On a Queer Day, Rise and Look Around You...

Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, by Alexander Doty

The other day, I was watching television and thinking about how much queerer the medium seems to have become since I was young. Or at least, how much more overtly queer, because as we all know, there’s always been subtext. Great, slashy gobs of it.

What I wanted to read at that point was a book theorising on what it means, culturally, that there is so much more overt queerness on TV (and in movies, and in fiction, especially genre fiction). But we didn’t have anything like that on our bookshelves and it was too late at night to send my partner off to a bookstore to look for it, so instead I read this book, published in 1993, about how much queerness there is/was in mass culture if you only look for it.

Doty covers a fair bit of ground, from the transgressive films of (queer) directors George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner (and who couldn’t make transgressive films with actors like Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, and Cary Grant to work with?) to subtext-laden sit-coms such as I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne and Shirley and Designing Women. He spends some time looking at Paul Rubens’ career as Pee-wee Herman, which I was alas not able to appreciate, never having been interested in Pee-wee as a character, but then moves on to a fascinating reading of the film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Perhaps the most interesting section for me was Doty’s discussion of The Jack Benny Show - a show that I just barely remember, but was far too young to see in the way that Doty does. Talk about a slashfest. Anyone who thinks it was a first that there was so much subtext in Xena: Warrior Princess that it ultimately became maintext really should read what Doty has to say about Jack Benny’s work as the character Jack Benny.

It was the last few paragraphs of Doty’s concluding chapter, however, that are staying with me, because all unknowing, Doty wrote this book just before the beginning of a great shift in the place and positioning of queerness in mass culture products. In the examples Doty discusses, queertext is subtext, or it is comedy – something that is funny precisely because it is not mainstream, even if it becomes maintext in a comedic performance, because the lord of misrule has always permitted the subversion of what is “right” and “normal” for such a limited space. Now, we’ve had Xena and Gabrielle, and Ellen DeGeneres, and Queer as Folk and The L Word and openly queer characters being treated seriously on any number of TV shows, and queer themes being treated with compassion on a goodly number of “crime/medical condition of the week” doctor/lawyer/police/criminalist shows and the outing of slash writing and any number of other direct representations of queer people in media. Sure, there’s still queer subtext that coyly refuses to come out of the closet and comedy based on mainstream discomfort with queerness, but there’s been, I think, a sea-change, and I think it must continue (as long as cultural products remain free of fundamentalist censorship, anyway, but that’s another topic).

And it’s in light of that sea-change that I present the concluding paragraphs from Doty’s 1993 look at queerness in mass culture.

… we queers have become locked into ways of seeing ourselves in relation to mass culture that perpetuate our status as subcultural, parasitic, self-oppressive hangers-on: alienated, yet grabbing for crumbs or crusts and wishfully making this into a whole meal. Have we been, and are we now, little better than collaborators in our own continued invisibility, oppression and marginalization, if in no other ways than by financially supporting capitalist entertainment enterprises and then keeping our queer interpretations of mass culture to ourselves? Or by accepting the idea that our readings and uses of mass culture must always be supplemental or alternative to those of straight culture? Wouldn’t it be more politically and personally beneficial to spend our time, energy and money creating, supporting and critically reading only openly queer cultural products?

But I suppose the idea of being “open” suggests what is finally at stake here. The hopefulness I feel in the face of the frustrating position outlined above hinges on the possibility that the increasing visibility and audibility of queers in relation to mass cultural production and reception will gradually establish academic and nonacademic discourses to challenge and redefine those ways of seeing and using mass culture that now invoke mass culture queerness only to deny/dismiss/contain it in order to maintain straight culture’s pleasures and profits. By publicly articulating our queer positions in and about mass culture, we reveal that capitalist cultural production need not exclusively and inevitably express straightness. If mass culture remains by, for and about straight culture, it will be so through our silences, or by our continued acquiescence to such cultural paradigms as connotations, subcultures, subcultural studies, subtexting, the closet, and other heterocentrist ploys positioning straightness as the norm. Indeed, the more the queerness in and of mass culture is explored, the more the notion that what is “mass” or “popular” is therefore “straight” will become a highly questionable given in cultural studies – and in culture generally, for that matter.

Sometimes it feels good to look back and see that we really have come a long way, even if there’s still a long way left to go.

All in all, it's just another...

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I don’t ordinarily warn about spoilers in these ruminations, but I find that in order to talk about what Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go means to me, I have to discuss and then set aside what it is "about," which means telling you what Ishiguro prefers to let you slowly discover. So my comments are, for once, behind a cut, in case you’d rather read it first for yourself.

( Read more... )

There’s a lot to think about in this novel, and I recommend it to any student of the human condition in modern times.