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