Saturday, November 29, 2014
Every Single Week
According to Anna McCarthy, ABC’s president, Robert A Iger, said of Ellen that it “became a program about a character who was gay every single week, and… that was too much for people.” McCarthy describes this perspective as maintaining the “fantasy of queer identity as something that can be switched on for special occasions” along with a “fear of a quotidian, ongoing lesbian life on television.” Since Ellen’s coming out episode in 1997, a number of queer characters, generally secondary characters, have appeared on both broadcast and cable television. Choose a program with a queer character from the 2000s that you are familiar with and examine whether or not that character’s relationship to their sexuality is truly serialized or only focused on during “special occasions,” whether to play up a particular stance on sexual identity or for eroticizing reasons.
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In the television show Modern Family there is a queer couple, Mitchell and Cameron. Both of these characters I believe have a truly serialized relationship with their sexuality. Unlike in the television show Ellen, where McCarthy argues that it is an example, which complicates our notions of “gay television” and queer history through the conflicting discourses that surrounded it, Modern Family does not complicate our notions of queer history and “gay television”. Ellen showed how queerness could only be turned on for special events, but even with the special events there was somehow too much week-to-week tension between queer history as interruptive event or as an abbility to apply narration to the everyday lives of normal people. On the contrary, Mitchell and Cameron are seen as a homosexual couple in every episode; there is no wavering back and forth on their relationships with their sexuality. In her article, McCarthy talks about soon after Ellen came out as being “gay,” the show did not survive much longer on the air. However, Cameron and Mitchell have been “gay” since the beginning of Modern Family’s premiere and the show has been running six seasons so far. Since Modern Family is airing during a very different time than Ellen did in socially accepting respects, this could be a possibility as to why the representation of a serial homosexual couple today survives on television easier than a gay woman in the 1990s.
ReplyDeleteThe first show I remember being invested in, personally, that also had a prominent gay character was Greys Anatomy. I'd watched Will & Grace quite a bit, which fed heavily into the effeminate gay male stereotype, but I had never seen a lesbian (or bi) character played honestly onscreen. I stopped watching the soap-y series after the third tragic plane crash (I sobbed for so long after one season finale that my mother asked me to stop watching the show), but when reading this question, I instantly remembered the representation of lesbian characters, Dr. Callie Torres and her various partners, both men and women. Her eventual wife, Arizona, becomes a central part of the plotline.
ReplyDeleteDr. Torres' identity was certainly serialized and sensationalized, as an attractive woman who realizes her attraction for another woman fairly late in life while also in love with Dr. O'Malley (who came out as gay in real life, midway through the series). In the second season, when she was discovering her passions, it was a huge deal because not only was she in love with two people, she was in love with a man and a woman. Her bisexuality was played up and several jokes about threesomes were made by "Dr. McSteamy," the sex-addict salt 'n pepper hair doctor (opposite of McDreamy). A quick google search of "Dr. Torres" reveals a montage of Dr. Torres and her longtime partner, Arizona, set to the Kings of Leon song, "Sex on Fire." While their love affair certainly was eroticized in a way to gain viewers (steamy sex scenes), the fact that their relationship became a pivotal one in the cast, through sickness and health, also shows that it was accomplishing more than just eye-candy. Their storyline stretched over four seasons, alongside straight couples, and the effect of their same-sex partnership lost it's sensationalized glitter and became a relationship, with ups and downs, just as the straight relationships were portrayed. It was crucial that the same-sex nature of it wasn't constantly reiterated.
While Grey's Anatomy is an extremely dramatized primetime soap, it did accomplish many character development goals that other shows failed to do-- it introduced a lesbian character quickly, shockingly, but then another, and it made them huge. It kept them, as accomplished doctors, friends, lovers and humans, not sensationalized objects.
One of my favorite shows is BBC 3’s In The Flesh, which as of right now has run for only two seasons. The basic premise involves a small English town that experienced “The Rising”, a period of time where everyone who had died in 2009 was reanimated (essentially the show’s take on a zombie apocalypse). The citizens of England are able to capture the undead and give them treatment to allow them to assimilate back into society, where they face heavy prejudice for what they did during The Rising (eat people’s brains, etc. you know, zombie stuff). Many members of the community feel angry, threatened, and as though these “partially deceased” (the PC term for zombie) should not be allowed to re-enter society.
ReplyDeleteThe main character, Kieren Walker, is a PDS (partially deceased syndrome) sufferer, and also queer. Throughout the first season, it is not mentioned explicitly in any terms--there is no coming out storyline, nor does the character ever actually say that he is queer. However, the entire first season deals with his unresolved feelings for his ex-boyfriend Rick, who also died and was reanimated during The Rising. Kieren and his family are incredibly nonchalant over his queerness, and the plot never focuses on issues that Kieren has explicitly because he is queer, but merely because he was in a bad relationship--one that easily could have been a heterosexual relationship.
In the second season, a new love interest for Kieren is introduced, named Simon. Simon, like Kieren, is queer and it is hinted that past issues he had (pre-his death and subsequent reanimation) were due to bullying. homophobia, and depression related to that queerness. However, the present storyline as Kieren’s love interest is introduced with as little fanfare as any new heterosexual love interest would be. The two have a “meet-cute” and get closer amidst the strife in their village. Once they begin their affair, Kieren brings Simon to his home to meet his parents, and any of the issues presented stem not from the fact their son brought home another man, but because of Simon’s undead status.
In The Flesh addresses queerness in a way that does not erase it, or the issues that can stem from prejudices against it, but still normalizes it in a healthy way. In such a fantastical setting, Kieren could easily have been heterosexual, and the storylines would be the same or similar. That Kieren and Simon’s queerness is seen as nothing out of the ordinary by both them and their families demonstrates the show’s unwillingness to exploit their sexuality for plot drama or sexualize or eroticize the queer characters for ratings.
Popular discourse has it that the sitcom Will & Grace was a groundbreaking moment in television history because it celebrated openly gay characters on network TV. But as McCarthy’s article points out, gay characters were not exactly unprecedented by the time Will & Grace appeared - even before Ellen gay characters appeared on screen, albeit in truncated storylines. Will & Grace, it can probably be argued, was one of the first to consistently foreground the sexual identities of its characters. Ellen, on the other hand, based on McCarthy’s statements, seems to have oscillated between a few episodes of quotidian gayness, “special occasion” gay episodes, or complete avoidance of sexual orientation. McCarthy’s text in part analyzes queer TV within a rubric of serialization versus “special occasion” episodes wherein serialization designates shows that allow a “gay experience” to unfold over several episodes and “special occasion” episodes make of sexual orientation a one-time topic of the week. I believe Will & Grace exists somewhere midway between these two: its male protagonists, Will and Jack, are two gay buddies living in New York and in that respect the show serializes a gay experience. But in the character of Jack I see a spectacle of gayness, a stereotype who needs no ongoing narrative to be appealing because of his function as buffoon and foil to Will’s “straight-acting” persona. The gayness of Jack’s identity is frequently addressed by Will himself whose own gayness in turn is clearly meant to make him an authority on what gayness is. At the same time, Jack’s performance is set in opposition to Will’s. And if Will is a character whose ongoing story matters to Will & Grace, and Jack is a character whose story matters not one bit, then Will’s performance is privileged in that it is attached to a character who can continually engage audiences, and Jack’s is underprivileged because it is attached to a character who appears sporadically and most often in relation to Will. Will then is more likely to be read as a believable and therefore more respectable character than Jack who is far too two-dimensional to be believable. (Although Jack still might have more of a presence on the show, if only because Will is so boring).
ReplyDeleteThe special “gays on TV” event embodied by Jack and the jokes that involve him is enunciated so relentlessly it puts a damper on the possibility of watching the show and just accepting that these men kiss, hold hands, and have sex with other men. The jokes seem to avoid overtly describing the sex in the sex lives of its protagonists, which would probably be the only way to objectively deal with homosexuality, choosing instead to ridicule their “gay” performances. These performances are defined as gay by the characters themselves. In a scene from the episode "Will on Ice," Jack complains to Will that he no longer enjoys the company of Grace because all she talks about are things like “how pastels are the new earth tones.” Will reproves Jack saying, “You love to talk about that kind of stuff.” Jack replies, “I’m not that gay.” “Yeah, you are,” says Will and the scene ends… What’s the joke here? It’s that Jack is denying the fact that he typically engages in a discourse that is here defined by Will as gay, an adjective that Jack supposedly embodies completely. In other words, Jack is speaking in bad faith. But in order for the joke to work one has to assume there are indeed qualities, such as an interest in chromatology, that define gayness. Then one can say, “Well, Jack is gay, here are qualities Gay Will has defined as gay, Jack must have these qualities.” Not only is this a naive and prescriptive way of dealing with gay characters, it makes a spectacle of these stereotypes by mobilizing them for humor's sake. Now, I acknowledge that there gay cultures exist and from these there are recurring themes and even mannerisms that might be and probably should be drawn upon in order to paint a truthful image of any of those cultures. But what Will & Grace does, especially in the character of Jack, is lock down an image of absolute gayness. And then it generates humor out of the recognition of that image. This alone would not make it the heteronormative bullshit I think the show really is, however. What really makes it the heteronormative bullshit it is is its insistence on never letting Jack be involved, queer performance and all, in situations that do not make his identity and performance of that identity the butt of a joke. The humor in any situation that Jack is involved in lies in the fact of his performance. Will, on the other hand, gets to be involved in funny situations with Grace that go beyond identity, that don’t make identity the punchline, and it can easily be imagined that the reason Will has this right is because his performance doesn’t embody salient difference. Difference is what Jack represents on the show, but a difference that can be comfortably defined on heterosexual terms as infantile and zany. This is gayness - whatever that means - exoticized,
ReplyDeleteWhile Will & Grace at least allows non-heterosexual (and heterosexual is also too reductionist a term) characters to be represented on television, it is of a television that is not yet comfortable with the idea of gays existing within heterosexual cultures. It would rather define homosexuality as a culture outside of the norm (Jack) and praise its assimilationist-driven repression in daily life (Will), dredging deeper boundaries in the sand between what is and isn't normal.
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