QUEER THEORY proposes to understand the construction and operation of categories and the identities they shape and contain. In some early applications of queer theory to the analysis of popular culture, queer theorists examined mainstream texts that have been the staples of American popular culture. Alexander Doty, for example, performed a queer archaeology of such texts as Laverne & Shirley, The Jack Benny Program, and I Love Lucy and illustrated one of the central principles of queer theory: Queerness is about destabilizing conventional categories, subverting the identities derived from and normalized by heteropatriarchy. Queerness defies binary and fixed categories such as homo-/heterosexual, female/male, even lesbian/gay. Queerness, in both social performance and in lived identities, interrupts both convention and expectations.
In a queer reading of an apparently straight text, the analyst looks not for lesbian or gay content in any explicit form, but instead for the torquing of expectations about gender and sexuality. Queer theory has been most useful in the analysis and interpretation of texts that presumably are not gay in any overt way but that contain subtexts that are readable to lesbian and gay audiences as queer in some way. Texts thus operate on several levels of meaning and offer different pleasures for different constituencies.
Queer readings, in this sense, fall into three major categories. First are those texts in which lesbian and gay content is probably inadvertent, such as in the now “queerable” comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the early 1960’s. Second are texts in which there is deliberate creative effort to create a gay subtext, readable to the semiotically informed but innocuous to those who cannot decode a floating pink triangle. Finally, some mass mediated culture presents a more self-conscious double layering of gay and non-gay signifiers. Vivid examples of this style can be found in Xena, Warrior Princess and episodes of Ellen during the transitional year before the coming out episode and the explicitly gay final season.
The problem comes in what to do with a text that’s explicitly lesbian or gay in its original intent. How, for example, can queer theory explain the queerness in Ellen after Ellen—both the individual and the character—came out? Does queerness vanish when the text is explicitly lesbian or gay? Can there be a queer reading when the text is already presented as disruptive, unconventional, and subverting of norms of gender and sexuality?
Take the popular sitcom Will & Grace, which appears to create havoc for a queer reading.
The stars of Will & Grace have each, in their own ways, gone to great lengths to establish their individual sexuality over the run of the program. Eric McCormack, who plays the character of Will, keeps his heterosexuality firmly in place, upheld by his happy heterosexual marriage and the recent birth of their child. Debra Messing, who portrays Grace, has established her heterosexual credentials in interviews about her boy-friend. Megan Mullaly, often described as the gayest character on the show, has openly discussed her self-identification as bisexual and her involvement with gay men, but has recently married a man. Sean Hayes remains a complicated and private element of the extra-textual gayness of the program. He has consistently maintained an unwillingness to make a public declaration about his sexuality.
These personal identities of each actor become inscribed on the characters and have the net effect of hardening the stability of the identities, whether gay or non-gay, of each character. In the case of Sean Hayes, his refusal to declare himself has led people to assume that he’s gay. Megan Mullaly’s confession of sexual variety has allowed the character of Karen to remain fluid.
Since Will & Grace made its first appearance on the cultural landscape in 1999, new spaces have opened up on both network and cable television for gay and lesbian expression. Queer as Folk, airing on the cable Showtime network, has significantly rearranged standards and expectations for the portrayal of explicitly sexual gay male relationships, even if these typically involve only white, urban, professional, young, handsome, comfortable, and sexually active gay men. And the images that complicate conventions of gender and sexuality are not confined to lesbians and gay men. The HBO cable network recently aired a made-for-cable movie, Normal, about an ordinary man who, in late-middle married life, comes to terms with the fact that he is, in reality, a transsexual, and seeks surgery to begin life as a woman, all the while maintaining, through their considerable struggles, his long and loving relationship with his wife. Is this gay? Is it queer? Is it subversive?
CBS has completed half a season of a series starring the openly gay actor Nathan Lane playing an openly gay actor who leaves his profession to become a member of Congress. (The series, Charlie Lawrence, has been temporarily shelved by the network.) Promises for more lesbian and gay-themed programs and more and more story lines and characters are practically brimming in development offices in Hollywood. Bianca, the adult daughter of Erica Kane on the daytime drama All My Children has been out as a lesbian for some time, but viewers are promised that she will finally find herself in a relationship with a mysterious and powerful bisexual woman in the final weeks of this year’s season. Showtime plans a lesbian version of Queer as Folk to premiere in the fall season.
These seem like enormous strides for the public representation of lesbians and gay men in popular media. Could it be that we are actually beginning to destabilize the straightjackets of popular representations of lesbians and gay men? Could popular culture be disentangling sexual orientation from gender? There seems to be contradictory evidence. Some indications point to a relaxation of the rigidities of binary gender and sexuality. Other examples suggest simply a transfer of these same binary distinctions and rigidities to a homosexual, rather than a heterosexual, context. Will & Grace provides a striking illustration of this process in action.
Much has been made of the flirtation between the characters of Will and Grace, of Grace’s romantic obsession with Will, of Will’s nearly celibate life, and of the ways in which their friendship both supersedes and sabotages other potential social and romantic connections. Even more has been made of the character of Jack, whose flamboyance and over-the-top stereotypical portrayal of a gay man has provoked considerable public disapproval and much criticism from gay people. Through Jack, the presentation of gayness has become no longer shocking, or at least somewhat less shocking. Gayness, in this particular packaging, is not only palatable; it is mainstream. In simple and complex ways, the gayness of Will & Grace is precisely not “queer,” not subversive, not disruptive. There is a queer subtext in Will & Grace, but it’s contained inside the gay-but-normalized text, a kind of marginalized Greek chorus that’s embodied in the character of Karen Walker and played out largely in the context of her relationship with Jack.
Two years ago in this publication (G&LR, Summer 2000), Andrew Holleran wrote that for sheer shock value—at least for anyone who came out in the 1970’s or before—watching Will & Grace is something like watching “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. In some sense, it seemed, the entire gay struggle had come down to this one sitcom, and a sitcom that was fundamentally shrill and ugly, at that. Holleran went on to note, as many gay audiences have, that it’s the character of Karen they wait to see. She is tough, snappy, stylish, and capable of out-doing or upstaging any gay quotient established by the purportedly gay characters. Karen, in Holleran’s essay, assumed her rightful place in the pantheon of gay characters alongside (or at least at the table with) Harold from Boys in the Band. But Karen is not just the only real gay character; she’s the only genuinely queer presence.
Here’s how Karen is queer and why Jack and Will are not. First, Will and Grace form a non-functioning but nonetheless de facto heterosexual unit. They remain the primary relationship for each other—this despite Grace’s marriage this year to a noble but ever-absent physician and continued promises from the series’ creators and producers that Will might soon find romantic, or sexual, or even social gay happiness. Over the last four seasons, dozens of episodes reveal the essentially straight nature of Will and Grace’s relationship. But when they flirt, it’s not sexy, charged, or queer. One might well ask why that is. On the other hand, why is it sexy when Karen and Jack flirt?
The answer lies in the fact that gayness is established as normative in the show’s text. Karen, on the other hand, finds flirting with Grace and Jack equally plausible, although perhaps not equally pleasurable or frequent. Karen is fearless about her sexuality, whether the object of her attention is male or female, gay or straight. In each episode, even as Grace’s heterosexuality is confirmed, Will’s gayness is re-asserted (although this is accomplished largely through verbal rather than behavioral evidence), and Jack’s gayness is redundantly demonstrated, Karen’s queerness is expressed again and again.
During the most recent season, Karen’s character increasingly has become a burlesque version even of the broadly drawn character of previous seasons. Her husband, always invisible and now incarcerated, has now been divorced from Karen in absentia. Karen now narrates the action more often than she’s found at its center. In the early seasons, her queerness was not derived from or expressed through her sexuality or overt sexual behavior alone. Rather, her queerness came from her complete disregard for convention, role requirements, or socially expected manners. Her queerness originated from her norm-breaking responses both in contexts that were established as straight and those established as gay. In her current, somewhat de-fanged and straightened incarnation, Karen Walker moves along the perimeters rather than inhabiting the borderlands.
Queer theory may have outlived its intellectual and political utility, or at least lost some of its critical vitality as a function of an increasing conservatism in the cultural products available for analysis. Viewers and critics alike are looking forward to the new interpretations of 1960’s-style romantic comedies in the forthcoming Down With Love. Soon to be in production will be a big screen reconstitution of Bewitched, a queer and queerable text beloved in gay iconography. Even made-for-TV movies are entering the nostalgia movement with the recent film of the behind-the-scenes drama of Three’s Company. My guess is that the queerness here is about to be straightened out, not simply because queer theory has been co-opted, but because the conservatism of the moment must seek out and re-code all the hidden disruptions that can be found in its infrared scope.
References
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Turner, William B. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Temple University Press, 2000.
Melinda Kanner, an anthropologist, is a visiting professor at the University of Houston. This research was funded in part by a research grant from GLAAD, The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
