Queering Street: Homosociality, Masculinity, and Disability in Friday Night Lights

Abstract

Gender and ability are integral to the cultural significance of sport, but contemporary media depictions of high school athletes rarely direct attention to the interaction of these issues. In contrast, the critically acclaimed television series Friday Night Lights (FNL) presents a complex and problematic portrayal of masculinity, disability, and sport. Our analysis explores how its disability imagery and themes obscure displays that inform a subtext of homoerotics. Bringing queer and disability theory together, we craft a lens for reading the show's coordination of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's analysis of homosociality to discuss specific erotic triangles in FNL's first season, we examine how its displays of homosocial desire and disability interact. Erotic triangles appear throughout the series and generate much of the show's dramatic appeal. A central plotline of the first season revolves around high school quarterback Jason Street, who becomes quadriplegic after a football injury in the pilot episode. Street's disability changes his relationships with the other main characters and dramatically transforms his place in the show's erotic triangles. Reading Street's disability story as a queer narrative, we emphasize the series’ display of contests between homosociality and homoerotics, emasculation and rehabilitation, and athletics and disability.

Keywords:

• Disability
• Erotic Triangles
• Friday Night Lights
• Homosociality
• Queer Theory

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and insights. An early version of this article was presented at 2010 National Communication Association Convention in San Francisco, California.

Notes

Some noteworthy examples of films that portray high school football in this way include Remember the Titans (2000), All the Right Moves (1983), Johnny Be Good (1988), Varsity Blues (1999), and Wildcats (1986).

In our emphasis on ableism and heterosexism we do not wish to suggest the absence— or relative unimportance—of racism and classism in the Friday Night Lights book, film, and television series. Bissinger's book deals extensively with the racial and class dynamics of the high school football scene in Texas. His chapter “Black and White” describes the explicitly racial divides that have historically shaped the town and its local football teams, and several of the stories involve class issues. For example, the Permian Panthers become a locus of hope for Odessa as it struggles with the decimated economy of the oil industry in the late 1980s, and several of the players’ families live in impoverished communities. Generally race and class play an enormous role in both contemporary masculinity and sport, and substantial scholarship illuminates these relationships. Some noteworthy examples include Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald's collection Reading Sport (2000), William C. Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (2006), Earl Smith's Race, Sport, and the American Dream (2009), and the essays of Thomas P. Oates (2007) and his collaboration with Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2004). In our present paper we direct our attention to the less examined relationships of disability, sport, and masculinity, and we hope that our research will add to and support the body of work that engages hegemony and oppression in various forms.

The setting should not be confused with the nonfictional town of Dillon, Texas, which has not appeared on highway maps since the 1930s (Jennings, 2011). Like Bissinger's nonfiction book, the film version of the narrative was also set in Odessa, but like the television series it is a work of fiction.

Echoing Bissinger's unvarnished depiction of high school football, the mis-en-scene of the show presents a gritty realism. Hand held camera shots, realistic sets, and backdrops displaying everyday locations conveyed the impression that the show provided an accurate glimpse into the life of a working-class mid-sized town in Texas.

Although we emphasize FNL's homosocial and homoerotic aspects, we maintain that the term “queer” does not necessarily imply “gay” or “homosexual.” We embrace queer theory to challenge compulsory heteronormativity by exposing its links to compulsory able-bodiedness. In this context, “queer” identifies critical orientations that generate nonnormative readings to interrogate these compulsory systems. Such orientations include even the “queer heterosexual” positions that embrace non(hetero)normative perspectives and undermine hegemonic masculinity.

Equipment designed to protect players forms a notable exception, particularly in contact sports such as football and hockey. But accepting this technology as a necessary part of the game enacts an ableist logic that makes exceptions to the general rule so as to prevent disabling injury. Players in some contact sports, quad rugby for example, eschew protective helmets and padding, rejecting this ableist logic and accepting their identity as disabled athletes (Lindemann & Cherney, 2008). The case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius provides several examples of the range of arguments made against using prostheses in sport. In 2012 Pistorius became the first person to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but earlier he had unsuccessfully appealed for the right to use his prosthetic legs and compete in the 2008 Summer Olympics (see Jones & Wilson, 2009; Swartz & Watermeyer, 2008). Similarly, the legal battle over whether professional golfer Casey Martin should be allowed to use a golf cart in PGA Tour events contained many of the standard arguments against assistive devices (Cherney, 2003).

In other work the first author examines the rhetoric of “normal is natural” in more depth (Cherney, 2011). In general, the rhetorical construction of “normal” obscures its artificiality by treating it as a “natural” category. When views of and assumptions about normalcy become naturalized, they resist recognition as extensions of ableist discrimination.

The roots of “rehabilitation” are the Latin re (“again”) and habitare (Online Etymology Dictionary, “Rehabilitation,” n.d.). As habitare can be translated as “to dwell,” or “to be fit,” Latin ties the concepts of dwelling and fitness to location. Hence the English word “habitat”—literally the third person singular present indicative of habitare—which names the place where an organism is best adapted to live (Online Etymology Dictionary, “Habitat,” n.d.).

This shot was among the handful chosen to be the background for the opening credit sequence used in the second season of FNL, which suggests its iconic significance in the series.

The two triangles we examine developed simultaneously in the television show, narratively reinforcing their connection. Additionally, this makes our examination of each in turn asynchronous, and many of the events described below happen before those described above.

In a classic scene in the boldly feminist film (for the time) Thelma and Louise (1991), the two protagonists pass a gasoline tanker truck bearing these flaps while driving on the highway. They vent their disgust of the misogynist image and the harassment it implies by forcing the truck to leave the road, ridiculing and humiliating the driver, and then firing at the tank causing it to explode. The violent and total destruction of the vehicle marked by this sexist symbol testifies to the latter's hypermasculine connotations. Certainly, the mudflap girl icon can be argued to operate primarily in the culture of White heteromasculinity, and its connection with the “good ol’ boy” network of truckers reinforces this. As noted above, the racial and class dynamics in FNL are highly developed and complex. See note 2.

In both contexts, the users display the icon as a “pink herring” (Morris, 2002), suggesting that—on some level—both Herc and the truckers fear they might be labeled as gay. In the truckers’ case, this potential may arise from the nature of the job; the predominantly male profession is known for drivers’ fraternal association via citizens band (CB) radios, working conditions that take them away from their wives or girlfriends for extended periods of time, and the common practice of pairing experienced male drivers with neophyte male apprentices.

For example, the series differs from mainstream (ableist) shows by portraying a paraplegic character who does not conform to conventional stereotypes of disability (Longmore, 1987; Norden, 1994). Additionally, the show frequently referenced scenes appearing in Jeffrey Mandel, Dana Adam Shapiro, and Henry Alex Rubin's Academy Award Nominated documentary Murderball (2005). Mark Zupan, the star of that documentary, even made a brief cameo appearance in the second episode of the second season of FNL. In earlier work, we discussed the ways that this film challenges ableist perspectives and ways of seeing (Cherney & Lindemann, 2009). While the content of several FNL scenes replicated Murderball, many of its innovative cinematic devices and its unconventional gaze remain unique to the documentary film.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James L. Cherney

James L. Cherney (PhD, Indiana University) is an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Kurt Lindemann

Kurt Lindemann (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University, in San Diego, California.