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Abstract
This essay examines the civilizing rhetorics performed on Bravo's reality television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the role they play in processes of queer worldmaking. We contend that despite charges of assimilation and depoliticization, Queer Eye enacts an “uncivil” tongue, opening up a discursive space for the circulation of nonnormative forms of desire. These performances of desire reimagine relationships between bodies, surfaces, spaces, and pleasure. In doing so, Queer Eye's uncivil tongue provokes a rethinking of desire itself—a strategy that, we argue, is integral to the cultivation of a queer public culture. This essay, then, extends critical scholarship pertaining to publics, performance, and queer worldmaking.
Notes
1. The popularity of the Fab Five is also credited with the development of Logo, the country's first all gay-themed cable network (CitationFlint 7BF).
2. The Fab Five have also appeared on CNN, E!, Today, Barbara Walters Presents the Top 10 Most Fascinating People of 2003, Regis and Kelly, the Emmy's, and Good Morning, Miami. In addition to generating a book series, CD, music video, DVDs, and calendars, Queer Eye inspired a sister spin-off, Queer Eye for the Straight Gal, and an on-line forum Queer Eye for the Straight Couple (Lettellier 6 ). Queer Eye has also been spoofed a number of times, including Comedy Central's South Park and the network's three-episode parody, Straight Plan for the Gay Man. CitationStraight Hike for the Butch Dyke, an independent film that circulated in gay and lesbian film festivals during 2004, borrows the make-over format only to lampoon the genre itself (CitationStanley).
3. Our use of the term “queer” is informed by scholarship that distinguishes queer politics from gay and lesbian civil rights politics (CitationCohen; Warner Trouble). “Queer politics” are an anti-assimilationist politics signaling nonnormative sexual practices and desires, as well as nonnormative gender categories. By heteronormativity, we mean the imaginary (as well as legalistic) rules about sex and intimate relationships that render normative those practices and relationship forms that create a moral hierarchy around sex. These “regimes of the normal” (Warner Trouble) prevent sexual autonomy by regulating as normal such practices as monogamy, sex within the couple form, sex within marriage, sex in private spaces, and noncommercial sex. All of these could be practiced by or aspired to by individuals regardless of their sexual identity. Hence, heteronormativity cannot be reduced to the cultural privileging of heterosexuality. As Berlant and Warner write, “by making sex seem irrelevant or merely personal heteronormative conventions of intimacy block the building of nonnormative or explicit public sexual cultures” (193).
4. Our analysis is primarily based on 22 episodes spanning the first four seasons of Queer Eye (2003–06).
5. CitationCastiglia and Reed, however, read Will and Grace as activating queer public memory.
6. The political philosophy “fitness for self-governance” has informed immigration policy since 1790, becoming one of the most powerful, enduring discourses designating certain people “fit” and others “unfit” for domains of public life and the demands of citizenship (CitationJacobson).
7. For further discussion of this point, see CitationPearson and Reich.
8. In a scene that was edited out of the episode with the Boston Red Sox, pitcher Tim Wakefield tells his stylist not to make him into a “girlie-man.” This scene was included as bonus footage in the DVD version of this episode (CitationQueer Eye for the Red Sox).
9. Grosz traces the intellectual genealogy of this tradition to Alphonso Lingis, Baruch Spinoza, and Deleuze and Guattari.
10. The concept of desire Grosz discusses is not reflected in Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which argues that in industrialized societies, libidinal energies are sublimated and redirected into mass consumption. For an application of CitationMarcuse's thesis to Queer Eye, see Whitney (Citation2006).
11. On the way discourses of hegemonic masculinity discipline homosexuality within major league baseball, see Butterworth (Citation2006) and Trujillo (1992).
12. Thanks to Jeff Sens for discussing this point.
13. We are not implying that a queer world is based solely on one mode of address, such as witty or flirty banter, as generosity and compassion also mark the Fab Five's interactions with the straight men.
14. Fortune magazine announced that Queer Eye was “making over the economy” when several manufacturers featured on the show reported significant increases in sales. According to a study cited in Fortune, “following a new episode of Queer Eye, straight men were five times more likely to go shopping than women” (CitationFlorian).
15. Our point here is in conversation with lines of inquiry that problematize the cultural tendency to base sexuality on the gender of the person desired. Eve Sedgwick, for example, observes one could be “oriented” toward someone or something based on criteria other than gender, such as “preferences for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc.” (CitationSedgwick 8).
16. As Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien put it, “the European construction of sexuality coincides with the epoch of imperialism and the two inter-connect” (qtd. in Somerville Citation2000, p. 5).
17. As Berlant and Freeman aptly point out, it seems that “only the public discipline of gayness keeps civilization from ‘melt[ing] back into the primeval ooze’” (200). Berlant and Freeman are quoting the 1990 Queer Nation manifesto (CitationAnonymous Queers), “I Hate Straights,” which circulated in several gay-pride parades in the US that summer.
18. For the Human Rights Campaign's agenda, see their website, www.hrc.org
19. If Eskridge's historical claim is any indication, appeals to civilization in this way also are predicated on a willful forgetting of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and queer activism of the 1990s.
20. Marriage ceremonies or marriage proposals have been the focus of ten out of nearly one hundred episodes. See episode guide for Queer Eye at IMDB: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358332/episodes>.
21. In several other episodes, the Fab Five also construct other male bodies of color in problematic ways. For instance, a Latino make-over subject is characterized as oversexed, while an Asian American male is emasculated by references that function to “make up for” the Fab Five's perception that he lacks a large penis (Citation“An Opening”).
22. See Anne CitationMcClintock's Imperial Leather.
23. We are in agreement with CitationMartin F. Manalansan IV, who states, “The idea of ‘making-over’ the queer world—from a world of marginalized people treated like aliens into a supposedly nurturing and more tolerant realm—needs to be examined in the face of the experiences of queer immigrants of color” (108).
24. For a critical discussion in the New York Times about Hussein's execution, see “CitationThe Debacle in the Gallows” On George Bush's defense of the execution, see Citation“Celebrations Follow Hussein's Hanging.”