” (86). He introduced a way to study what surrounds the text, and links it together in programming blocks, as essential to viewer’s experience.

William’s saw a trend in television studies deriving from how our “habitual vocabulary of response and description has been shaped by the experience of discrete events” (87), which translated into an analysis of television shows as standalone texts overlooking the context of the viewing experience as also defined by what is around it, including the commercial interruptions it enables. Nick Browne extended this to stress the central importance of commercials, particularly in the United States, to the networks that had to plan programing around them. While new technologies from DVR to online streaming sites have certainly changed what a flow analysis looks like from what it did in the 1970s, television viewing remains heavily impacted from outside the “discrete events” within the show. I was reminded of the continued relevance of Williams and Browne, as I re­ watched episodes of The Good Wife on hulu. I was struck by a moment when I looked up from my notes, confused to see a Chase Bank commercial while still hearing the voice of the lead actress in The Good Wife Julianna Margulies who is also Chase’s spokesperson. 25 The almost seamless transition between the show and the advertising, gave the commercial a kind of moral authority and continuity. In my viewing experience they were not discrete or entirely decipherable. Not only do current viewing practices often contain more conventional commercial pauses, as well as internal product placement, they are generally being watched on screens where other targeting advertising exists around them simultaneously as well as through delayed channels.

British Cultural Studies is cited as a major force in reshaping the theories and methods of the field as it moved away from what TV does to a passive impressionable audience and towards a understanding of television as a multi-faceted text and the audience as an agentic force. Durham offers the “experiential self—a ‘middle-range’ theorization that seeks to reconcile the conflicting and seemingly incompatible understandings of media and their audiences into a series of articulations that offers a space within which media, cultures, and subjectivity can be understood as dynamic and dialogic” (168). The middle he is referring to falls between media analyses that over­ emphasize the potential for resistant or oppositional media reads and those focused on media’s hegemonic control.

Queer media analysis, particularly queer of color critiques, have suggested similar modes of understanding representation and viewership that also challenge totalizing concepts of power. Jose Munoz names disidentification as a critical practice allowing for an understanding of how meanings can change and shift based on “cultures of circulation.” Disidentification, as a means of cultural consumption, problematizes dominant social scripts by either submitting to them (identification) nor breaking free of 26 them (counteridentification) but by working with them and through them (Munoz 11).

This practice allows for a means of subversion that does not remain wedded to either/or logics that ask for certain forms of representational inclusion in the mainstream.

Disidentification is concurrently a coping mechanism and a creative outlet that acknowledges the implausibility of popular culture ever being representative of the diversity of queer bodies while still daring to imagine a queer future. Considering queer subjects beyond those that fit neatly into the fixed categories of gay and lesbian, opens up a space for envisioning what a bisexual view could offer. Theories like disidentification and the experiential self suggest methods of working outside of, through and between discourse and reverse discourse. They reflect Hall’s insistence that there remain “cultural strategies that can make a difference” (24).

Non-Normative Bodies and Representation

Work on representation and non-normative bodies is instrumental in conceptualizing what a “bisexual look” could mean in film and television and understanding the attendant political stakes. Engaging bisexual epistemology with work on disabled and transgender representations in film and television reveals the tensions between postmodern idealization of flexibility and teleological narratives, and shows the uneven plausibility, and desirability of visibility as a political goal. I take up these works not to imply equivalence but to reveal some of the overlapping ways disabled and bisexual characters are framed as immoral while other bisexual and transgender characters are figured as deceptive and confused. Analyzing parallels runs the risk of presenting identities as discrete and singular, and in this case, adding to the way the 27 sexualities of trans and disabled people are often ignored, denied or used metaphorically to further express other identity traits or underlying psychological issues. In an effort to avoid repeating this epistemic violence, I remain attentive to the ways multiple compulsory logics intersect in framing representations of bodies and desires that fall outside of accepted structures of ability, gender, and sexual object choice. By centering bisexuality, as an epistemological and narrative framework as well as an embodied subjectivity, I hope to illuminate some of the structures of marginalization and control that govern and demarcate non-normative bodies, particularly those that are multiply transgressive.

Scholarship on disability and representation reveals the ableist assumptions of mainstream media, including the overemphasis on the visual elements of culture, and lends theoretical frameworks that suggest some of the ways bisexual characters function within media narratives. McRuer outlines how constructions of ablebodiedness rely on the separation of material (or scientific) vs. cultural to maintain a guise of neutrality that defines a normal subject as able-bodied (26). This dichotomy is both reified and complicated in media depictions, where physical disability is often used as a metaphor to suggest “some element of a person’s character” (Nordon, 5). Parallels can be drawn between these depictions and depictions of transgender and bisexual characters whose gender or sexual orientation often function to illustrate a character trait, generally deceitfulness and occasionally confusion (San Fillippo). As homosexuality is increasingly depicted as an immutable trait that does not inherently predict a tragic end, it is more often situated as one character trait, albeit an overly determining one. 28 Alison Kafer offers an important dimension to MeRuer’s notion of compulsory able-bodiedness by illustrating how the focus on bodies to show disability creates a hierarchy, largely based on visible traits, among disabled people based on their ability or inability to “pass.” For those “whose disabilities allow them to pass as nondisabled, the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness throws suspicion on their desire to identify as disabled-under a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, why identify if you can pass?”

(80). While McRuer and Kafer draw parallels between the way compulsory ablebodiedness positions people with disabilities and how the framework of compulsory heterosexuality positions homosexuals, the particular tensions around passing may most accurately parallel the supposedly privileged placement of bisexuals in the hierarchy of sexual identity. Bisexuals, like people with less overtly apparent disabilities, are accused of wrongfully claiming a minority identity/group affiliation and expected to inevitably choose to pass when they “can.” The expectation of passing comes to the forefront when claims to rights are increasingly predicated on the notion that no one would “choose” to be outside of the norm. In this process, claims for equality ironically re-inscribe the superiority of the unmarked subjects and uphold dominant cultural beliefs that disabled and LGB individuals should and will always aspire to be able-bodied or heterosexual.

McRuer illustrates the ways that ableness and compulsory heterosexuality are co- constitutive and work together to maintain social hierarchies while the media is conditionally including more “diversity.” The heightened visibility of minoritized identities is made possible within an increasingly “flexible” model that offers symbolic inclusion as stand in for social change. According to McRuer, homosexual and disabled 29 characters have joined the “magical negro” as a stock character type that serves to aid the white heterosexual lead by teaching them a lesson that enables the culminating

“epiphany” of white romantic heterosexual love (28). By not spoiling this culminating plot, positive representations can replace antagonists. All of these stock characterizations, and the culminating plots they enable, rely on the compulsory framework of monosexuality (James). Current depictions of the gay or lesbian friend function within a monosexual framework where they cannot be romantic competition while disabled characters worthiness and narrative import is often predicated on their willingness to sacrifice themselves to promote heterosexual romantic love, even as they are often set outside that equation themselves (Nordon 316). Rather than act as an aid, helper or wise character, bisexual supporting characters are often situated as a plot complication, albeit a necessary one, to the romantic epiphany. The sexual and gender identities of bisexual and transgender characters often function as a shocking reveal, one that causes various twists and turns and generally begs further explanation in terms of backstory.

Though often left out of queer theory and political organizing, when bisexual and transgender subjectivities are addressed they are sometimes positioned as the queerest of the queer, by virtue of disrupting binaries and representing what Halberstam calls the “the postmodern fantasy of flexibility” (77). At the same time, both have also been accused of not being queer enough by supposedly upholding normative ideas of gender. In envisioning a “transgender look” Halberstam describes how “transgenderism also represents a form of rigidity, an insistence on particular forms of recognition, that 30 reminds us of the limits of what Emily Martin has called ‘flexible bodies’” (77).

Likewise, the insistence that bisexuality (continue to or begin to) be named and attended to within queer theory and in political organizing intimates a certain fixidity even among the fluid (Hemmings). Rather than accept that all cinema is potentially bi or trans by means of offering visual pleasures or perspectives that cross gendered lines, work on bisexual and trans cinema suggests there are particular visual and narrative frameworks that deserve further elaboration. Halberstam shows how films can offer a “transgender look” that brings the audience into a transgender perspective rather than simply putting transgender bodies on display. Halberstam explains transgender film as “constituted as a paradox made up of equal parts of visibility and temporality: whenever the transgender character is seen to be transgendered, then he/she is both failing to pass and threatening to expose a rupture between the distinct temporal registers of past, present, and future” (77).

I will illustrate how the paradox of bisexual narratives is also constituted through visibility and temporality, although perhaps not in “equal parts.” The format of media offers varied potentials for depicting sexuality that may not subscribe to progressive models that offer a singular romantic love as a resolution on multiple fronts.

Only recently has a critical body of work begun to address the specificities of bisexual representation in film and television. Most notably, Maria San Fillippo’s The B

Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television employs bisexual epistemological critiques alongside cinematic reading methods offering a framework for

analyzing film and television that reveals common tropes that consolidate bisexual

identity and examples of more open-ended possibilities. Paying attention to the role that format plays in facilitating bisexual narratives, she further complicates claims of bi­ invisibility by paying attention to the proliferation of representations of bisexuality, even as they are often unnamed, denied and repudiated (4). San Filippo is interested in what is shown but remains unsaid, bisexual acts or desires devoid of identification. She gauges bisexual representability depending on if a film keeps the possibility of bisexuality open

(if rarely named) rather than relegating non-monosexual characters to fixed positions in a gay/straight binary. She disrupts assumptions that European (and some U.S) arthouse cinema offers a purely liberatory space for sexual fluidity as set against mainstream film and television as only exploitative and repressive.

Following San Fillipo, I suggest that there are elements of serial dramas that may facilitate a “bisexual look.” The serialized format “encourages and even necessitates mixed meanings, in that writers leave open possible avenues for plot development while courting an ideologically diverse viewership” (San Fillipo). Like many episodic serial dramas, The Good Wife uses the mixed procedural and serial format to create an interplay between the personal lives of the central characters and the issues presented in the cases.

As Emily Nussbaum recently noted in an essay in The New Yorker about The Good Wife,

“unlike most art forms, a network TV series is always under construction.” The ability to maintain an endless, open-ended, “choose your own adventure” format is impacted not just by ratings and commercial integrations but also by the happenings in the lives of the celebrities who make up its cast, and more recently the ways that fans voice their individual and collective opinions that go well beyond ratings. Nussbaum concludes that each episode of a serial drama on network television is “the rough draft that doubles as 32 the published product.” The serial drama is an ideal format through which to illustrate

Hemmings assertion that sexual subjectivity is also, always, under construction (22).

When bisexuality has attempted to present as an equivalent to a “published product” within the frameworks of identity politics, it always falls short of meeting the proper inclusionary criteria even as that criteria has changed.

If it ever was truly absent, bisexuality is certainly no longer left out of discourse on sexual identity. Foucault’s observation of the homosexual congealing as species can only be historically understood in relation to racialized others whose species status was still being closely scrutinized by the sciences at the time this process took place (Stoler

16). Bisexuality’s debatable place outside the discourse of homo/hetero actually makes it a useful site to investigate the racialization of sexuality. Historically, bisexuality was understood in as a delayed developmental or “primitive” stage, relying on the same taxonomies used to create racial hierarchies (Storr 81). Presently, the particular characterization of black men who fall outside of a monosexual pattern as “on the down low” is an apt example of the ways sexuality is always already racialized and vice versa

(Health and Goggin 2009). While some activists and scholars claimed this term as a rejection of normative white gay male models of sexual identification, it has generally been mobilized to promote negative images of non-monosexual black men as secretive, manipulative and presenting health risks to the straight community. Richard Pitt, Jr. found that representation has reflected and promoted this pathologization, by offering sympathetic images of “Brokeback” white bisexuals versus manipulative and dangerous black men (255). Overly simplistic claims of bi-invisibility threaten to overlook the 33 racially mediated ways bisexuality already circulates. Representations of bisexuality point to the conflicting ways it is imagined as a hyper-modern or postmodern identity available to privileged westerners, particularly affluent white bohemian women, and as an identity, or set of practices, held by people of color whose restrictive cultures force them to maintain a guise of heterosexuality. The slippage between self-definition and sexual practice is heavily racialized and relies on monosexual and colonial assumptions that share deterministic ideas about culture and agency. Centering bisexuality as an epistemological and narrative framework, as well as an embodied subjectivity, illuminates some of the structures of marginalization and control that govern and demarcate other non-normative bodies and those that exist at the intersections.

A more thorough spoiling of The Good Wife

The Good Wife is a prime time television serial drama that premiered in 2009 on the most watched American broadcast network, CBS. It was created by wife and husband duo, Michelle and Robert King, and produced by Ridley Scott (CBS.com). It has been noted by critics that the show has gone increasingly toward its more serialized elements, allowing many ongoing plots to build over time (Hale). Because it remains a courtroom and legal drama it maintains some of its standalone procedural elements with court cases allowing for a within episode conclusion. This shift may be explained, in part, by the recent resurgence of serial dramas on cable and non-traditional streaming networks. It also stands in marked contrast to CBS’s general success with more purely procedural shows particularly NCIS and its geographically specific spin offs that all regularly make the top 10 list on Neilson (Neilson.com). The Good Wife has been a critical darling 34 winning numerous Emmys, while also boasting a loyal internet following among critics associated with specific fan communities. The show has garnered particular praise for its use of technology and recent news stories to explore the intersection of politics, new media, and the law.

The Good Wife follows attomey-turned-housewife, Alicia Florrick, as she returns to the legal profession after her husband, former Chicago State’s Attorney Peter Florrick, is imprisoned on charges of corruption, including spending state funds to pay for prostitutes. Though she has been out of work for over a decade as a stay-at-home-mom, she is able to get a position at one of the more successful Chicago firms, Stern, Lockhart

& Gardner (subsequently just Lockhart/Gardner). We later find out that she dealt with many rejections and overt discrimination before gaining this position through a personal connection with named partner Will Gardner, who also happens to be a former boyfriend.

A central tension in The Good Wife revolves around Alicia’s inability to be happy as a result of her romantic choices, as she swings back and forth between being the “good wife” who “stands by her (cheating) man” and the mistress having an affair with Will, her boss. The irony of the show’s title is evidenced by Alicia’s family openly mocking or questioning her decision to stay with her husband. The plot arc follows Alicia’s rise from a dejected wife to one of the most successful and powerful attorneys in Chicago and finally has her running for State’s Attorney after her husband moves on to other political ambitions. Throughout the show, the audience follows the political corruption and the bending of legal rules while Alicia stays (mostly) pristine, or at least compellingly fraught. The characters I track are less pristine and certainly less fraught. Perhaps they are 35 just more realistic about the moral world of Chicago’s legal and political machinery. By

centering them even when the show’s narrative structures does not, I offer some alternate

readings that go beyond what the intentionally polysemous show offers. For the sake of

context, it is important to give some background on how they relate to the show’s central

dynamics.

Kalinda Sharma (Archie Punjabi) is the law firm's primary investigator, although

she does not work under an exclusive contract and is often tasked with assisting the firm's

lawyers in personal matters as well. Kalinda deals in secrets, keeping and exposing them,

and holding onto her own. Kalinda’s sexual, racial, ethnic and national background is one

of the shows slowly unfolding mysteries enabled by the serialized format. She is

presumed to be Indian, although there are some hints that she might be of Arab descent,

and it is not clear whether she is from the United States originally as she implies, or

actually from Britain or Canada remain contested. In many ways, Kalinda typifies “the

postmodern fantasy of flexibility” as well as its limits. The mystery of Kalinda’s origins

or erotic interactions would not be such an obviously important one if she read as White

and straight. In the first season, Kalinda becomes Alicia’s confidant at the firm, easing

her transition back to work by providing an insider's view. Kalinda is framed as Alicia’s

opposite,

She acts in a secondary helper position often available to minority characters.

Eventually, she even begins measuredly sharing personal information with Alicia. As

Kalinda’s past starts to be revealed by other sources, it comes to light that she slept with

Alicia’s husband when she worked for him under a different name several years prior. 36 Alicia is devastated that her “husband and best friend” slept together, even though she and Kalinda were strangers at the time. Their relationship is never repaired, which also means Kalinda’s role in the show changes dramatically. While she had some promise as an ethnic lesbian best friend, her promiscuity with people of varied genders eventually pushes her out of the running for two reasons. First, any homosocial bonding she engages in can be read as actually romantic in nature. Also, since she sleeps with men she always carries the threat of infidelity with someone’s husband.

Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) enters the show at the tense moment of Peter Florrick’s return home. His entry point highlights a driving characteristic of Eli’s persona- he has direct goals and tries to appear pragmatically indifferent to circumstance. For Alicia he is a meddlesome PR manager tasked with giving Peter Florrick a compelling spin on his extramarital indiscretions after Peter’s criminal charges are dropped. He and Alicia share a jovially antagonistic relationship that turns into some kind of strategic partnership after it is Eli who eventually saves the day and lands Alicia the coveted junior partner position.

Eli’s entrances are often fittingly grand and neurotic, for instance in several episodes, he magically appears horizontal on the couch in Alicia’s office. He wears impeccably tailored suits, sports a very metropolitan faux-hawk, and appears to live for his work.

This translates into him pouring all of his energy into preserving the happiness, or at least the presentation of happiness, of the Florricks and their children. As previously recounted, representational minority tropes generally serve the culminating heterosexual plots, but not necessarily this literally. Eli tirelessly fights for the Florricks to stay 37 together. Eli’s personal life, or the regularly referenced lack thereof, is slowly revealed throughout the seasons which also explore his conditionally Jewish identifications.

As a point of entry to bisexual representation in the The Good Wife, I initially looked to the show's most explicit exploration in the character of Kalinda, who is regularly depicted in sexual/intimate exchanges with men and women, often within a single episode. I paid special attention to the plot structures of episodes where she was featured, or where I believed her absence had a marked import. But, as I continued to watch my focus was pulled to Eli. As Peter Florrick’s campaign manager Eli has a hands- on role in keeping the Florricks together, and packaging the heterosexual dream for political gain. His own straightness is never overtly questioned but his floppy faux-hawk, his perpetually raised eyebrows, his eclectic romantic interests, as well as his intense loyalty to the Florricks, make Eli’s sexuality aesthetically and emotionally confounding.

Also, actor Alan Cumming’s insistently bisexual identification outside of the show, I argue, is referenced by the show and points to the extratextual elements of celebrity that impact viewerships.

By looking at both Kalinda, a female character who explicitly has sexual encounters with men and women, and Eli, a male character played by an out bisexual star, who is constantly “queered” by the show despite never deviating from female objects of desire, allows for a discussion of how gender mediates what kinds of lives and desires are rendered possible by mainstream representational frameworks. Initially I resisted looking at both of these characters, for fear that such an analytical choice could be collapsed into a stereotype of bisexuality always relying on a simultaneous 38 engagement with dichotomous gender. And if, as both a phenomenological and feminist methodology would insist, I will be present, embodied and self-reflexive as a researcher,

I feared what it could look like for me to be engaging in this sort of intellectual three- way. However, my focus on these two characters is not based on an effort for balance or even juxtaposition but rather to underscore that the ways bisexuality works to define heterosexuality and homosexuality is reliant on assumptions of dichotomous gender the ways that visibility and representability are mediated by hierarchized notions of gender difference. I read these characters as exemplifying, falling short of and acting in excess of common representational tropes depending on what surrounds them. Looking at representation through a phenomenological lens points to the ways that non-monosexual characters become the location where excessive forms of desire (those that are not properly aligned with romantic love, monogamy, positive regard, aesthetic attraction, and the future) are articulated.

I began binge watching The Good Wife as a mode of decompressing from graduate school and life’s other competing demands. Instead of a much needed distraction it became a place where I obsessively engaged my intellectual preoccupations with phenomenology, bisexual epistemology and representational politics. Reading the show as a text that rubbed up against, contradicted, upheld and undid much of what I was reading made it a terrible way to unwind; quickly my relationship with the show became complicated, some elements of it were spoiled. Just as my undergraduate courses in feminist film theory made it impossible to watch films without a certain killjoy edge and hyper-awareness of the male gaze, now my most coveted television hour was marred, 39 maybe even spoiled, by queer and phenomenological readings. Instead of fighting this, I conceded my defeat and embraced this serial legal drama as a means to ground my research.

The WGS department exposed me to theoretical works that encouraged me to entirely rethink agency, subjectivity, and temporality while expanding my views of what could be generative objects of study in ways I could not have imagined within Sociology.

Two classes stand out in my intellectual genealogy at SF State. Queer Theories pushed me to examine the relationship between political economy, culture and affect and it was the first time I started to take up phenomenology as a framework to explore bisexual identity. Gender and Popular Music promoted critical analysis pop-cultural texts that, instead of simply spoiling them, left space for a multiplicity of reads and relations to text, celebrity, and aesthetics.

Motivated by these influences my interest in the show became both formalist and

substantive, since I am curious about what the show has to say in relationship to other

cultural dialogues and what the serialized structure offers that may be in excess of what is

expressed. As a legal and political drama that often takes on issues about legally and

politically representing identity it offers an open-ended and contradictory text through

which to consider how bisexuality’s (un)representability can be evidenced in pop-cultural

spaces. My first viewing of each episode typically occurred when I was reading a

particular text, or a cluster of texts, and my reading of certain episodes may be

particularly beholden to those texts. Though I rewatched all the episodes I pull from after

reading the bulk of the work I reference, my initial viewings were certainly impacted by 40 the specific texts I was reading at the time. On the first watch, I jotted down notes that included anything from quotes to plot points to visual elements that related to bisexual/non-monosexual representation. I was particularly attentive to moments where the show offers itself, intentionally or not, to multiple reads. I read the show as exceeding the hetero/homo divide both through its content - what it has to say about identity - and layered format, which does not always serve a dominant or singular view. I attempted to then track these observations, sometimes backwards depending on when I noticed them first. By applying multiple reading methodologies including phenomenological, bi- textual, and extratextual, I found the show rife with examples that evidenced desire’s lack of reducibility to frameworks of sameness/difference.

In the next two chapters, I follow Kalinda and Eli along the fence, paying close attention to the ways their paths align with, and fall outside of, fixed notions of identity.

In Chapter 2. “Triangulations: Genre, Queerbaiting, and Bi-temporality” I look at how desires take shape and the shapes desires take. I first outline the temporal, emotional and political possibilities and limitations of genre, and how it shapes characters. Highlighting how the politics of representation and visibility are impacted by how fan communities consume and critique media that is beyond ratings, I ask what concepts like queerbaiting

say about the demands of positive visible representation, and whose visibility they will allow. Following phenomenological, queer of color, and bi-epistemological methods in

my reading of pop-cultural texts resists notions of media consumption as either passive or resistant, and the media as either reflective or effective of social realities. Through an

application of Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, and other scholarship on affect, 41 temporality, and bisexual epistemology, I look at how triangulation functions in The

Good Wife not only to make non-normative sexuality visible but to highlight the contingencies of desire at large. By paying attention to how gender and temporality structures what is placed in focus, versus what is in excess, I highlight the limits of bisexual representability, and what not being “presentable” may also bring to the table.

Building on the previous chapter, “Irreducible Desires and Identities: The Legal

System as a Bisexual Space in The Good Wife. ” delves more specifically into what

structures the positive in positive representation by asking what happiness demands. I

employ San Fillipo’s bi-textual reading as a methodology that reveals how the double

plot structure talks about and around (bi)sexuality. The Good Wife offers

professional/employment status and racial/ethnic identity as metaphors for sexual identity

that work to uphold and undermine dominant discourses on identity politics, racial

diversity and citizenship in contemporary U.S. society. By situating the courtroom as a

bisexual space where different identificatory labels come in and out of utility, I suggest

that the difference between opportunistic and authentic is conditional and mediated by

various forms of privilege. Lastly, “Programming The Bisexual Look” connects back to

my own work within cultural production and representation, I reflect on the LGBT film

festival as an embodied space and a space that embodies identity politics. As a curator for

Frameline:The San Francisco LGBTQ’s Film Festival’s Bisexual Shorts Program, I

attempt to create an experience that can satisfy some of the literal expectations of

visibility while concurrently pushing back on then. 42

Triangulations: Genre, Queerbaiting and Bi-Temporality

“I don't know. Alicia, complicated relationships are a breeding ground for

misinterpreted action.” -Kalinda Sharma (“Bang”)

The Good Wife opens in a familiar crisis. When we meet the show’s lead, Alicia

Florrick (Juliana Margulies), she is at a press conference where she stands stoically by her husband, Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), a former state's attorney in Cook’s County

(Chicago) about to begin a prison term. In addition to charges of corruption, he has been publicly implicated in a sex scandal complete with widely distributed footage of him engaging with prostitutes. The Florricks’ personal life becomes a regularly debated public topic of conversation, material for memes, and plotlines for porn parodies. The Clintons are a specter hanging in the background, serving as historical reminder of a time when

shocking stories may have been a bit more jarring, before technology had offered both

new avenues of intimacy and new means of access and distribution of intimate acts. After

a decade and a half hiatus from practicing law, Alicia returns to work as a Junior litigator

at Stem, Lockhart & Gardner in order to support her two teenage children and herself. By

sustaining a level of crisis, the show illustrates Lauren Berlant’s observations that the

trauma paradigm becomes less explanatory once crisis itself becomes ordinary (11).

Rather than offer a shocking disruption to a stable norm, The Good Wife begins in the

midst of an ongoing crisis. As a serial drama, The Good Wife is a multi-valent text that 43 both works to stabilize and unsettle sexual norms, linear models of relationships, and expectations of genre.

Although the heterosexual love triangle between Alicia, her husband Peter and her boss and former college flame Will Gardner (Josh Charles) make up its central ongoing romantic tension, The Good Wife has been referred to as “the gayest show on television”

(Moylen). The show not only features several non-heterosexual core and supporting characters, it offers a multi-dimensional pandering to a queer viewership some of which may be largely missed by other audiences. By including explicit same-sex interactions, relationships with strong homosocial bonds, and introducing a constant array of secondary and recurring stars who are queer or queer icons, the show welcomes a queer viewership through multiple means. Queerbaiting is a term generally used to refer to the ways media employs gay or lesbian subtext to hook queer viewers while never following through on, and often overtly dismissing, any homoerotic relationships. Popular gay media website Autostraddle contributor Rose defines queerbaiting as “when they give us just enough to keep us interested, but not enough to satisfy us and make us truly represented” (“How do you solve a problem like queerbaiting?”). Rose goes on to complicate the relegation of all same-sex subtext to the blanket of “queerbaiting” in part because its key narrative functions across all representations, and its “progressive history” functions as a means to communicate to a LGBT audience when decency codes, and society at large, would not allow. Rose suggests that shows that play on queer romantic potential while using it as an impossible punchline may warrant ire, but she cautions against grouping all subtext under this term. Most versions of queerbaiting, 44 however, offer a less nuanced critique. They have resulted in fan communities demanding, through petitions, social media campaigns and other forums that shows make explicit their underlying same-sex tensions or risk losing their queer viewership. These forms of protest, and the kinds of representation they demand, generally subscribe to a model of consumer citizenship that has steered the mainstream LGBT movement to focus almost exclusively on institutional recognition as its main axis of political intervention.

Concepts like queerbaiting highlight how visibility has been fashioned as a progressive measure of social integration and political success that is expected to both reflect and enable positive social change on a linear course. By requiring action on the part of the show’s writers, producers etc., these demands unintentionally imply a passivity on the part of the viewer. Even as they ask for change, they accept a one-way relationship between media and consumer at the point of consumption. In doing so, they can easily align with overly deterministic views of how media functions that deny what the act of perception offers. They underestimate the pleasure of reading subtext and what an exploration of excess can offer.

I follow two characters, Kalinda Sharma and Eli Gold, who simultaneously expose, fall short of, and exceed the demands of visible representation. Kalinda is one of the most explicitly bisexual characters to ever maintain a core role on primetime television. However, she is far from “out and proud.” Eli’s queemess, on the other hand, is coded, but not very carefully. Within the show his character is reminiscent of the way queer side-kicks functioned as comedic relief and romantic enablers in the golden age of cinema. Eli plays in a different affective register than the rest of the core cast, he brings a 45 melodramatic flare that exceeds the confines of the genre while serving to define heterosexuality as the central norm. His presence in a modern drama calls into question the progress narrative that suggests certain characters will necessarily disappear to make room for properly modern queer subjects. In rethinking the monosexual structure of the celluloid closet, bisexual characters may not simply be “time-warped,” but their representations may reflect the lack of access bisexuals have to the current trappings of

“happy queerdom” (Love 22) while also showing their restrictive nature.

In mainstream media, in order to show that characters are “really” and in real-time bisexual, visual representations of bisexual characters remain wedded to certain tropes

(threesomes, affairs, stalking impersonators). This places a temporal demand on characters to engage with or overtly desire partners reflecting gender differences concurrently; otherwise the character can be read as going in a potentially endless loop from gay to straight and back again. A mapping of how television functions, or could function, as a bisexual space, relies on attentiveness to behavioral, relational and temporal lines and how those lines take shape. One of the ways bisexuality is commonly rendered visible in representation is in the form of love triangles. This form offers the simultaneity of actions/desires that can unambiguously mark a character as desiring two

(usually, different) objects at once.

The love triangle also has an essential place in the coming out narrative structure where leaving behind a heterosexual partner is a necessary step in translating one’s internal desires into visible action. Because the coming out narrative, particularly in film, has an endpoint, and it obscures the way every subsequent encounter potentially “erects 46 new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure” (Sedgwick 68) since one is never “out” to everyone. In Ahmed’s terms, queer desires and bodies are always susceptible to “straightening reads” since social and familial lines maintain heterosexuality as the place of origin. I consider monosexuality as one form of a straightening read, since it acts as a default view and imposes a repetitive and repeatable binary order on acts and desires that may exceed its confines. The love triangle has classically functioned to uphold heterosexual monogamous desire as the rightful conclusion after a complication is resolved (Garber). In The Good Wife triangulation functions to not only make non-normative sexuality visible but also to highlight the contingencies of desire at large. The ways gender and genre structure what is placed in focus, versus what is in excess, illustrate how bisexuality pushes the bounds of representability.

Genre, Excess and Gratuity

Genre is an elusive and elastic term. Genre stretches and yields in order to encompass changing styles, tastes and formats while still maintaining, or returning to, a legible and commodifiable form. Genre has certain features and limitations. Genre also provokes feelings, and the kinds of feelings it provokes are part of what defines it and its audience. Television genres are as much defined by format and structure as they are by emotional register. Part of the “social contract” between viewers and creators of media hinges on the kinds of emotional expectations that define the genre. Serial dramas, as opposed to melodramas, are expected to be emotionally engaging while avoiding 47 gratuity. Serial dramas offer a particular combination of episodic containment and overarching, ongoing narratives that can stretch out and develop overtime. Many serial dramas are organized around the introduction of a new case (criminal, medical, supernatural, investigative, etc) that is often solved/resolved within an episode. This dual, or more often multi-layered, structure also allows for a certain degree of emotional containment, since different plots and sub-plots can exist in varied affective registers.

A closer look at what defines some visuals, objects, or scenes as “excessive” or

“gratuitous” shows how genre and gender mediate these designations and highlights a lack of stability in these categories. Often used interchangeably or in tandem, gratuity deserves some further explanation. Excess is more than can be contained, while gratuity is, by definition, “uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted.” When media is accused of containing gratuitous elements it often connotes that they do not serve the plot, or character development; they lack a narrative justification. The sweeps week teaser, popularized by Ally Mcbeal, where “straight” women kiss which is later revealed to serve no narrative function (they were in a dream sequence, or dare, an alternate reality), is an oft cited example of gratuity. The designation of sex scenes as gratuitous, even as they are an essential selling point, evidences the ongoing relevance of Foucault's observation about the way sexuality is concurrently denied and proliferated through discourse. Linda Williams suggests the value of considering “the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses” in what she terms the “body genres:” pornography, melodrama, and horror. In doing so she offers a rethinking of gratuitous,

“for if as it seems sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational 48 effects of these three types of films’, the designation gratuitous is itself gratuitous” (7).

The line between drama and melodrama and high/low becomes harder and harder to articulate if “what may especially mark (body) genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female”(8). Williams suggests that ideas of gratuity are inherently gendered, and also that bodily engagement is part of what defines “low” culture. A phenomenological understanding of perception as an inter-subjective act suggests that all viewing engages bodies, which may serve to blur some of the lines between high/low culture, active/passive viewership and different genres.

Serial television, versus narrative film or purely episodic television, depicts a span of time that potentially eases some of these restraints as characters have seasons to develop. At the same time, even in serials the episode remains a standalone object where, depending on genre, characters are expected to remain somewhat consistent. Part of why bisexuality, as an epistemological frame and a standpoint of insistent subjectivities, may remain such a threat to hetero and homonormative constructions of time, relationship structures, and politics is because of the refusal to place sexuality on a progressive timeline with a distinct happy endpoint that, at the very least, promises futurity. Paying attention to characters that do not find or seek out their proper mates suggests there may be some holes in representational progress narratives. Rather than read characters as stuck in the past, I read them as examples of how the past sticks around and disrupts some promises of the present. 49 Triangles and Temporality

Love triangles and other relational geometric shapes make up the central dramatic structure of The Good Wife. While the initial triangles find their base in the heterosexual marital line between Alicia and Peter Florrick, whose other interests often follow along romantic/sexual lines, the show employs the tension of triangulation through multiple relational frameworks. Alicia Florrick remains tortured and fraught no matter what man she chooses, because the choice itself connotes a failing. She should only be able to truly love one man at a time. Triangles are a pervasive structure in the show that disrupts the most exploited narrative utility of bisexual characters- their ability to cultivate varied forms of romantic and erotic combinations, rivalries, and surprises. What is unique about the show’s representation of bisexuality is that Kalinda’s consistent placement in love triangles is not what not sets her apart. Rather, it is her lack of investment in resolving them that sets her apart. However, the way that Kalinda’s love triangles are always constructed by a man and a women fits in with tropes of the insatiable bisexual whose desire specifically cannot be satisfied by one sex. Although, as San Fillippo notes, the format of the serial drama holds the possibility to depict more nuanced desires that develop over time, the individual episode, more often than not, still also acts as a standalone unit which limits what happens within a character’s arc. Kalinda’s bisexuality is rendered visible only when her desire for men and women can be encompassed within one episode.

This pattern assumes, perhaps rightfully, that a viewer can not retain (or tolerate) a character as a changing entity across time. It is also based on the necessity to always 50 court new viewers. The episode structure highlights the temporal demands of visibility and legibility, even as serialized time offers the ability for different temporal dimensions.

Kalinda’s seeming disinterest in resolving her love triangles by ever making a choice or even engaging in the process of decision-making offers a departure from the other depictions of love triangles. Kalinda’s fence-sitting is a refusal, not necessarily of binary gender categories, but “of the superiority of a temporally based single sexual partnership”

(Di-Pramaggiore 16). Eli’s fence-sitting is evidenced in his prioritization of his placement in intimate working relationships, and the temporally and emotionally inappropriate love interests he engages with on the side.

The love triangle is often used as shorthand to render bisexuality visible through the simultaneity of desire. Triangles offer other temporal dimensions that may fit less neatly into narrative structures and binary taxonomies. Theorizations of queer time do not place past, present and future as falling along a progressive line. If these time frames can be isolated at all, perhaps they may take a more triangular shape. Imagining past, present and future as all having points of contact unsettles the categories themselves. Part of what makes bisexuality so vexing to representational models and monosexual understandings of authentic sexuality is how, in practice as a self-identifying term, it often relies on the past or future to define a present and/or future sexuality. To imply that the past weighs in on current relationships, that it may actually be present, does not fit well with true love’s power to nullify everything that came before as it is imagined in romance genres. The future, likewise, may hang over the present not always as a promise but also as a threat. 51 Freeman’s concept of temporal drag offers a way to think about how some of the encounters, even erotics, that arise from the past rub up against the present.

The Good Wife swiftly historicizes the present by recycling current news stories into weekly cases while never being free of the past. Throughout the seasons, ghosts of mainstream feminism’s past and present literally and figuratively appear. A glowing

Gloria Steinem tells Alicia Florrick to run for office while the ever present conjurings of

Hillary Clinton appear in photographs, biographies, and through certain pant suits. The

Clinton Era and the Clinton scandal are essential elements to the show’s staging of the present moment. Genre may be haunting as well. As part of a lineage of female lead courtroom dramas acting as exemplars of a moment’s feminism, or lack thereof, the

1990s cast a shadow of wispy Ally McBeals in the courtroom halls. The short skirt remains an essential part of the female professional’s arsenal, but it is only taken out by attorneys at strategic moments when it can actually, strategically be employed to win a case. The miniskirt is revamped to serve Kalinda Sharma’s active seduction of Chicago’s seemingly endless pool of high powered lesbian officials and her more ambivalent seduction of everyone else she comes across. Kalinda’s all-weather uniform of dark tight- fitting leather adorned with suggestive zippers straddles the line of current couture, timeless superhero and outdated 90’s badass. She manages to be distractingly sexy and almost entirely covered, which means that the only way the other characters, or viewers, get to see more is when Kalinda is erotically engaged. An attentiveness to aesthetics reveals one of the ways past/present erotics surface disrupting notions of linear time and positive visibility as a corrective to a restrictive past. Instead of shedding the ghosts of the 52 past, Freeman suggests that the present remains haunted by it, in a way that might be particularly queer. These moments “reanimate cultural corpses” (72) and exert a drag on the present that reveals the failed projects (certain forms of feminism and LGBT rights) that came before.

Welcome Back To Normal: Meetings of normative and non-normative desires

Alicia Florrick’s transition from stay-at-home mom back to attorney is complicated by the introduction of a rival for the position of junior associate- recent graduate, Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry). Cary is the epitome of what is privileged in and outside the legal profession. A young, white, ivy league educated, unattached, cisgender, heterosexual, he brings a boundless, grating, golden retriever enthusiasm to both his work and his seemingly unrealistic courtship of Kalinda. His shock that Kalinda appears immune to his boyish charms leads him to uncover her past relationships with women; the only plausible explanation for her rejection of him is categorical. As he threatens to

“out” Kalinda, his desire for her, now conflated with competition and jealousy, grows.

The relationship between Cary and Kalinda is an ideal site to explore how the love triangle can act as a critical methodology for revealing the interplay between normative and non-normative desires (Garber), and how those categories become harder to decipher when all desire is understood as impacted by surroundings.

When Cary pursues a workplace romance with Dana Lodge (Monica Raymund), he is convinced that she will be seduced by Kalinda as the two women attempt to use each other to get information on shared cases. Cary is not wrong to identify the erotic potential of informational exchange as an essential element in Kalinda’s patterns of 53 seductions (this will be discussed at length in the following chapter). When Dana is insistent that she is not attracted to women, Cary ignores her self-identifications stating,

“I know a lot of people who weren't anything until they met Kalinda” (“Affairs of

State”). This is perhaps the most overt exposition the writers allow to explain Kalinda’s mythical power over others. This statement sticks out for a number of reasons. It speaks to the necessity of bisexual characters in the construction of other sexual subjectivities, to the unmarked privilege heterosexuality still maintains, and to the continued cultural amnesia around any terms that can name non-monosexual desires. Who were these people before they became “anything” What are they during their meeting of Kalinda and what does this make them after? Cary’s declaration points to the alternative temporalities revealed at the meeting points of different sexual subjectivities. What is clear is that

Cary’s grasp of his own sexuality as normative is challenged through his embodied, embodying and imagined encounters with Kalinda.

The triangle between Kalinda, Cary and Dana is not easily reducible along lines of jealousy, professional rivalry or romance. Following Garber’s suggestion, it offers a means to explore the specifics and positionalities within triangulations and how they function as a representational trope of bisexuality. Specifically, triangulation takes a different form when it is not understood along lines of either/or in terms of identification vs. desire. While Garber suggests that this opens up a means of exploring how the “other partners” feel about each other, not all triangles have a singular meeting point. The desire lines of this particular triad make it nearly impossible to chart uni-directional patterns as they all remain crossed in a variety of ways. 54 The ongoing erotic triangle between Cary, Kalinda and Dana disrupts linear time and constructs of desire based along the lines of sameness and difference as linked to gender and bodies. Instead it presents a complicated multi-directional interrelationship in which professional, racial, and sexual identifications come to a head. Constructs of normative sexuality are inherently racialized, leaving white western sexuality the unmarked standard. When Dana confronts Cary about his proclivity for “ethnic women” he is at a loss (“Affairs of State”). The implication of such a specificity to his sexuality seems jarring within the logic of the show. He makes Dana repeat the question. “He [their co-worker Matan] says you have a thing about ethnic women. You just can’t control yourself around «s.” What seemed like an unsettling accusation begins to border on flirtation. “I-it’s not true,” he stutters and then tries to read her expression. “Unless that’s a good thing?” The scene ends with them unsnapping their seatbelts and making out. The plural nature of this seduction, “around us” conjures the erotic triangle while also suggesting the interchangeability of Cary’s desired objects. In this scene the objectification of women of color is at once addressed, critiqued, and exploited while

Cary’s normative sexuality begins to be exposed as having its own specificities. The lines of attraction as understood along static notions of sameness and difference start to unravel in relationship to interracial attraction, because the script is flipped making the desire for difference the deviation. This scene offers an unsettling moment where Cary has to actually think about, and talk about, race or ethnicity in relationship to his sexual desire. This moment is just as quickly undone when it seems that Cary was in a position where, no matter what he said, he was bound to get what he wanted. 55 It is clear from the moment Dana meets Kalinda that she is not entirely immune to her seductive powers, which is why her question “what’s the point anyway, I don’t get it, without a penis involved [drunken pause] it’s like baseball without a bat,” seems a transparent way to make the conversation sexually explicit rather than an earnest display of heterosexual curiosity (“Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot”). Kalinda, rarely thrown off course, takes this as an invitation to launch into one of her several cringe-worthy essentialist monologues, about how women are “different.” With a far off reflective gaze, she patiently explains “when you get a woman excited it’s not like a man, it’s not aggressive.

It’s slow ... suspenseful.” The scene ends with Dana trying to leave but stumbling and ending up in Kalinda’s arms. The cut from the bar scene is one the audience has grown accustomed to, as well as the abrupt transition to the bedroom that generally follows or is soon revealed. In this episode, the next shot is of clothing cast on the floor with the sound of heavy breathing leading to a close up shot of Dana who playfully whispers “I said it would take more than a few shots to get me into bed.” While this seems an obvious cue for Kalinda to surface from the folds of the duvet, instead, we hear Cary next to

Dana, asking for more details of her exchange with Kalinda. “I asked her what it was like to make love to a woman” she continues, “you wanna know what she said? [pause] When we get excited you can feel it.” By using “we” instead of saying “women,” Dana’s speech act recontextualizes the previous event into a current action performed by Cary on Dana.

The “we” also implies his ability to feel Kalinda despite her physical absence. The way these scenes flow together, following an established pattern but replacing Kalinda’s body with Cary’s, means Kalinda never leaves the scene. Not only is her seduction of Dana 56 ongoing, it is guiding the sexual encounter she has with Cary. The ordering of the scenes allows for femme-on-femme desire to act as a sort of foreplay to heterosexual contact, while also exceeding this structure. As a site of contact between normative and non- normative sexuality this scene puts Cary in a position that both highlights and confounds heterosexual scripts. Although Dana is physically and verbally asserting Cary’s next moves, he still needs clarification as to exactly what “making love to a woman” by a woman entails. “She wanted to touch you?” he asks. Cary is playing Kalinda. Dana is also playing Kalinda. The lines of identification vs. desire are impossible to discern, suggesting the lack of reducibility of desire to either/or frameworks in the first place.

The scene between Dana and Kalinda is recalled several seasons later, when Cary and Kalinda are literally under the sheets (“A Weird Year”). Kalinda’s sex scenes generally share certain aesthetic features: dimly lit high ceiling apartments where bodies always remain partially obscured by shadows and dark shiny sheets. This scene, instead, happens in broad daylight under white sheets, repeating the aesthetics and even the framing of Will and Alicia’s idealized sexual encounters, that we only see in flashback.

Cary is distant and checked out in marked contrast to the engaged connection of the shows central love story. When Kalinda tries to question his absence, he angrily explodes

“Kalinda, just shut up [pause] I am not one of your women. I’m not gonna go slow when you want me to go slow.” This scene exhibits some of the dangers associated with the meeting of non-normative and normative sexualities. As many of the shows cases demonstrate non-monogamy is a dangerous game, possibly more so when it does not fit within heterosexual frameworks. 57 During the first season and Cary’s time at Lockhart/Gardner it is clear that

Kalinda’s professional and personal alliances are with Alicia. When Cary loses the spot and ends up working under Peter Florrick in the District Attorney’s office, Kalinda visits him regularly under various pretenses, but always when she needs information. Cary feels used, and says as much, but continues to acquiesce to her requests. When Kalinda throws him the slightest bit of personal information, in the outdated form of a change of address notification, Cary promptly goes to her new address. When he arrives, Kalinda assumes it is a romantic gesture and begins to let Cary down as gently as she’s ever been seen to do so. He interjects saying “I’m only here to tell you something.” Cary arrives ready to confide information that could jeopardize his job on the chance that it may mean something to her. And yet, even once he sees clearly that he has been played by her and ostensibly given something for nothing, he seeks more meaning in her gesture of information sharing. Kalinda tells him “It just felt normal” to which Cary asks, “You trying to be normal?” Kalinda answers ambivalently, “sure, I like normal.” Cary takes this rather roundabout admission as an invitation and kisses Kalinda. It is not clear from the camera angle or her physical cues how much she kisses him back. He pulls away satisfied, says “welcome back to normal” and exits her building with a spring in his step.

The sexual identity subtext is so overt, and disturbing, it can hardly be deemed sub, ensuring this statement’s implications about normative temporalities are worth exploring.

To be welcomed back, you must have been somewhere before. If it is, indeed, heterosexuality that she is being welcomed back to, this statement speaks to the 58 susceptibility of certain queer bodies to straightening reads, and the differential possibilities and vulnerabilities such a placement entails

“Produce or Fruit?”: Overt Subtext and Extratextual Analysis

While stereotypes about homosexuals, whether negative or positive, often act to affirm a stable category that is gay or lesbian, the primary bisexual stereotype is actually a disavowal of the existence of bisexuality as a plausible identification. A queer poststructuralist lens offers a certain leveling of this differential, by throwing all identity labels into a crisis that is more than just semantic (Butler). Mainstream understandings of sexuality still largely conform to a linear model that assumes bisexual women will “go straight” while bisexual men are merely dragging their feet on the way to gay. An often ignored element of this twofold stereotype is that both groups will eventually “end up” with men. Biphobia relies heavily on sexisim in order to uphold the logic that everyone would/will be with men if they could/can. Though the differential stigma of same-sex encounters for men and women cannot be discounted, especially in terms of their marketability, neither can the underlying sexist logics that bolster them in multiple ways.

While Cary is waiting in the wings to welcome Kalinda “back to normal,” Eli has no such normative heterosexual options. Instead, his female romantic counterparts on the show offer more disorientation. Eli is listed as part of what makes The Good Wife the “gayest show on television,” despite it’s heterosexual core drama (Moylen). “Cumming’s Gold is straight, formerly married to Parker Posey, and had a liaison with Amy Sedaris (two of the only women gay men would think about sleeping with, anyway).” Moylen is referencing the camp and gay icon status of both actresses as an extra-textual signifier of Eli’s queerness. A pattern that holds, when his next love interest is a young Latina nanny and budding economist played by America Ferrera, whose own camp status was won by her leading role in “Ugly Betty” (ABC 2006-2010), the American adaptation of popular telenovela “Yo soy Betty, la fea.”

Reading Eli as a signifier of the way male bisexuality is concurrently exploited and disavowed relies on a twofold extra-textual analysis that looks outside the show to include the actor who plays the role as well as the elements that compose their celebrity.

Here triangulation is evidenced in the relationship between character, actor and celebrity.

To say that Alan Cumming is an out bisexual man obscures the incomplete process that is coming out. What may be more telling is a look at the common elements in the way his bisexuality is biographically referenced which are generally some variation of even though he is married to a man, Cumming insists he is still bisexual. His celebrity is the celebrity of a gay man, with his bisexual insistence appearing as a questionable footnote.

The construction of a celebrity relies on the proliferation of often contradictory information, but to use Ahmed’s term, some things certainly “stick.” Ahmed uses stickiness to describe how bodies and ideas gather in space, and how they come to gain certain significations over others. “Think of a sticky object; what it picks up on its surface

‘shows’ where it has traveled and what it has come into contact with” (Ahmed 40). The concept of stickiness is useful in theorizing a phenomenological understanding of how objects gain meaning and how orienting towards certain objects, and not others, impacts social formations. 60 Cumming appears in lists of “gay actors who play it straight” and other enticing monosexual listographies. In what may very well be a pointed contrast, when Cumming narrates his own sexuality he employs the term bisexual for its descriptive elements and its political potential, and although he seems resistant to the temporal demands of bisexuality as a simultaneity of desires of actions, he is also compelled to explain why he does not let this label become something in his past:

I still would define myself as bisexual partly because that's how I feel but also

because I think it's important to — I think sexuality in this country especially is

seen as a very black and white thing, and I think we should encourage the gray.

You know? I don't go around in my life thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm going to have

to have sex with a woman soon because I said I was bisexual!"... It's like saying

you're straight or you're gay — it's just what you are, and whatever you're doing

in your life it runs obviously parallel, but it's kind of secondary to how you are

inside. That's how I've always felt, and I still do, even though I'm very happily

married to a really amazing man and wish to be so for the rest of my life. (Gross)

In this one paragraph Cummings narrates some of the central issues that continue to plague theorizations of sexual subjectivities. He describes identifications as both what you are, and something that runs parallel. It is both essential and secondary to who you are inside. This quote gets at the phenomenological paradox of experiencing the world, as a body within the world. As Butler has exhaustively illustrated, labels are both explanatory and binding. Cumming uses bisexual politically to “encourage the gray” in black and white thinking, but struggles for a way to give bisexuality explanatory 61 legitimacy that does not rely to the supposed fixity of gay and straight for points of reference.

Secondary characters in serial dramas generally exist to make possible the central narratives of primary characters, Eli is very literally tasked with holding together Peter and Alicia’s marriage as he attempts to reinvigorate Peter’s political career, and later to start Alicia’s in the shadow of crisis. Despite this professional goal, his closeness to the couple creates an uncomfortably intimate triangulation that threatens the partnership it seeks to solidify. If Alicia and Peter act as a base for various other romantic triangulations, Eli, as a third point in this triangle, actively running interference with the other love interests. As the bond between Peter and Eli grows it goes beyond friendship, casting Eli in the role of the jealous wife that Alicia refuses to play. While Eli could just help the Florricks have a non-monogamous “arrangement” he, instead, is devastated by the news that they have come up with a pragmatic partnership.

His jealousy over Peter is not just on Alicia’s behalf. The show makes a nod to the unconsummated homoerotic potential of Eli and Peter’s relationship when they introduce a third to their professional relationship. It is not a coincidence that his rival,

Jordan Karahalios, is played by the gay T.R. Knight who says to Eli,“I like to learn from my elders” (“Boom de ya da”). While the other women in Peter’s life provoked eyebrow raising ire from Eli, Cumming saved his nose-bleed readable melodrama for this male competitor. The tension is palpable between the two, as Eli both fights for his relationship with Peter and experiences some pull towards his rival. Eli often exhibits concurrent repulsion and desire. Through casting choices, layered plotlines, and affective register 62 The Good Wife creates and sustains triangulations that can be read along multiple lines. A phenomenological read opens up space to view moments that exceed the confines of genre and plot by taking into account what viewers bring to the experience.

As I will explore in greater detail in the next chapter, workplace politics are often used as a metaphor through which to talk about sexual identity with various degrees of subtlety. The plotlines where Eli goes head to head with a rival lobbyist, stands out for two reasons. First, it is a rare instance that Kalinda and Eli share the screen while working together. In a show that is about shifting workplace allegiances, it is notable how rarely these two end up on the same side or within the same scene. Their distance from one another highlights their mutable and secondary placement. Second, it is an example where the subtextual discussion of identity politics becomes so overt it is even self- referential. As usual, Kalinda’s small leather book holds some coveted information, in this case, it relates to Eli’s attempt to represent the cheese lobby, in part, by partnering with “The bread people” to create a more “cheese inclusive” food pyramid. Kalinda informs Eli, that Stacy (Amy Sedaris) who had been working on the side of Cheese had won the client out from under him.

Kalinda: She flipped sides ... she played you Eli. She left the USDA (United

States Dairy Association) to become a lobbyist for the produce people.”

Eli: “produce or fruit?”

Kalinda: “fruit”

The language Kalinda uses not only directly references discourses about bisexuality, but mimics the way her employment infidelity is discussed by others throughout the course 63 of the show. The scene successfully communicates to a queer viewership, even giving a nod to its own subtextual conventions, while also offering a non-threatening humorous and straight subplot. While it is not entirely obvious how LGBT identifiers map onto the world of produce, fruit, dairy and grains, the term fruit has a long history most commonly as a referent to homosexual or gender-nonconforming men. Its most common current usage is in the compound slang term “fruit-fly” which refers to straight women who

“stick” with gay men, like flies to fruit, and may or may not harbor an erotic or romantic attraction to them. My identification of Eli’s female counterparts as offering a queering of his character has something to do with stickiness as it relates both to how communities and celebrities become defined through what “sticks.” Both through familial lines, as the sister of gay comedic author David Sedaris, and the brand of spectacular celebrity she is associated with most famously by playing the sexually voracious middle-aged bisexual high school student Jerri Blank on Strangers with Candy and more recently through her hospitality books and artisan cheese-ball business, Sedaris certainly brings a camp sensibility of “artifice and exaggeration” (Sontag) to the role of Stacy. In terms of affective register, Stacy is Eli’s match as both exceed the naturalistic expectations of this television drama.

When Stacy is reintroduced, her well-foreshadowed relationship to fruit is expressly articulated. She and Eli are in competition for a bid to do PR for an LGBT organization fighting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The stage is set for two queer icons to go head to head in winning a gay bid while they try to oneup each other in what results in one of the queerest (in a multiplicity of the word’s meanings) seductions 64 ever to grace network television. Eli meets Stacy in a hotel bar where she sits with two

Irish coffees and a canister of whipped cream as the smoking gun. Stacy asks, “is there anything that doesn’t taste better with whipped cream?” before helping Eli to more than he wants. He drinks the cloying beverage in disgust, commenting that it is “very, very” sweet, to which she responds, “wait until you get to the bottom” with a provocative smirk. After some talk of the DOMA bid, Stacy switches topics; “I have to tell you something but I have to still myself first. I desire you Eli - every part of you, your eyes, your hair. I want to take you on the floor of this bar.” Eli responds, unshaken, and asks her to make the first move, “I’m pliable, so ply me,” he taunts. Why does Eli’s pliability beg mention? While Kalinda’s “flexibility” is only named when she is confronted directly about the gender of her sexual object choices, Eli’s “pliability” is offered up as an explanation for his willingness to explore the advances of a woman who wants to “take him.” This scene uses heterosexuality as a very translucent and pliable cover to explore a queer sexual dynamicism rarely made visible in primetime television. In so doing it actively disrupts the literal, and often unimaginative, demands of anti-queer baiting campaigns to follow through with homosocial subtext. At the same time, through the utilization of extra-textual elements, including celebrity, this scene and others like it allow the show to interpolate a queer viewership while avoiding the ratings risks associated with any explicit depictions of male homoerotics. Instead, the viewer is offered a heterosexual seduction complete with Sedaris’ hyperbolic performance of Stacy licking whipped cream off of Eli’s fingers, that in his own words, “lacks subtlety.” This form of commentary pushes up against the third wall, offering itself to multiple reads. Is 65 it Stacy, Amy Sedaris as Stacy, the writing, or the overt display of heterosexuality that is lacking subtlety, or put differently, exhibiting excess.

Eli understands Stacy’s advances as strategic, a means to unsettle him so she can continue to win over his clients. As their relationship builds the lines between rivalry and attraction are no longer discernable. Eli invites Stacy back to the same bar, where he sits waiting with the same two Irish coffees and the canister of whipped cream and two surprises. The first surprise happens when “I desire you too” leads the two into a game of

“chicken” which culminates in a even more shocking kiss. The second surprise, that Eli got the GLACK account they were competing for, is revealed right after the kiss as he taunts “what happened, where’s the desire?” and offers “I still desire you, the way a victor desires his spoils.” The game of chicken resumes as both try and call the others bluff until Stacy calls it out “O.K. let’s go, let’s have intercourse.” She marches away as

Eli dumbstruckenly pays and follows behind only to find out after they have said intercourse that Stacy is working on the political campaign of his ex-wife (Parker Posey).

He has been played once again. Rather than hold its place of unmarked centrality, heterosexuality is exposed by being referenced in specifically straight and clinical terms.

Eli’s romantic liaisons undercut the logics of queerbaiting that remain wedded to notions of sameness and difference as linked to gender and object choice. This scene stands as a moment of overt subtext that may not satisfy recent demands of normative homoerotic visibility, but offers a particularly interactively queer kind of viewing pleasure. Scenes like this give rise to questions of what characters, stories and fantasies would be rendered impossible or out of date if literal demands for representation are met? 66 My reading of Eli as a signifier of male bisexual representation relies on the extra- textual elements, including actor Alan Cumming’s own self-identification. Like most non-monosexual television characters, Kalinda does not self-identify as bisexual. Those around her also struggle to label her, rarely landing on bisexual. As many have commented, in the world of mainstream media it often seems as if there has never been such a word, and the recent multiplication of gay and lesbian characters have only perpetuated this absence. Rather than consider this a mere oversight or offshoot of bi­ invisibility, Kalinda’s various moments of identity disclosure, warrant more specific attention. They illustrate the ways in which sexual identity labels that describe only object choice can obscure all other modes of desire and relationality. The most telling moment of Kalinda’s self-identification happens in conversation with a pining ex­ girlfriend (played by Lily Taylor) whom Kalinda reminds (warns) “I am not [pause] domestic.” As mainstream LG rights have increasingly focused on recognition in the domestic sphere, representation has also gone towards increased depictions of same-sex domesticity. Bisexual characters have yet to be fully domesticated.

There are specific sets of values reflected in the kinds of out and proud queers that are most readily legible on television. At first glance, the moral world of The Good

Wife does seem to define good characters by their desire for career success and family as defined by having children and a proper mate. From the show’s inception this system of normalcy is made visible because it is in crisis. On the other hand, there is no character in the show that maintains a solid grasp on this familial, reproductive model as a lifestyle or even a consistent aspirational goal pointing to the future. While the show’s title 67 ostensibly holds these as the “good” values to possess, they often play out as at odds with happiness, integrity, and even justice. The Good Wife asks what it means to “be good” within systems that may not “be good” in return, or to begin with. In this way it evidences the “cruel optimism” of maintaining an attachment to fantasies of economic and relationship security, mobility, and social progress even as they have become increasingly unattainable under current economic and social conditions (Berlant). Eli and

Kalinda share a lack of attachment to, and a marked pessimism towards, the systems that are supposed to offer happiness, security, and justice.

Many narrative forms rely on, and reinforce, the connection between good and happy. Good characters deserve to be happy, especially in the end. In fact, much of genre itself relies on what becomes of the good characters, since only a tragedy would allow bad to befall them in the end. Serial dramas can offer a more complex relationship to goodness, relying on a lack of resolution to sustain dramatic tension. I employed temporal, extra-textual, and representational triangulation as reading methodologies that call into question the progressive narratives of visible representation, romantic love and social movements. This next chapter looks more specifically at what defines the positive in positive representations, and how happiness dictates the bodies, actions, and desires that are representationally possible. 68 Irreducible Desires and Identities: The Legal System as a Bisexual Space

When Will Gardner asks Kalinda if she can be exclusive to Lockhart/Gardner law firm, the material stakes of his question are high (“State of the Union”). Her professional exclusivity is a prerequisite for health insurance, and a condition of consenting to her request for a higher salary. This moment illustrates how the show uses employment dynamics to talk about sexuality metaphorically, while also opening up a space to consider the material consequences associated with an unwillingness to conform and commit. The Good Wife is not a standard procedural wherein each episode’s case concludes without any loose ends. However, it does offer new legal cases and clients who serve as a means to illuminate the ongoing character development and personal dramas of the Lockhart/Gardner crew. The character-centered plots rely on the concurrent lessons learned from the political and legal happenings surrounding them.

The backdrop of the legal system functions as a space that is both dichotomous, there is innocence and guilt, and ambiguous since a legal victory does not inherently coincide with the “truth.” I employ San Fillippo’s bi-textual reading method in order to consider how the political/legal system functions as a metaphoric bisexual space in which

Kalinda and Eli are often, allegedly or overtly, “working for both sides.” Cary Agos uses this phrase to describe Kalinda’s relationship to a case in the first season of the show; it, in turn, foreshadows Kalinda’s sexual “flexibility” (“Painkillers”). “Both sides” can refer to the competing sides of a legal case, different sides of the legal and political worlds, or the gay/straight divide. San Fillippo outlines a means of reading double plot structure that

“operates to formulate and convey just such a metaphor between bisexuality and an 69 analogous identity construct that also resists containment within a binary taxonomy” (41).

Bi-textual analysis is a reading methodology that reveals how the double plot structure talks about and around (bi)sexuality without concretely referencing it. The Good Wife offers professional/employment status and racial/ethnic identity as metaphors for sexual identity that work to concurrently uphold and undermine dominant discourses on identity politics, visibility and citizenship.

This chapter looks at how The Good Wife theorizes identity vis-a-vis the courtroom- a space where identity is constantly shifting based on the kind of case the attorneys believe they can win. This is evidenced in both how attorneys present the plight of a particular client, and what facets of their own identity they play up. Since these tactics are shared by good, bad, and more complexly moral characters they suggest some of the instability of these categories and identifications outside the courtroom as well. At the same time, how these strategic identifications reflect on the moral character of the characters is mediated by their access to privilege.

A common trope of bisexual characters is their opportunism. In fact, it is often their primary trait positioning their willingness to wield a gender-blind sexuality as an offshoot, or merely further evidence, of their lack of scruples. Centering (intersectional) bisexual characters in this analysis makes visible the ways opportunism is set against acceptable manifestations of desire and action. The Good Wife recenters whiteness, heteronormativity, and monosexuality as ideals while simultaneously presenting formulations of identity that exceed and challenge these frameworks.

Happiness Scripts and Intersectional Hybrids 70 This chapter continues to employ what Ahmed terms “straightening devices” but follows this concept to her work in The Promise o f Happiness where she suggests that

“happiness scripts can be thought of as straightening devices, ways of aligning bodies with what is already lined up” (91). Considering this in relationship to television, where there is a literal script, points to the ways that familiar narrative structures are already conditioned by an ideal of monogamous, heterosexual happiness and an idea that happiness itself is heterosexual. As Ahmed explains, “[t]here is no doubt that heterosexual happiness is overrepresented in public culture, often through an anxious repetition of threats and obstacles to its proper achievement” {Promise 90). One of the central dramatic tensions of The Good Wife hinges on Alicia Florrick’s decisions around what man she will end up with and whether or not she will allow herself to be happy.

Here “heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life a direction or purpose, or as what drives a story.

It is difficult to separate out narrative as such from the reproduction of happy heterosexuality” (Promise 90). The interrelationship between narrative and heterosexual love impacts what kind of characters are central, as well as the narrative function of secondary characters. They either act as threats and obstacles or as advisors and helpers, ultimately serving the culmination of what McRuer terms “the heterosexual epiphany”

(28).

Kalinda Sharma and Eli Gold are figures that function in line with, and in excess of, the established narrative of happy heterosexuality and more recent depictions of happy homosexuality, that are drawn along similar narrative lines. This chapter asks how 71 ideas of happiness regulate what defines “positive” representation and who is deemed worthy, or becomes excessive, based on such demands. The characters’ sexual identities are explored vis-a-vis their work lives and ethnic/racial backgrounds; Eli’s fidelity to his

Jewish identification and Kalinda’s “cultural identity” are questioned as they seem to be flexible and, as such, lack authenticity. Their identities shift as political and/or financial opportunities arise. Certain plot arcs show Kalinda being not indian enough, and Eli being a traitorous jew while their sexual identities and romantic inclinations are likewise often falling short of unitary, happy-making definitions. Moments when bisexuality serves as an analogue for other forms of identification and vice/versa point toward a broader theorization of the contingency of desire and identity. This analysis connects notions of immigration, nationalism and sexual subjectivity in the American pop-cultural imaginary with questions of what bodies are deemed worthy of representation, both in its legal and media connotations.

In many ways The Good Wife fits with Micheala Meyer’s observations that recent prime time representations of bisexuality “follow a typical narrative pattern: women are more frequently represented as bisexual than men; they are generally non-White, and their sexuality is often located outside of traditional coming-out narrative disclosure more commonly associated with gay and lesbian representations” (366). This observation suggests an emerging pattern that is different than the cinematic trope of bisexuals as single white females who are generally psychotic doppelgangers or freeloving bohemians

(San Fillipo). It also evidences the continued scarcity of bisexual men on television. 72 Meyer terms these bisexual characters, particularly, women of color, “intersectional hybrids” and reads their narrative functions as concurrently hegemonic and counterhegemonic. However, the pattern Meyer notes, and the blanket term of non-white, should not obscure the specific stakes associated with Kalinda Sharma as the first representation of an openly queer South Asian woman on U.S. television. While they do not fit the previous mold of multicultural diversity that fashioned minority characters after a dominant ideal with one difference, these characters exemplify the new landscape of visible difference. Looking at how bisexual characters are located at the intersections of multiple identities, extends this analysis to consider the contingency of identity more broadly.

This Chapter follows Meyer’s suggestion that the intersectional placement of bisexual characters has something to say about “cultural discourses of globalization, racial diversity and citizenship in contemporary U.S. society” (366) by focusing on several episodes that look at immigration, identity, and labor. According to Meyer their intersectional status, aside from acting as a means to mark the characters as others on multiple fronts and allow television shows to hit their unspoken diversity quotas, also lends itself to an intersectional analysis. An intersectional analysis demands attentiveness to interlocking systems of oppression and how they impact particular bodies (Crenshaw).

Putting the concept of intersectional hybrids in conversation with Ahmed’s work on happiness scripts, this chapter subsequently charts how characters’ failings at assimilation, cultural authenticity, romantic love and workplace loyalty show the cracks in, and uneven opportunities of, certain gay and lesbian narratives of progress. In the 73 previous chapter, I discussed how homonormative demands for out and explicit same sex representation limit who becomes representable, by relegating certain characters, experiences, or lifestyles to the past. This chapter further considers these questions, looking explicitly at what defines positive representation and how homonationalism impacts the conditions of possibility for queer bodies. Following Jasbir Puar’s recent clarification of the term, homonationalism is understood as “a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality” (336). Representation both reflects and projects whose lives are deemed worthy of protection.

Not-So-Helpful Others: Bisexual Mercenaries and Opportunistic Minorities

In television, centrality is measured not just by screen time, but by impact and the amount of information that is given about characters’ lives and their personalities. The

Good Wife’s Chicago is glaringly white when set against census data or even other

Chicago-based dramas on television or even. Kalinda is the only person of color who has been a part of the primary cast for the five seasons I analyze. Eli’s Jewishness can function so clearly as a marker of difference only because it is set against the white protestant background of the Florrick household. Julius Cane, the one black partner at

Lockhart/Gardner, is given very little screen time, and almost no defining personality traits, despite being the head of litigation. When black characters are given secondary roles on the show they are generally antagonists. Since the legal system offers shifting moral grounds, antagonists appear as anything from murderous drug-dealing villains to 74 justice-seeking, state-department employees. Three of the most villainous characters on the show are a physically disabled white male lawyer Luis Canning (Michael J. Fox), a black female attorney-turned-politician Wendy Scott Carr (Annika Noni Rose) and a perpetually pregnant or parenting middle aged white female attorney Patti Nyholm

(Martha Plimpton). All three are guilty of using their minoritized status strategically whenever possible, a tactic that is positioned as one of the greatest offenses committed by characters on the show.

These characters illustrate how social positioning separates opportunism from more acceptable forms of striving. Using privilege becomes a naturalized act when it can appear unwitting, and therefore without blame. Strategically employing minority status, on the other hand, is a tactic that is considered out of the moral bounds of the already morally flexible landscape. From the other side of the aisle, Luis Canning complicates the way visibility functions in the courtroom and in representations of disabled bodies.

Canning begins every trial explaining to the judge and jurors that he suffers from tardive dyskinesia, a condition which causes erratic body movement. This generally softens the judge and jury to his corporate clients, who have done some irreparable damage to countless individuals who flock to Lockhart/Gardner for representation. Fie makes a pointed spectacle of his disability, rather than honorably downplaying it. He knows that people will stare, and he uses this to his favor, diverting attention when he needs to by harnessing his body’s potential for involuntary movements strategically. Rather than perform the labor of managing his stigma (Goffman), Canning demonstrates a lack of regard for earning acceptance, and instead relies on sympathy. 75 In its ever growing cast, The Good Wife introduces some characters that fit more cleanly with classic minoritized tropes than Canning. These depictions rely on a racialist, ableist, and heterosexist palate from which to paint characters in broad strokes. Perhaps the most familiar character trope, the Magical Negro (Gabbard) appears as Pastor Isaiah

(Gbenga Akinnagbe) to help Peter Florrick atone for his sins against god and his family.

Equally miraculous, Alicia’s brother Owen (Dallas Roberts) shows up out of nowhere as a GFB (Gay Best Friend) to offer pithy one-liners while always trying to help Alicia follow her heart, and the audience’s preference, towards Will Gardner. Bisexuals have yet to enter into one of these representable helper roles, which has something to do with how bisexuality is imagined in relationship to happiness, or more specifically unhappiness.

By turning her attention to unhappiness, as a subject worthy of tracking, Ahmed suggests that it cannot merely be defined as lacking what makes for happiness, but that unhappiness itself may have certain features and distinguishing traits. Ahmed brings to light some negative figures including the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer and the melancholic migrant in order to describe what happiness might look like from the perspective of those cast outside of happiness by being unhappy and/or unhappy-making.

These figures become “affect aliens” by virtue of not being properly uplifting modern subjects who make the best of their lot. Ahmed also gives examples from generally used and accepted phrases that solidify happiness and the related attachments. “I am happy if you are happy” can have a sort of binding contractual force that conditionally allows for an object to be happy-making. When considered as a statement appraising someone’s sexual object choice, the happiness mandate sets up a nearly impossible expectation that the decisions in one’s love life should always lead to happiness. If one comes out and remains unhappy, and in turn unable to make others happy they are failing and that failing can be seen as a failing of non-heterosexuality (or non-monosexuality). Recently depictions of gays and lesbians reflect an understanding that they too can have access to happiness, if they follow closely to heterosexual scripts and maintain only one key difference.

Representations of bisexuals, on the other hand, suggest that their orientation may, in fact, be unhappy making all around. Bisexuals are imagined as being unsatisfiable, which makes them incapable of satisfying the monogamous monosexual happiness demands. Kalinda defies a well worn heterosexual happiness script- when told by Cary that he “doesn’t want to see other people” she answers, “I do” (“Red Zone”). In the previous chapter I propose that the insistence of bisexuality, as an identity, practice, or epistemology disrupts some of the linear mandates of romantic love and sexual identification that gain their legitimacy through the promise of happiness.

Within mainstream representational frameworks, bisexual characters or plotlines often function as little more than a cautionary tale that can teach straight, and more recently gay characters, something about themselves. In the show’s first season it seems like

Kalinda serves as a traditional non-white helper character as she kindly shows Alicia the ropes at Lockhart/Gardner while also offering friendship and romantic advice. This relationship comes undone once Alicia finds out that Kalinda slept with her husband years ago, and it never recovers. The lack of stability of sexual object choice makes 77 bisexual characters less than ideal helpers to the heterosexual happiness cause. Instead, bisexual characters are often represented as purely opportunistic to such an extent that it subsumes and explains away their queer desires and they become one-dimensional caricatures, simply present for all of the plot twists their conniving enables. They become susceptible to what Ahmed calls a “straightening read” by virtue of their sexual couplings being reduced to the side effect of a character flaw. San Fillippo dedicates a short section to Kalinda’s character in which she discusses how Kalinda fits into the model of the

“bisexual mercenary”, a character trope in which “power and pleasure are conflated in a covetous logic of desire” (235). The bisexual mercenary is dangerous because they always want something they are not supposed to; they are bad because their desire is always also opportunistic. They are bisexual by default, because sex in general is secondary and is just one tool in their tool kit of manipulation and information retrieval.

What is interesting about this character trope is how it functions to suggest that some desires are, indeed, pure and unmarred by any other conditions.

I offer a different read. In resisting the desire to recover bisexuals from their mercenary status, I instead want to employ bisexual mercenaries in all of their multiple agent statuses to help uncover the contingency of desire, and identification, more broadly.

With an understanding that these characters do not only work for me, I expect that they will expand, contradict, bend, and reorient my understanding of the phenomenology of bisexual representation. Bisexuality becomes the location where anxieties over desire’s contingency can be expressed, without spilling over, so long as bisexuality can ultimately be disproved in the end. In the courtroom proof itself is contingent, based on precedent 78 rather than unimpeachable fact. Many of the tropes associated with bisexuality

(opportunism, switching sides, ambivalence) are normalized in characters with social and political capital, but become character flaws when they are visible on minoritized characters. The Good Wife offers a space to look at some of the ways bisexual representations spill over, exposing the instability and partiality of other identities.

Beyond Fruitful Disclosure: Kalinda’s Irreducible Desire

The idea that one’s desires are either opportunistic or pure fits into dichotomous logics that obscure the complex navigations, power structures, and multiple identity frameworks at play in sexual subjectivity. Reading Kalinda’s lack of identification and refusal to be exclusive on multiple fronts, alongside her loyalty and deep care for others suggests that motivations can come from various, even competing sources. San Filippo does seem, at least partially, invested in recovering Kalinda from the bisexual mercenary trope by suggesting her desire for women is “not reducible to fruitful disclosure” (236).

It is Kalinda’s lack of reducibility that makes her character an ideal site for considering the contingency of desire more broadly. The scene San Fillippo references is one where

Kalinda outlines the differences between having sex with men and women in very dichotomous terms that perpetuate understandings of bisexuals as particularly situated within gender-binary logics. Specifically, her description situates women as receptive, non-aggressive and mysterious lovers who desire a slow build up versus more simplistic and goal oriented sex with men (“Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot”). The sexual encounters depicted on the show, between Kalinda and other femmes do not necessarily fit this description. 79 San Fillippo’s efforts to use this passage as evidence of Kalinda’s true desire for women - one that must be beyond the information seeking transactional mercenary mode- treats certain manifestations of desire as having purer roots. The reducibility of desire is rarely called into question as long as it is reduced along appropriate lines. While the gender of a sexual object choice is deemed an appropriate means to reduce, a desire for information is not. Her sexual interactions may not be “reducible” to fruitful disclosure, but as subsequent encounters suggest, they may not be properly unrelated to it either.

Kalinda’s sexual partners and ongoing flirtations often express feelings of being used by the investigator. Part of the power that Kalinda cultivates is that she is almost always in a position of asking and taking information while offering little in return either interpersonally or professionally. Kalinda seems entirely unconcerned with anyone liking her, and yet, everyone seems desperate for her approval, remaining willing to jeopardize their professional and personal lives in order to give her what she asks for, whether or not they get anything in exchange. Her lack of fidelity is seemingly infectious. Even the justice minded FBI agent Lana can never resist giving into Kalinda’s requests despite being upset that Kalinda only sees her when she “needs something.” Kalinda’s on-and-off relationship with Lana takes a different turn in Season Five, when Kalinda suspects she was the one being used (“Shiny Objects”). The following scene evidences how Kalinda takes pleasure in her work as an active negotiation of labor and leisure, and public and private that is not easily reducible. 80 In what is likely Kalinda’s most impassioned scene, she believes Lana stole information pertaining to a criminal case during their previous night together. Instead of being hurt, Kalinda is visibly excited when she confronts Lana. Though the scene is shot from the waist up, it is heavily implied that Kalinda and Lana struggle to get their hands up each other's skirts, with Lana’s hands reaching their destination first. She remarks

“Someone’s turned on.” to which Kalinda replies, “You’re bad.” Then Kalinda playfully accuses Lana of stealing information from her pertaining to a shared case, but Lana is not amused. She pulls away from Kalinda saying “Just because you would do it Kalinda, doesn’t mean I would.” The subtext of this phrasing implies that Kalinda commonly does things (people, illegal acts, etc) that Lana would not do. Usually an excellent read of emotions since her career relies on it, Kalinda somehow does not take Lana seriously. In another uncharacteristic move, she nuzzles Lana’s nose and says with a grin. “No, but you did.” This may be one of the times Kalinda appears happiest, but it is not happy- making for Lana.

While this exchange could be read as evidence that Kalinda is seeking likeness as a way to connect, that Lana’s infraction dissuades her guilt or makes her feel understood, it could also be that some of her desires are indeed related to, if not reducible to, fruitful disclosure. Kalinda’s orientation towards desired objects is heavily impacted by what is in and out of proximity. Kalinda does not fit neatly into the bisexual mercenary framework since it is not clear that Kalinda’s sexual desire is secondary to her professional fact-seeking- it may not be entirely distinguishable from it. In this way, 81 bisexual characters make visible what forms of desire fall in and out of line with social expectations.

“It’s not a gay thing, it’s a Jewish thing”

In its efforts to be hyper-modem, The Good Wife recycles current news stories and court cases into its weekly scripts. Patterns of overlap within episodes between political and legal subject matter begin to emerge across seasons. The repetitive pairing of the Israel/Palestine conflict and gay rights/identity politics generally occurs in episodes where Eli Gold plays a central role. This pairing of character development and plot offers a metaphoric structure to explore Eli’s Jewish identity as one of the ways his ambiguous sexuality is referenced, while also serving as a means to solidify Eli’s general otherness and intersectional status. As a multi-valent text, the show offers competing notions of sexual citizenship that uphold and undermine homonationalist narratives.

The first time that sexuality and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict overlap in the legal/political world of The Good Wife's Chicago occurs when Alicia’s gay brother is captured on YouTube saying that her husband, Peter, may be uncomfortable with homosexuals (“Breaking Fast”). When Eli, Peter’s campaign manager, watches this clip he literally starts choking on his lunch, an acute physical response that does not stop him from dramatically throwing a book across the room. Such appreciable flare is within his wheelhouse but does go above and beyond, nodding to the possibility that this has hit a personal chord. When Eli confronts Peter about his issues with “gay people” Peter shares this read, telling Eli that he “could not care less if you're gay” while offering a reassuringly masculine pat on the back. Eli dismisses this comment and gesture with an 82 effeminate edge “oh my god, Peter, I’m not gay!” he declares as he turns his back to him and strides away.

When Eli follows up with the Florricks on this homophobic YouTube incident, both Alicia and Peter consider this allegation laughable; it is implied that no liberal politician could possibly still be homophobic. In fact they respond identically with the refrain, “[tjhat’s just Owen.” This speech act functions by reducing any claims Owen might have to him as an individual, dismissing the possibility that he could be impacted by homophobia. Alicia’s brother and husband don’t get along because they are difficult people within a complicated family dynamic-end of story. The Florricks imply that Owen was playing the gay card for easy impact. He is offered, instead, as another example of minority opportunism. As with other plots about subtler forms of bias and discrimination, the show manages to cast some doubt as to Peter’s comfort level with his gay brother-in- law, at least gesturing to the ways unexamined privilege has impact. In another pairing of gay plots and middle eastern politics, Owen is later revealed to be dating a an a married

Palestinian man who shoots condomless porn which becomes a potential PR issue in

Alicia’s political campaign (“Oppo Research”).

The Florricks’ dismissal of any possibility of homophobia does not stop Eli from needing to clean up the PR mess he fears the YouTube video left behind, “[t]he Chicago gay population is small, but it’s powerful” he warns, “[i]t has money.” The show’s plots consistently hinge on the inseparability of financial and political capital and how they structure the legal system as well as the social and economic possibilities available to the characters. Eli, especially, is in a position to follow the money. In this instance he quickly 83 books a meeting with Spencer, one of the “power gays” who has recently expressed a lack of support for Peter. He finds that Spencer’s reticence to back Florrick, “isn’t about straight-gay, it’s about Jewish-Palestinian.” There's a picture of Peter circulating with a copy of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. When Eli finds out that the concern is not homophobia after all, he quickly shifts gears and invites Spencer to the

Florricks’ house to break their supposedly shared Yom Kippur fast. This scene shows

Eli’s ability to rapidly pivot from the gay agenda to strategically employing a Jewish holiday for political gain. His identifications are adaptable.

He assures Spencer that Peter’s support for Israel is unwavering and that this invite is not a contrived last minute plan but rather an occasion the Florricks have graciously embraced since Eli has no one to spend the holiday with. In a common refrain,

Eli explains “because, as you know, I have no life.” The Florricks supplying Eli a home, albeit a broken one, is an essential part of their relationship. Eli’s inability to follow

“happiness scripts” that would dictate the importance of him finding personal happiness, allows him to be read as what Ahmed terms an “affective alien.” As discussed in the previous chapter, his primary relationship is his emotional, homosocial bond with Peter that well exceeds its professional duties. Eli’s commitment to the Florricks is evidenced in his sublimation of his own desires and his flexibility to adapt his religious practices, or lack thereof, for political gain. In general, Eli’s identification as Jewish is employed when it offers an opportunity to advance political gains. The double plot structure, and overlapping of Jewish and gay plots, implies Eli has fluid identifications and suggests the impact of proximity on which way he swings. 84 By consolidating the Jewish and Gay lobbies into one figure, whose ultimate concern is Israel, The Good Wife illustrates the inability of severing identity politics from other global political happenings. However, suggesting that gay rights and conservative

Jewish lobbyists are political bedfellows avoids casting a critical eye on that relationship.

As evidenced in subsequent episodes where Middle Eastern politics and gay identity converge, the show often maintains either/or logics that uphold certain identities as primary and more worthy of protection within modern colonialist frameworks.

In its third season premiere, Lockhart/Gardner take on the case of Jamal, a Palestinian student who was arrested after a fight broke out at an on campus interfaith rally (“A New

Day”). We are led to believe that Jamal is charged with a hate crime instead of an assault, so Peter Florrick can pander to the Jewish lobby before the election. Jamal denies ever being at the rally, which ends up working against him when a Jewish student is found murdered in a dorm room the same day as the rally. The backstage political plot thickens when Wasim, a wealthy, Muslim business man offers to pay for Jamal’s defense in addition to bringing a ten million dollar PR campaign to the firm’s crisis management maven Eli Gold, who, in a double agent moment, is also Florrick’s campaign manager.

After airing some general bigotry, including making fun of Wasim’s name, Eli agrees to take on “the anti-Muslim bigotry campaign.” He is instantly bombarded with backlash from the head of the “Jewish League Fund” one of Peter’s supporters who accuses him of running “a pro-Palestinian campaign.” He implores Eli to act as “a Jew” stating, “[t]his is a PR war, and they are winning.” Eli questions, “[a]nd I’m a traitor?” 85 Eli’s clarification of the campaign’s double negative status has important political implications. He maintains that he can work “against bigotry” without being “pro-”

Palestine and, in doing so, still maintain his siding with Jews as a Jew. The term traitor has a particular connotation when read as a metaphor for sexual identities that fall outside of hetero/homo lines. In this scene Eli resists the idea that someone must lose, at least in a

“PR war,” without necessarily connecting U.S. politics with the actual conflict in the

Middle East.

Kalinda and yet another high powered femme investigator with whom she has a past, find Jamal’s roommate Tariq in a gay bar. They get him to reveal that what really happened was a “crime of passion” between gay lovers, whose backgrounds can be subsumed into the American melting pot. Although this episode offers some insight into the ways campaign politics, legislation and identity intersect, in the end order is restored.

Eli is dropped from the Muslim PR campaign, but manages to leverage it into gaining

The Jewish League fund, and the case is “solved” because the students being gay does away with any other facets of their identities. In a reversal of the first twist, it is not a

Jewish (or Muslim) thing, it is a gay thing. Here gay is a universalizing identity; it acts as the truth of who these students really were and what truly motivated them. To return to

Foucault’s observations of how sexual object choice came to identify a “species,” narratives of cross-cultural love made possible, even if tragic, suggest that gay identity can also work to define a brand of cross-cultural humanism reliant on colonialist hierarchies. By considering gayness as a defining feature, and one that works outside of culture, gay rights are often deployed as a means to justify modern colonialism (Puar 67). 86 In relationship to Israel and Palestine this process has been termed “pinkwashing.” One of the ways pinkwashing functions is by painting Israel as a bastion of safety for homosexuals in the Middle East, perpetuating notions of Muslim cultures as backwards, violent and unaccepting while positioning certain Arab lives as worthy of rescue by virtue of their modern sexual identities that Israel, ostensibly, will protect.

In the U.S. discourse over same-sex marriage, gay asylum seekers and immigration rights

often perpetuates similar notions of national and cultural paternalism and superiority. As

Eithne Luibheid argues, the recognition of same-sex relationships as a basis for

immigration will not address, and may actually obscure, all of the other contingencies and hierarchies that structure the legal immigration process. Relying on the institution of marriage, same-sex or otherwise, as a basis for immigration status may have particular

impact on those who do not fall along gay/straight lines.

Deportation Plots and Worthy Immigrants

Since many of the cases in The Good Wife are ripped from the headlines, the show offers points of connection between real-life court cases and its own theorizations of

identity. The ongoing deportation case of Chicago-based journalist Ivo Widlak, who

legally immigrated from Poland to the United States after marrying his female spouse,

sheds some light on one of the ways marriage offers a conditional and preferential basis for protection. In a case that surprisingly has not been revamped on The Good Wife, Ivo believes he was targeted as means for recourse over his investigative report that uncovered corruption involved with the building of the Polish Consulate General in

Chicago (Cheltenham). After gay rumors surfaced from Ivo’s past in Poland, he and his 87 wife were separately questioned by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

(USCIS), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Both parties identified as bisexual, and said they were aware of the other’s bisexual status as well, but this did not stop the case against Ivo from moving forward with the couple’s bisexual status cited as evidencing the invalidity of their partnership. Tom Plummer, a spokesperson for LGBT rights organization Immigration Equality, may have, unintentionally, best expressed the limitations of marriage as a basis for equality: “we look forward to a world after DOMA has fallen, when couples of all orientations will have equal opportunity to be grilled regarding the validity of their marriages"

(Cheltenham). If a bisexual identification can be used as evidence to undermine the validity of a marriage, in an otherwise privileged white opposite-sex couple, it points to all of the other legal interpretations of a marriage's validity that will differentially impact already vulnerable populations.

This case points to the ways immigrants are expected to leave certain aspects of themselves behind in order to be deemed worthy subjects. In theorizing “Melancholic

Migrants,” Ahmed shows how postcolonial societies promote and expect a relationship to happiness in exchange for certain forms of citizenship. Looking specifically at two film representations of Asian migrants in Britain Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and East is

East (1999) she argues that “it is migrants who must become (more) British in order to be recognized as citizens of the nation. Citizenship now requires a test: we might speculate that this test is a happiness test” (The Promise 130). Passing this happiness test, involves forgetting about colonial pasts and ongoing racism as much as it does retention of modern nationalist practices. In both these films the younger generation’s happiness potential is set against the wishes of their traditional families. Allowing for another extra (and intra) textual read, The Good Wife's Archie Punjabi has a role in both of the films Ahmed analyzes. Charting the characters she plays offers a basis for understanding how immigrants figure in relationship to happiness scripts. In positing celebrity as something that gathers, the collection of an actor's previous roles are never fully left behind in subsequent performances. Kalinda, in all of her mystery and postmodern hybridity, can also be read through Punjabi’s two breakout roles in British multicultural family comedies. In East is East, Punjabi plays Meena, the rambunctious tomboy daughter of a devout Muslim from Pakistan and his Caucasian British-born wife. In Bend it like

Beckham Punjabi’s role is flipped when she appears as Pinky, the dutiful daughter of

Indian parents and the foil to her sister, the films football playing heroine, Jess (Paminder

Nagra). Very literally, Pinky’s wedding acts as an essential plot obstacle by falling on the same day as Jess’s football tournament. Within the broader narrative Pinky’s lack of desire for something other than what her parents envision acts to define Jess’s quest for something else as the ideal of an assimilationist multi-culturalism (Ahmed The Promise).

Ahmed points out that these films suggest that there are either those who conform or those who want more, a more that the West can offer.

The way subaltern women have been imagined by much of western feminism has been complicit with these ideas (Mahmood; Spivak). There are those who want freedom and those who do not see their own self-interests. Returning to Kalinda, the kind of immigrant she is and her ever-elusive backstory are key to her ambiguous positionality as 89 a worker, citizen, lover, and friend. Kalinda is revealed to have a different name and perhaps a different nationality. Kalinda exercises a tenuous freedom that does not entirely align with models of the happy immigrant or out-and-proud queer. Although she may openly express disdain for other’s means of arrival, this can also be read as a cover for her own less than above-board backstory. When Alicia asks Kalinda, “[a]re you gay?”

Kalinda responds, “I’m private” (“Hybristophilia”). The access to a private life may be the most coveted in the show. Kalinda’s lack of legibility offers her access to a private life others on the show cannot maintain. It also lands her in precarious positions where she is always in danger of being exposed on multiple fronts.

The Good Wife offers several deportation plotlines that follow a similar pattern and speak to the way certain lives become valued over others through narrative structures and legal proceedings alike. They begin with the introduction of an exceptional person- of-color who needs the law firm’s help, usually on a pro-bono basis, so that their immigrant parent will not be deported. When Wendy Scott Carr runs against Peter

Florrick, Eli must find a way to undermine her seemingly unimpeachable moral character

(“Silver Bullet”). Her earnest campaigning as a working black mother has Peter dropping in the polls even among more conservative factions of his voter base. When Eli finds out that her children were cared for by an illegal immigrant, he sees it as just the opportunity he has been looking for. However, when he meets this former Nanny, Natalie Flores

(America Ferrara), she is not what he expected. The audience is expected to share in his surprise at finding a studious and composed Economics major who speaks perfect

English. Eli finds himself impressed and attracted to the much younger woman. This plot 90 simultaneously exposes stereotypes while promoting certain hierarchized notions of citizenship, assimilation, and value. If the nanny had been what Eli expected, had she not been someone who could be deemed valuable based on her quantifiable achievements towards the American Dream, she may not have been the subject of Eli’s attention which included his expediting her bid for legal citizenship (“Killer Song”).

In another deportation plot, Alicia feels a sense of responsibility when her building’s superintendent’s mom, Samira, faces deportation back to India (“Mock”).

When Kalinda sees Samira’s children waiting in Alicia’s office she can tell they are not going to lead to billable hours. She offers to “get rid of them,” reminding Alicia that she needs to keep her “eyes on the prize” and focus on proving her monetary worth to the firm. When Alicia expresses shock at Kalinda’s lack of sympathy towards others she reads as similar to her, Kalinda replies “because my parents immigrated legally you thought I would be more sympathetic to someone who immigrated illegally.” This moment disrupts the way people of color are often generically grouped, and expected to stand in as representatives for one another. At the same time, these plots evidence some of the ways citizenship functions to deem certain modes of entry, and certain bodies, worthy. By having properly assimilated, exceptional children, the parents also deserve to be in the U.S. Kalinda helps with the case regardless of her motivation. She even quips

“[s]o you're the pushover, I'm the one who actually does the work?” This self-referential comment illustrates the labor bisexual characters perform in workplace dramas through

“anchoring their experiences to more dominant White characters highlight their 91 contributions to the workplace but restrains them from occupying the center of the narrative” (Meyer 370).

Kalinda’s entry into Indian immigrant culture serves as a means to further explore how the show theorizes identity more broadly, and Kalinda’s sexual identity specifically.

Concerned that Alicia may get behind by focusing on pro-bono work, Kalinda also tricks

Cary into helping on the case. It ends up bringing them to a Sari shop where a shopkeeper speaks to Kalinda in Hindi. Cary impatiently asks what was said to which she replies, “I don’t know, I don’t speak Hindi” (“Mock”). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Cary is the show’s most unmarked and privileged subject, and is shocked that Kalinda can not provide inside access and voices his frustration saying “[a]hhh, seriously Kalinda, where is your cultural identity?” Her “absence” of cultural identity acts a means to address her lack of an openly articulated sexual identity. A major part of Kalinda’s success as an investigator is how she manages to traverse various worlds, from gay club scenes, to college campuses, to pretending she is buying suburban real estate with an air of belonging. In spite of being clad in a leather jacket, mini-skirt and stiletto boots she goes unquestioned beyond official and unofficial lines that demarcate space. But, in this space, one in which Cary perceives she really should belong, she falls short. Kalinda’s character simultaneously personifies “the postmodern fantasy of flexibility” (Halberstam) while also suggesting its limits.

Opportunism and (Bisexual) Privilege

An examination of the courtroom as a bisexual space that offers theorizations of identity as partial, dynamic, and shifting elucidates how privilege mediates the ways opportunism becomes visible on certain bodies and not others. One of the ways bisexuality is imagined as particularly opportunistic is through the concept of bisexual privilege. Cases like Ivor’s, that place bisexuals in a very literal limbo between heterosexual institutions and newly won same-sex rights, undermine notions that straight privilege can protect bisexuals, even when they are in opposite sex relationships. This case also illustrates how Homonationalism has particular implications in relationship to citizenship claims of those who do not fall along monosexual lines.

The notion of bisexual privilege relies on the assumption of the inherent desirability of passing (Kafer) and denies the physical, emotional and psychic dangers associated with passing. The expectations of happiness may also require a certain ability to pass, one that means acting according to happiness scripts that rely on individuals to manage their own stigma. Returning to the offices of Lockhart/Gardner as the negotiation of Kalinda’s salary demands continues, Will tells Kalinda he can meet her demands if she signs an exclusive contract, “but, otherwise,” he warns, “your freedom costs you” (“State of the

Union”). Kalinda’s freedom is already costing her. While falling outside frameworks of legibility offers certain freedoms and an access to privacy (Halberstam 8), this positionality also has consequences. The courtroom offers a metaphor for bisexual space that reveals the contingency of desire and identity, while also illustrating the material stakes associated with falling out of line. 93

Conclusion: Programming the Bisexual Look

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that neither subjectivity nor objectivity can be absolute or discrete [has led] lead some to refer to his reworking of phenomenology as the “philosophy of ambiguity” (Silverman 76). Perhaps this characterization was first uttered as a sort of philosophical schoolyard name-calling, which I like to imagine had minimal impact since Merleau-Ponty was pretty shameless in passionate embrace of the ambiguous. Still, when one of the professors on his dissertation committee suggested he might be more successful expressing his ideas through his beloved art forms (painting and literature) than in philosophical texts, I can only imagine (empathize) that it had to sting (Silverman 78). With this anecdote in mind, it is not difficult to consider Merleau-

Ponty’s history as a queer one; he was basically told he was not decisive enough to do philosophy proper and should pick up a paint brush or a quill pen. Such a historical recounting would always be incomplete due to its contemporary reframing and attendant inability to encompass “the excess of what we live over what has already been said”

(Phenomenology, Language and Sociology 83).

Like Merleau-Ponty’s nay-sayers I questioned if the format of academic writing was best suited for conveying a phenomenological approach to bisexual representation.

When I was conceiving of this project I wondered if I would not be better off exploring these themes through a more conventionally expressive creative medium-one where I could be less beholden to the way language renders ideas so concretely. At the same time, knowing I would simultaneously be programming the bisexual short film program for 94 Frameline: The San International LGBT Film Festival, I was anxious about what it would mean to write a thesis that was critical of the politics of LGBT representation. By introducing even more ways to think critically about representation I was worried I would spoil this already complicated experience.

For the past three years, the overlapping deadlines and demands of finals and screening short films has left me simultaneously pressed for time, inspired, and mildly terrified by the accountability associated with presenting work in a public space. As a co­ curator of “Bi Shorts” I not only control what is put in front of the audience but also write about the films for the program, offering a preview and some unavoidable spoiling of what is to come. During the event itself we introduce the program at the beginning and facilitate a Q and A with filmmakers at the end. These moments of literally having the mic have always been daunting. The further I have immersed myself in the language and ideas of academia generally, and of bisexual representation specifically, the more difficult this task has become.

During the week-long festival I also experience other screenings and my own as an audience member, privy to the murmurings of the crowd with whom I am in proximity and community. The desire to please, to make others happy, to fall “inline” with what may be a rather unruly bunch, is visceral. And yet, the possibility of pleasing everyone, or even anyone, feels impossible and presumptuous. It is a curious feeling to exhibit work under a certain banner, one that you know means something different to everyone who also gathers under it. The question of who our audience is looms over the decision­ making process and remains largely unanswered, even as we stand in front of the crowd. 95 Hemmings’ characterization of bisexual community organizing as “spaces-in-difference,”

Munoz’s work on disidentification, and phenomenological readings of interactive media consumption have been useful tools in imagining a non-homogeneous audience of film festival goers and television watchers alike. Part of what makes television such a rich text is how it imagines, and interpolates, so many audiences at once while remaining susceptible to unintended reads and modes of reception and identification. Television viewing is also collective, even when not simultaneous or in shared spaces, and it offers points of overlap other than the contact of physical bodies in space that exists at the film

festival. I note this difference not to imply more value to one mode of viewing than another, but to underscore how reception and representation are impacted by what

surrounds them.

In some ways the history of Frameline reflects the general trends in the LGBT movement from a more radical critical politics to an assimilationist rights-based focus. It can also be narrativised as an illustration of spaces won for inclusion and the uneven progress, backsliding, and partiality of such historical reads. Frameline Festival’s origins are commonly traced to 1977 when the radical artistic collective Persistence of Vision hosted a free screening titled “Gay Film Festival of Super-8 films" which may have been the first gay film festival in the world (Stryker 365). After what has been historicized as a

“lesbian uprising” in the early 1980s Frameline expanded its name to include Lesbian in

1982 and brought on a guest curator in order to include this new “women’s” programming (Stryker 367). The historical pattern of groups demanding and eventually gaining inclusion has been consistent along with the staffing practices relating to them. 96 Newer programs, like the Bisexual Shorts program, are often curated by volunteers from that community. This concurrent process of inclusion and marginalization satisfies the quota demands of neoliberal multicultural ism by including and managing diversity but not necessarily redistributing power or resources (Nabir 27). Having named Trans, Bi,

P.O.C. and international programs offers valuable representational space, while possibly reifying the centrality of white, North-American, cisgendered, monosexual stories. These programming practices can relegate certain individuals to the role of expert in their own identity category, rather than centering stories of marginalized groups or allowing for different foci. The way programs are organized not only reflects existent divisions and hierarchies within the communities these ways of organizing also serve to reify these separations and power structures both by literally dividing audiences across screenings and venues but also by narrowly defining what constitutes “Queer Cinema.” This project was motivated, in part, by my discomfort and ambivalence around my own identity-based expert status. I sought a greater knowledge of bisexual representation across media to bolster my internal justifications for inhabiting this representative space. One reason I keep returning to phenomenology in thinking about bisexual representation is because it gives me a way to contemplate my own placement, as someone who experiences themselves within the world of bisexual representation, while also observing that world as if it were outside.

Since my sister April and I became guest curators of “Bi-Shorts” in 2009, envelopes with DVDs start appearing in our mailboxes and emails with links to short films flood our inboxes every spring. I am filled with excitement, hope and dread as to 97 what shorts will make their way to us. We receive films that can be flagged as “bisexual” at least one of three ways, by the filmmakers themselves who check a bisexual box relating to content or their own personal identification as bisexual or by the general screening committee deciding a given film has “bisexual” content. We also solicit films through personal networks and have the option to view multiple online submissions that are not pre-vetted. Our initial process is to screen the first round of potential films as

Frameline sends them our way so as not to compete with other programs. Over time we have developed a kind of informal “coding” process that reflects the major, often overlapping, tropes of bisexual representation: threesomes, love triangles, and affairs. By identifying these themes we do not dismiss work that includes them. Firstly, we would end up with little to screen. Secondly, these remain compelling narratives that can offer up important challenges to “the superiority of a temporally based single sexual partnership” (Di-Pramaggiore 16) while also exposing some of the temporal limitations of visibility.

Noticing how short-format, independent cinema so often relies on the same tropes of mainstream media led me to look more specifically at how genre and format impact bisexual representation. The Good Wife, as a serial drama, offers an example of how bisexual representation might take shape when the temporal demands of total running time were less restrictive. As I have shown throughout, by placing Kalinda in love triangles with men and women within a single episode, the show conforms to some familiar tropes. At the same time it exceeds these tropes through layered plotlines that point to the contingency and complexity of desire at large. Thinking more specifically 98 about what defines excess and gratuity has allowed me to reevaluate some of my own embedded beliefs about the limits of representation and what bodies, desires, actions, and stories I deem representable.

In contrast to the ongoing character development along multiple plot lines that serial dramas enable, narrative short films generally have one central plot or even depict just one contained scene. Short films can be astoundingly ambitious in the breadth of plot and character they convey, which is often accomplished by employing alternative temporalities, rather than sticking to a conventional narrative progression. By employing flashbacks, dreamscapes, and counter-realities while remaining anchored to a central time, place, or character, bisexual short cinema blurs some of the boundaries between experimental and narrative forms. Through these mixed formats, even very short films include explicitly bisexual characters, while avoiding the demands for a simultaneous, gender-balanced attraction. Some films I read as bisexual epistemologically, as they offer a means of thinking outside of an either/or paradigm and suggest a definition of bisexual cinema that does not rely on literal markers of desire or action across normative gender lines. In constellation, short films present an often jarring temporal landscape that causes audiences to constantly adjust and readjust their relations to time while watching one program. The fragmented and incomplete feeling for the viewer can offer an experience that is less susceptible to monosexual straightening readings of heterosexuality and also homonormative, linear, coming out narratives.

Isolating each film as a discrete experience may seem a necessary step for making screening choices, but the ultimate product is cumulative which allows for, and even 99 encourages, a space for contradiction. When we create a program, we attempt to always keep that in mind, watching films in different orders and combinations. This practice can highlight the value of films that may feel slightly incomplete or unresolved as potentially exposing some of the partiality of identity rather than the limitations of the format.

Ordering can also allow for more tidily resolved narratives to open up a bit. We make our final decisions by examining how flow will impact the program. There are also elements of flow that are entirely out of our control as some format issues can impact the order films are shown in and Frameline has its own advertisers to consider.

The political ramifications of sponsorship, as well as how they may impact screening decisions, have come to a head in recent years. Activists have pointed to

Frameline’s increasingly corporate sponsorship and alliance with certain foreign consulates, particularly Israel, as evidence of pinkwashing and homonationalism. The programming practices of Frameline reflect and promote divisions in the LGBT community while also offering spaces of contact and overlapping of divergent audiences.

The LGBT Film Festival presents a fertile ground to explore the paradox of perception.

As audience members we experience the festival as bodies in a particular space, seeing and being seen, and also viewing media that is attempting to reflect “us.” Richard Fung explains that the LGBT Film Festival offers, what he calls a “double representation” since queer visibility is taking place on and in front of the screen- the festival is a space that shows a community to itself (75). This concept speaks to the paradox of perception, as an experience of being a part of the world we perceive (Merleau-Ponty,

Phenomenology o f Perception 61). Because of this double representation the 100 programming of a festival “also programs the audience and the community” rendering the

LGBT Film Festival an important site for community building and conflict (Fung 75).

The LGBT film festival is a site marked by the same visibility politics I have discussed throughout this thesis. Notions of sexual identity as innate and fixed vs. anti- essentialist, queer critiques are played out through audience response, programming structures, and the curatorial process (Zielinski l).The identity-based Film Festival remains generally conceptualized in positivist terms, as a claiming of space both representationally and physically and as a celebration of community pride. The practice of dividing programming by lesbian and gay, or boy and girl, content is so common to the

LGBT film festival circuit that it passes as an almost inevitable ordering. Despite this ubiquitous practice some festivals, such as New York’s Mix and Toronto’s Queer West, organized around themes, cinematic styles or other more abstract groupings focusing more on what a queer counterpublic “does” as they view the content than offering content that represents that public. At Frameline, even programs that have another theme

{International, Comedic, Sports) are often also organized across sexual identity lines. The major short film programs are divided into the playfully titled “fun in boys (or girls) shorts” and are screened twice at the historic Castro Theatre during the weekends. The

Bisexual and Transgender short programs are screened once on a weeknight at smaller venues outside of the Castro district. It is impossible to predict what a screenings’ popularity would be without accounting for its time slot, location and marketing. Through these decisions festival staff exercise an immense amount of power in programing “the audience and the community” (Fung 75). 101 Even though the entire festival courts a non-heterosexual viewership, the general anxiety over lack of representation shows how literal visibility demands, like anti- queerbaiting, can also impact “queer” spaces. I have been told by other programmers that, at the very least, they look for a quality “gay or lesbian kiss” as a criteria for inclusion of short format pieces. This is a tempting criteria, one that hopes to satisfy an audience that remains on the sidelines of mainstream representation, still looking for images that reflect them. By giving the kiss itself an orientation, it implies that one can see, from the outside, what dynamic is at play in a kiss. At the same time, it implies a legibility that can too greatly limit what images are included. By this criteria certain episodes of The Good Wife could be included in a screening. Kalinda’s kisses could be read as lesbian, and why not if they are oriented towards lesbians. Eli’s disorienting courtships, on the other hand, would not make the cut, since this kiss criteria overlooks the pleasure and critical work camp does by exposing heterosexuality’s idiosyncrasies, rather than letting it always stand in as the central unmarked norm. For a variety of reasons, characters like Eli and

Kalinda fall short of the demands for a domesticated and proudly out sexual subject, and in doing so, they spoil some of the progress narratives of visibility politics. Mainstream

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