Genders OnLine Journal - Presenting innovative theories in art, literature, history, music, TV and film.
Issue 42 2005
Metrosexuality
the Middle Class Way
Exploring Race, Class, and Gender
in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
By BETH BERILA and DEVIKA DIBYA CHOUDHURI
“Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and
culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their
respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design,
grooming and culture.”
—Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Bravo website blurb
[1]The recent popularity of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
has been heralded as evidence of increased tolerance of queerness
and a model of friendly interactions between gay and straight men
(Hart, 241). (The show has been so warmly received in some circles
as a positive sign for gay rights that it won a GLAAD award in the
reality TV category in 2004 (“GLAAD Honors Queer Eye”)). While the
show’s popularity does, on some level, reflect a kind of cultural
fusion that could potentially herald a more equitable and less
violent form of interaction between gay and straight cultures, it
also reproduces economic, racial, and sexual power inequalities at a
time when gay rights and the rights of communities of color are
under assault by the U.S. nation state. (As this article was being
written, the Bush administration was advocating a constitutional
amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, thus
denying same sex marriages, at the same time that it was proposing
heterosexual marriage as a way to get individuals off welfare, a
policy that disproportionately affects poor women of color.
Moreover, communities of color, both gay and straight, have been
targeted by racial profiling and other assaults to civil liberties
in the aftermath of the tragedy at the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001). It is not accidental that this show in
particular has come to represent gayness in dominant popular culture
at this historical moment, when Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender communities are gaining more prominence in public issues
and debates.
[2]Queer Eye is the inheritor of a long list of specifically male
depictions of queerness in the media, such as Will and Grace, My
Best Friend’s Wedding, and Sex in the City, that represent such men
as the heterosexual woman’s best friend (Creekmur and Doty). This
immaculate intimacy consists of being able to gossip, complain about
their male lovers, and get advice on fashion. Queer Eye simply
takes this concept to rarified levels, where the straight woman gets
a five in one package to help “straighten out” her man, who will
still be unthreateningly hers at the end of the process. Indeed,
the show follows the standard makeover narrative that promises an
individual’s ability to be transformed through the right advice and
the right products.
[3]The show features five gay men who enter the home of a straight
man, detect, interrogate, and mock the faults of the home décor and
the man’s style, and then proceed to revamp the space and the man
into a more stylish metrosexual. The Fab 5 consist of Kyan, the
“Grooming Guru,” Jai, the “Culture Vulture,” Ted, the “Food and Wine
Connoisseur,” Thom, the “Design Doctor,” and Carson, the “Fashion
Savant.” After throwing out much of the straight man’s
unfashionable possessions, each member of the Fab 5 take him to the
appropriate places to learn new techniques, labeled as culture and
grooming, and pick out new furniture, clothes, and food. They then
return him to his redesigned home, and turn him loose to cook a meal
for his girlfriend, wife, or family, who gush at the successful
makeover while the Fab 5 watch on a TV screen from afar.
[4]The surprising success of the show’s concept begs attention.
Queer Eye has enjoyed its extreme popularity precisely because it
both commodifies gayness and reinscribes the heterosexual
imperative, thus reinforcing hegemonic power dynamics while seeming
to transgress them (Rogers). As the show becomes the “face of
queerness” in mainstream popular culture, it raises critical
questions about what form of queerness it represents and what parts
of queer communities it renders invisible. Though the show reveals
some potentially valuable contradictions, ultimately Queer Eye sets
up a racialized and class-based binary that keeps lesbians off stage
and invisible, heterosexual men dumbed down, heterosexual women
present only in the context of their relationships with men, and
people of color buying into a consumerist lifestyle that reifies
white middle class normativity just touched up by appropriate color.
The portrayals on the show contain numerous contradictions, some of
which contribute to gay visibility. However, ultimately, the show
contains gayness by reducing it to a commodity that services
heteronormativity. Given the recent decision by the US Supreme Court
overturning the Hardwick vs. Bowers case (Lawrence and Garner vs.
Texas), and the growing international debate over same-sex marriage,
these portrayals serve to depoliticize queerness.
[5]Much work in feminist visual culture has explored the gendered
power relations in the gaze that is constructed by filmic
representation, while critical race theorists have analyzed the
colonizing nature of that gaze and queer critics have discussed the
commodification of the “gay” hip look. This article brings together
these bodies of work in order to suggest that the cultural function
of Queer Eye does more than perpetuate problematic stereotypes.
Specifically, this article analyzes the interrelated links between
the commodification of gayness, the reinscription of the
heterosexual imperative, and the problematic racial and class-based
constructs of masculinity perpetuated by the show in order to argue
that Queer Eye ultimately serves to dramatically limit radical queer
resistance.
Coopting Queerness
[6]The surprising popularity of Queer Eye amongst a variety of
audiences suggests that it is worth noting some of its
contradictions. One of the most potentially progressive elements of
the show is that it troubles false binaries of gay and straight
space. The show brings queerness into mainstream television space
and into the homes of both straight and queer viewers, creating a
kind of contact zone that potentially disrupts heteronormative
assumptions by revealing that gay and straight masculinities are
deeply connected. They’re defined in relation to each other.
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as the
ways in which social institutions have prescribed heterosexuality as
normative. The show creates creative and often humorous
interventions into spatial divisions, as gay men literally enter the
homes of select heterosexual men, including their kitchens, their
bedrooms, and, yes, their closets. In a parallel process, gay men
come into our homes via our television sets. The show thus reveals
that heteronormative space is not impenetrable and in fact
highlights the fact that queer communities have regularly shaped
what is often assumed to be gay-free mainstream space. We know, for
instance, that gay men had major influences on the Hollywood musical
and that Madonna’s Vogueing came from drag clubs, to name just a few
random examples. As the Fab 5 revamp their subjects’ styles, they
frequent various public consumer spaces, such as stores, salons,
museums, and restaurants (not to mention television). More
importantly, they do so authoritatively: they know the terrain and
they play the role of experts to explain it to the straight men on
the show. They thus unsettle the heteronormative presumption that
mainstream space is not inhabited or influenced by gay presence.
[7]This disruption of spatial and sexual boundaries is potentially
productive, as is the suggestion of radical politics implicit in the
title Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The choice of the word “queer”
in the title could be read as a more radical statement then some of
the other options (it could, for instance, have been called “Gay Eye
for the Straight Guy,” which would be a more accurate name) (Meyer
and Kelley). On some level, the show takes a word that has
historically been used to do violence to members of the Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community and makes visible to the
broader public the ways that LGBT communities have reclaimed the
word. Queer, in its more radical political sense, refers to
identity categories that are constantly shifting, hard to pin down,
and which trouble normative categories of gender, race, and
sexuality (though it can also erase racial differences in
problematic ways) (Muñoz; Ferguson). Initially, Queer Eye seems to
fulfill that radical potential, since it is at times difficult to
distinguish who is gay and who is straight on the show. One
episode, for instance, cuts from a scene in a bar during a heavy
metal concert in which a crowd of presumably straight men are
cheering the singer, to a nearly indistinguishable performance of
the Fab 5 shouting “girls, girls, girls” (Episode 117 “Radio
Ralph”). This juxtaposition draws clear parallels between how the
men on the show, whether gay or straight, perform masculinity. Queer
Eye often features similar moments that blur common assumptions of
what gay and straight performances look like. The show also
troubles interpretations of both masculinity and sexuality as the
Fab 5 make campy jokes or, in the episode just mentioned, are
horrified by the sexually explicit heterosexual dancing occurring at
the bar. In another episode, much is made of the straight man’s
involvement in musicals as a question mark of his transgression of
gay territory (Episode 119 “Compose Yourself”). These moments call
viewers’ attention to how we are reading the links between
masculinity and sexuality, revealing the inability to neatly
interpret gender performance and sexual identity, and thus becoming
potentially “queer.”
[8]However, while the show “queers” certain stereotypes about
sexuality, it nonetheless falls far short of “queering” gender or
sexuality and ultimately reaffirms the gay/straight binary. The
show never offers any options other then being gay or straight, nor
does it fundamentally blur the boundaries of even those categories.
Indeed, the entire purpose of the show is to uphold the
heteronormative imperative, which is the primary way in which
gayness is allowed to be embraced in hegemonic popular culture.
Most of the heterosexual guests on the show are nominated by women
in their lives—either their girlfriends, their wives, or their
mothers who want to help their sons get girlfriends or wives. The
Fab 5 then come on the scene and show the straight guests how to be
more sensitive and stylish straight men. In doing so, they create
the epitome of the metrosexual, the sensitive straight man who is
confident enough to demonstrate some “gay elements” (whatever that
means) and, not accidentally, coopt those “gay” elements to work in
the service of heteronormativity. Critic Sasha Torres suggests that
this constant need for gay men to help incompetent straight men
perform “normal” domestic tasks reflects a “crisis in the
reproduction of heterosexuality,” and that the show indicates that
“heterosexuality constitutes its own undoing” (96). This potential
crisis is yet another of the show’s contradictions: it troubles
heteronormativity on one level while reinscribing it through the
commodification of gayness on the other. The show ultimately
contains queerness, robbing queer identity of any meaning other than
aesthetics that work in the service of heteronormativity. Queer no
longer means a sexual identity, an understanding of gender bending,
or a history of oppression and resistance. Instead, as an article
Queer Eye in The Advocate puts it:
Simply by being themselves—openly gay men who are commanding,
funny, whip-smart, and disarmingly personable—they are shedding
light on the subject of gayness for the nation to see (And what a
flattering light it is too!) Just knowing them makes it that much
more difficult to dismiss gay people as threatening the American
way of life. After all, their entire mission is to make straight
America feel better about itself when it looks in the mirror.
(Vary, “Pride, Patriotism, Queer Eye”)
Thus, queer presence on the show shores up middle America
heterosexual whiteness, rather than troubling the elements of that
citizenship that render LGBT communities second-class citizens. It
is notable, after all, that the issue of The Advocate in which that
story appeared featured the Fab 5 on the cover in front of an
American flag, and that Queer Eye debuted soon after the events at
the World Trade Center while President George W. Bush was
encouraging US citizens to show their patriotism by continuing to
spend money. The makeover narrative has always played a role in
constructing proper citizens of the US nation. Queer Eye simply
renders more visible the role of heteronormativity in the production
of the proper subject. The ultimate measure of success on Queer Eye
is often the degree to which the straight guest can pull off the Fab
5’s tips and the degree of pleasure the woman in question
demonstrates at her new metrosexual man. The show, then, invites
“nice” friendly gay men into the homes of straight men not because
of any radical understanding of queerness, but because the gay men
become the tools through which heteronormativity is reinforced.
[9]Interestingly enough, the longer the show remains on the air, the
more the fissures in the relations between the straight men and the
Fab 5 are revealed. While the heterosexual men on the show always
express their profound thanks to the Fab 5 at the end of the show,
often saying that their time spent with gay men “opened their eyes”
to the “normalcy” of gay men, this response rings hollow in some
episodes. For instance, in one episode, the straight guest resists
cooking a meal for his party, saying it would be too time consuming,
but Ted bluntly says he doesn’t have a choice (it is probably part
of the contract the straight man agrees to when he comes on the
show) (Episode 202, “Help a Soldier Begin Again”). In another
episode with the Red Sox, one player runs onto the field during the
fashion show doing a “girly” dance with his hands that in any other
context would be read as a homophobic statement (Episode 204
“Championship Make-Better”). Given that this performance is in front
of a stadium of baseball fans, arguably a bastion of masculinist
heteronormativity, the Fab 5’s disruption of that space is mitigated
by the player’s display.
[10]This affirmation of hegemonic American masculinity and
heteronormativity is evident in numerous ways throughout the show,
particularly since the identities of the gay men are constructed
exclusively through their service to the straight men. We know
nothing about their histories, their communities, or their politics,
and instead only know them through stereotypically gay realms of
consumption. Their mission in every episode is to make the guest a
better straight man, usually by assigning some task that ensures his
success with his wife or girlfriend. For example, in more than one
episode, the man proposes marriage and is accepted (such as John B,
in Episode 107, “He’s a Little Bit Country,” or Kevin D. in Episode
118, “Stand up and Deliver”), in other episodes he introduces his
parents to his fiancée’s parents (Alan C. in Episode 111, “Meet the
Folks”). Sometimes, he helps with an engagement party, sometimes
along with making a scrapbook for his girlfriend with images of the
two of them in their relationship. In doing so, they perform what
Anna McCarthy calls a queer pedagogy. According to McCarthy, by
“[t]eaching domesticity and care of the self to facilitate
heterosexual coupling,” the Fab 5 “‘construct templates for
citizenship that compliment the privatization of public life, the
collapse of the welfare state, and, most importantly, the discourse
of individual choice and personal responsibility’” (qtd. in McCarthy
98). Thus, while Queer Eye is not the first to feature gay men as
connoisseurs who work in the service of heterosexual masculinity,
this makeover narrative once again reproduces heternormativity and
proper citizenship by suggesting that learning a few self-care
tricks is all that’s needed. Indeed, like many contemporary reality
makeover shows, Queer Eye promotes a cultural citizenship in which
individual self-care choices are constructed as “redemptive
narratives that overcome social positioning” based on gender,
racial, or class differences (Woods and Skeggs 206). For instance,
the Fab 5 might help prepare the straight guests to do a sports
broadcast or go on a corporate job interview. As always, the show
is full of contradictions, so the Fab 5 also help the guests show
their photography, prepare for a concert or informal musical
performance, or an opening night for a musical (Warren L. in Episode
119, “Compose Yourself”), all activities that do not as clearly or
inevitably conform to hegemonic masculinity. But the markers of
heteronormativity are consistently and invariably upheld,
particularly when the “truest” markers of the guest’s success are
his wife or girlfriend’s approval and the Fab 5’s assessment of how
successfully he performed his revised straight masculinity.
[11]Even the spin off from Queer Eye, Queer Eye for the Straight
Girl, applies the same makeover narrative to straight women in a way
that embeds queerness neatly within heteronormativity. It’s telling
that the “Gal Pals,” the show’s equivalent of the Fab 5, include one
woman and four men, as though the help and advice of gay men is
essential to a successful makeover. And while the lesbian on the
show, Honey Labrador, makes visible the presence of feminine
lesbians, her gender performance continues a long line of media
portrayals of lesbians, including Queer as Folk and The L Word, that
erase the presence of gender bending within the queer community.
Honey is entitled “The Lady,” a generalist with a hand in the areas
of each of the other three men who are specifically assigned, Life,
Locale, and Look. Moreover, Honey spends an excessive amount of time
helping the straight women with their makeup and giving them sex
advice for how to please their men in bed (a level of advice that
even the Fab 5 don’t engage in). In fact, the Gal Pals spend an
inordinate amount of time talking about the breast size and other
sexualized features of the straight women on the show. The
heteronormative gender binary is thus squarely upheld. While the
website touts Honey as “the first lesbian Queer Eye” her sexual
orientation is oddly muted and she rarely engages in the flirtatious
banter with the straight girl that the Fab Five engage in with the
men they groom.
The Racialization of Gay Presence
[12]The term queer refers to the inability of heteronormativity to
fully establish stable definitions of sexuality because identities
are often “overdetermined by other issues and conflicts…[such as]
race or national identity” (Hennessey 1998). On Queer Eye, white gay
masculinity is established through the exploitation of men of color,
both gay and straight. The show privileges particular forms of both
heterosexual and gay masculinities, so that it is often hard to tell
which forms of masculinity are “gay” and which are “straight.” In
doing so, it not only perpetuates forms of masculinity, it also
constructs them. That is, after all, the entire purpose of the
show—to turn straight guys from “drab to fab” by teaching them how
to perform masculinity “properly.” While producing more stylish and
sensitive men may seem on the surface to be a desirable endeavor,
the show establishes hierarchies of masculinity by invoking
problematic long-standing racialized and class-based ideologies.
The representational practices on the show, then, uphold patterns of
racialization for both gay and straight men of color that have
historically been used to enact violence on them.
[13]Queer Eye treats the gay men of color on the show notably
different then it portrays heterosexual men of color, revealing yet
another contradiction embedded in the show. The show
disproportionately eroticizes Jai Rodriguez, a member of the Fab 5
who identifies as Puerto Rican and Italian. Jai is frequently
depicted in far more intimate positions with the heterosexual guests
than are the white gay members of the Fab 5. For instance, in one
episode, Jai is posed lying in bed with the heterosexual guest as
they talk about romance (Episode 115 “Mr. Clean Comes Clean”). This
scene does, on some level, trouble homophobic assumptions, since Jai
is not hitting on the straight guest but is instead giving him
advice about how to be more romantic with his wife. But Jai’s
position on the bed is far more intimate then are most of the scenes
that feature other members of the Fab 5, and it participates in a
problematic pattern of portrayal. Probably the clearest example of
the pattern involves the making of the Queer Eye video, in which Jai
dances in a sexually suggestive member with another dancer, in what
Jai describes as a “gay Justin Timberlake” routine. Given that Jai
is a dancer and a performer, this number is on some level a rather
normalized reflection of artistic expression. Jai’s portrayals can
be seen as a performance of gay male femininity that reworks
dominant white straight femininity in interesting ways, revealing
that both gender constructions need to be understood in the plural:
masculinities and femininities. Given the range of gender
performance that exists in queer communities, this portrayal is
politically useful. But its progressiveness is mitigated by the
racial hierarchies the show upholds. It is notable that Jai is so
regularly eroticized while the white members of the Fab 5 are not
sexualized themselves, though they do make numerous sexual innuendos
about the straight guests on the show. In other words, the white
members of the Fab 5 sexualize the heterosexual guests, but they
themselves are not eroticized in the way that Jai is. The difference
in the portrayals, then, needs to be read in the context of
feminizing gay men of color and, by extension, eroticizing them
through racialized constructs (Meyers and Kelley). For instance,
Carson and Kyan, the two most dominant of the Fab 5, and not
coincidentally, as the couture and grooming experts, the ones who
most physically transgress the straight guest’s boundaries, use a
very dominant form of teasing with their guests. Jai, on the other
hand, is often supplicant, affectionate, and depicted as
sentimental. Moreover, this representation of Jai is not an
anomaly. One of the Fab 5’s earlier members, Blair Boone, was a man
of color who also played the “culture guy,” but was quickly
discarded. Interestingly, visually he fit much the same physical
model that Jai does of being small built and not physically
assertive. He appeared in a few episodes and was quietly dropped.
Given that the Fab 5 are supposed to be a team, the un-commented
substitution of one man of color for another invites the notion that
they are interchangeable.
[14]It is also telling that Jai is in charge of “Culture” on the
show. “Culture,” as presented as one of the five categories on the
show, is a problematic and enigmatic construct. In this context, it
appears to be a range from teaching the straight guy to say “I love
you” in his girlfriend’s language even if he can say nothing else,
picking up some HathaYoga to sweat out toxicities, visiting an art
gallery, or learning to salsa. Culture therefore is a rarefied
version of popular culture and is characterized by a global
appropriation. The implication, then, is that “culture” is the
purview of men of color, at the same time that the concept is robbed
of any specific cultural context, heritage, or tradition. Even the
term “Culture Vulture” that appears on screen and on the website to
introduce Jai marks him as one who exploits culture; vultures, after
all, circle dead prey. Jai performs what Judith Butler refers to as
the “merely cultural” and José Esteban Muñoz refers to as “inane
culture mavens,” in which racial difference is erased and queers of
color become merely window dressing, while the white gay men perform
the “real” makeover work (Butler qtd. in Muñoz 101-102). Culture on
the show is gesture and packaging, but contains no substance. As
the blurb on the successful Fab 5 book states, culture is “all the
things to do on the date to impress your companion” (Allen et al.).
In one episode, Jai tells a straight guy to think of making charming
gestures such as warming a bath towel for his spouse by throwing it
in the dryer. Once again, the way to a woman’s heart is through her
comfort by upholding consumer culture. Moreover, while the Fab 5
supposedly train the straight man to help out around the house, it
is still only an occasional thing, thus continuing the long-standing
narrative that men’s domestic activity is an anomaly (Bordo;
Miller). Queer Eye moves culture from a worldview, set of values,
or living generational history of a people to an easily available
set of do’s and don’ts that allow for smoother schmoozing. In
another shift, the term culture-deprivation is used to mock the
straight man’s lack of knowledge of these little tips, a twist given
the original assignation of the term as one applied in the 1960’s
Moynihan report to African American families (Moynihan).
[15]This portrayal has serious implications for feminist,
anti-racist, and queer politics, because as the show marginalizes
and erases queer of color, it once again renders as white the “face
of queerness,” which Queer Eye has come to represent in hegemonic
popular culture. Moreover, it achieves its supposed “tolerance” and
“openness” about gayness at the expense of queers of color. It is
long past time to heed the cautions of activists such as June
Jordan, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and numerous others, that we
cannot eradicate oppression and achieve liberation on the backs of
other marginalized groups, nor can we afford to see racial,
economic, gendered, or sexual oppression as unconnected systems.
They are deeply interdependent and many people experience systems of
oppression simultaneously. Queer Eye is popular precisely because
it overlooks this complexity and pits one set of oppression—white
gay middle class masculinity—against that experienced by other
marginalized gay masculinities of color.
[16]This narrow portrayal becomes particularly clear in the show’s
use of camp humor. As a style of taste, aesthetics, and humor, camp
is part of a long tradition of LGBT politics and resistance
(Sontag). At times, the show’s campy humor comes close to parodying
normative constructs of masculinity. The Fab 5 regularly crack
jokes that reflect a knowledge of gay culture and that can, at
times, serve as a form of insider recognition for its queer viewers.
Carson, for instance, will look at an article of clothing that he
thinks lacks style and ask the heterosexual male guest if he was “a
lesbian in a former life.” (Presumably he is not referencing the
Honey Labrador sort of lesbian but rather the stereotype of the
man-hating lumberjack). Of course, the gendered and anti-lesbian
stereotype in this comment needs to be noted, as it reflects the
privileging of gay masculinity over other forms of queer identity.
It also participates in the pattern of disparaging women—both gay
and straight—that is all too common on the show. In another scene,
Carson asks a heterosexual guest what “you people” do with fly
fishing paraphernalia, commenting that “my people would use it to
decorate shoes or perhaps as a festive tiara” (Episode 113 “Neither
Rain Nor Sleet Nor Length of Hair”). The campy jokes and the
subversion of “my people” and “your people” invoke campy humor to
invert language often used to stereotype LGBT communities and
instead reclaim it in a way that troubles the assumptions underlying
those statements. The show’s use of camp humor is one key reference
to a history of cultural resistance through the production of
“insider” humor. But the limitations of this strategy become
quickly clear when the comments become racialized. In the same fly
fishing store, Carson tells the straight guest to pretend they are
“hungry Indians hunting squirrels” (Episode 113 “Neither Rain Nor
Sleet Nor Length of Hair”). Carson is also depicted in the Queer
Eye book wearing a T-short that reads “Gay is the New Black.” These
types of comments and portrayals—which are all too common on the
show—turn this type of camp into racism, and reveal that problematic
racial formations provide the foundation for the gay presence the
show creates.
[17]The frequent racialized comments also highlight the paucity of
heterosexual men of color featured on the show. When heterosexual
men of color do become guests on the show, the racialized
hierarchies of representation become even more visible. For
instance, one episode featured Rob M. (Episode 120, “Meeting
Mildred”), a Black man who identified himself as part Jamaican. In
this episode, “camp” quickly became racism, as virtually every
comment out of Carson’s mouth is deeply racially problematic,
including references to Rob’s “cocoa colored skin.” The other
members of the Fab 5 also enact problematic racialized behaviors.
In the opening scenes in which the Fab 5 usually tears apart the
guest’s abode, Kyan draped himself in Rob’s shower curtain, which
had a vibrant pattern on it. He then made a comment about how
“unstylish” the look was, implying that Kyan considered the shower
curtain on par with Rob’s wardrobe, which included many dashikis.
Significantly, Rob resisted this construction by arguing that he
doesn’t wear his shower curtain, while his body language indicated
that he both recognized and was uncomfortable with the racism and
ethnocentrism in Kyan’s behavior.
[18]This episode is worth discussing at length because of its
complexity. The show contains several levels of problematic
racializations, some of which Rob resists and some of which he is
complicit with. One of the most blatant elements to note in the
episode is the hypersexualization of Rob in a way that echoes a
long-standing pattern of doing violence to heterosexual Black men in
U.S. culture. Whereas Jai is eroticized by representational
practices that mark his “feminine” performances, which results from
a combination of racializing Puerto Rican gay men and portraying
them as effeminate, Rob is constructed as a hyper-masculine and
highly sexualized Black man. This portrayal participates in a long
history in the US of hypersexualizing black men and marking them as
threats to white femininity through the myth of the Black male
rapist (Davis). One scene in a fashion boutique, for instance,
depicts Carson flirting with Rob and referring to him as “daddy.”
In this scene, Rob is seated on a sofa while Kyan and Carson lie
touching him on either side, but Carson is literally curling up next
to him in a kind of lover pose that clearly makes Rob uncomfortable.
Kyan assures Rob that he will protect him from Carson if Rob simply
says the code word, “zucchini,” an all too obvious phallic
reference.
[19]We cannot underestimate the racial dynamics of the ways that
Carson sexualizes Rob. In one of the next scenes, Carson follows
Rob into the dressing room, and while the camera shoots Rob in a
tank top and boxer shorts, Carson exclaims with admiration that Rob
is “bursting out” of his shorts. These moments clearly
hypersexualize Rob in a way that cannot be read as simply gay male
camp, but must be read in a history of violence, sexuality, and race
around Black men that includes the lynching of black men, the myth
of the Black male rapist, racial profiling, and the fact that Black
men in the U.S. are far more likely to be prosecuted for charges of
rape then are white men as a result of institutionalized racism. In
this context, Queer Eye cannot be read as evidence that gay and
straight men can now “get along,” but instead must be read as a tool
through which acceptance of white middle class gay presence is
bought through constructs of violence around Black men and an
erasure of queers of color.
[20]At the same time that the show eroticizes and hypersexualizes
men of color, it also renders diverse ethnic traditions as
interchangeable. The few times that Queer Eye has featured men of
color as guests on the show, it has treated ethnic traditions as
another product and technique of style. During the show that
featured Rob for instance, Thom’s interior design strategy was to
advise Rob to “diversify” his ethnic decors so that he was not
limited by any one tradition. To that end, Thom took Rob to a store
that featured furniture from all over the world, encouraging him to
choose a table from Africa, chairs and lights from the Philippines,
and so on. Ethnic, then, becomes removed from the particular context
of its meaning and personal significance, and instead becomes an
interchangeable commodity. Having ethnic items in one’s home then
reflects only where one shops rather than any deeply personal roots.
A clear example of this erasure of substantive ethnic traditions
involves Rob’s fashion segment, in which Carson, like Thom, suggests
that he diversify his wardrobe to combine dashikis with more casual
“everyday” clothing (again an ethnocentric assumption). Carson’s
solution is to purchase Rob the Donna Karan collection and hot glue
small segments of African cloth to a jacket or a belt buckle, so
that it becomes an accessory to more “mainstream” fashion. Given
the way that the show has framed the issue, there was no way that
Carson could have more fully integrated the various styles, because
to do so would require troubling the cultural context and racial
formations that the show explicitly works to reinforce. Manthia
Diawara’s observations about Black spectatorship in contemporary
Hollywood film are instructive for understanding the implications of
Rob’s portrayal. Diawara writes that:
dominant cinema situates Black characters primarily for the
pleasure of white spectators (male or female). To illustrate this
point, one may note how Black male characters in contemporary
Hollywood films are made less threatening to Whites either by
White domestication of Black customs and culture—a process of
deracination and isolation—or by the stories in which Blacks are
depicted by playing by the rules of White society and losing.
(215)
Though Diawara is discussing film not television, the analysis of
deracination is clearly relevant here.
[21]In a subsequent show, Kyan encourages James M. (Episode 123,
“Training Day”), one of the few Asian American men to be featured on
the show, to learn how to do a Thai massage in order to better
connect with his girlfriend. While the idea of a massage is
certainly a potentially romantic one, the segment clearly
participates in stereotypes around Asian American masculinity. It
is also one of the only episodes where the girlfriend, Taebee, an
Asian woman, is thoroughly criticized and portrayed as a spoilt
princess who doesn’t deserve her man because she doesn’t appreciate
the show the Fab Five facilitate from the meal to the massage. As
the episode synopsis comments, “Would it have killed her to be a
better sport about it?”(Queer Eye website). Thus, Queer Eye does
more than participate in making ethnic “trendy,” a pattern that is
evident as suburban whites purchase African masks or decorative
Buddha statues without being fully aware of the meaning of those
objects in various cultural contexts. More problematically, Queer
Eye robs ethnic traditions of their cultural specificity and
suggests that their only purpose is to look stylish, at the same
time that it tends to “go ethnic” mostly when men of color are
involved.
[22]The racial formations that are perpetuated on the show are
integral to the forms of masculinity that are constructed on the
show. Let us return for a moment to the episode mentioned above
which features Rob M. sandwiched between Carson and Kyan on the
couch. This scene involves complex layers of masculinity that also
pit Kyan’s more “metrosexual” gay masculinity with Carson’s more
stereotypical display of gay masculinity by racializing and
hypersexualizing Rob’s masculinity. The phallic symbol of the code
word “zucchini” is obvious, of course, but even more significant are
the complex layers of power and masculinity that are played out in
the scene. Kyan is depicted as the one in control precisely because
he performs a form of white middle class gay masculinity that is
hard to distinguish from white middle class heterosexual
masculinity. For instance, in a scene with Ross M., a former Marine
(Episode 114, “Create an Officer and a Gentleman”), Kyan outperforms
him in push-ups, asserting his fitness. Kyan then is the one who
can “protect” Rob from Carson’s stereotypically gay performance of
masculinity, though not before Rob has already been sexually
objectified. Rob’s masculinity thus becomes the conduit through
which the hierarchies of Kyan’s masculinity and Carson’s masculinity
are established.
[23]Indeed, the show sets up a clear power dynamic between Jai, the
feminized gay man of color, Ted and Thom, who perform fairly nice
and gentle meterosexual forms of masculinity, and Kyan and Carson,
who, though they perform very different types of gay masculinity,
nevertheless have the most visible power on the show.
Interestingly, the opening promo of the show, depicts Kyan, Ted, and
Thom holding tools of their trade that are clear phallic symbols (a
hair dryer, a whisk, and a paintbrush, respectively), while Carson
and Jai are shown holding objects that are not phallic: shopping
bags and an art pad. However, the pattern on the show is to
establish a rather different binary. While Thom, and Ted are much
warmer, less controversial, and physically further away in many of
the shots, it’s Carson and Kyan who hold the most prominent
positions on the show. Though Carson’s performance of masculinity is
most stereotypically “gay,” he holds disproportionate power in the
show and in the media representation. He is the first of the pack,
so to speak, in the opening credits, gazing directly into the
camera—a powerful gaze that is not at all campy and that, not
accidentally, suggests that he is the most definitive “Queer Eye” on
the show. Along with Kyan, he transgresses the most and he tends to
take the humor to its sharpest edge. This division between the
forms of masculinity does not go unnoted as the show is received by
popular audiences. The December 1, 2003 issue of People magazine,
for instance, names Kyan Douglas as one of the sexiest men alive,
and his photograph bears no significant difference from the images
of all the other, presumably heterosexual “sexy” men in the issue.
On one level, this blurring of the lines between gay and straight
masculinity points out that it is not so easy to “read” different
masculinities along the lines of sexuality, and it illustrates that
not all members of the queer community enact stereotypical forms of
gender performance. As such, this display has the potential to be
radically productive as it troubles assumptions about sexuality, but
its radical potential is drastically mitigated by the power
hierarchies the show establishes between the different forms of
masculinity.
Commodifying Masculinity
[24]The constructions of masculinity that are represented on the
show, then, are deeply racialized, but they are also deeply
class-based. In the end, Queer Eye reifies a commodified
masculinity: being a sensitive and stylish man means consuming
products. As the website states, "With help from family and
friends, the Fab Five treat each new guy as a head-to-toe project.
Soon, the straight man is educated on everything from hair products
to Prada and Feng Shui to foreign films. At the end of every
fashion-packed, fun-filled lifestyle makeover, a freshly scrubbed,
newly enlightened guy emerges — complete with that ‘new man’ smell!”
(Queer Eye).
[25]In essence, the straight man himself becomes a commodity,
constructed through the judicious application of the right products.
And should viewers miss the actual names of the products used on
each show, the Queer Eye website gives detailed accounting of brand
names and product availability. When the straight male guest knows
how to dress more fashionably, has a well-decorated house, applies
lots of hair and skin care products, knows a few tidbits about
“high” culture, cooks food in a trendy way and serves it on the
right dishes and with the right wine, he is deemed a “success.”
This commodified masculinity reflects an important shift, as it
involves daily maintenance rituals. Feminist scholars such as Susan
Bordo and Sandra Lee Bartky have long pointed out the constant
maintenance required to produce “proper” femininity, a routine that
also regulates women’s behaviors in conformity with power
structures. According to Queer Eye, masculinity now requires
similar expenditures of time and energy in order to produce docile
bodies. Men on the show spend a great deal of time in front of
mirrors, and in salons, malls, and kitchens. Being a “successful”
or “attractive” man, in other words, means policing one’s body
through daily rituals that require participating in conspicuous
consumption, so that one has the right accessories and accoutrements
to “produce” and maintain this sensitive masculinity. The show
highlights this maintenance with regular shots of men in front of
mirrors applying skin care products and in stores trying on clothes.
So the show does indeed tell us that “proper men” must exert labor
to produce the image they want (something women have always known
about femininity). It is presented as “you owe it to yourself,” a
message that smacks of self-pampering, and which transfers to men
the makeover narrative so often applied to women (such as in the
Loreal “I’m worth it” campaign). Thus, whereas the personal
transformation narrative has historically always informed the
production of gendered subjects in the US nation through the “land
of opportunity” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”
ideologies, this new version has men enacting the kinds of labor
that are often attached to femininity. So while Queer Eye continues
the long-standing production of the bourgeois heterosexual masculine
subject as the sophisticated connoisseur, it now requires additional
daily rituals of self-care (Breazeale). This shift thus helps
produce the metrosexual while linking that production to the
stereotypical “gay” realms of fashion, cuisine, grooming, interior
design, and certain elements of culture.
[26]But, significantly, the show conveniently obscures other forms
of labor. Queer Eye predicates gay visibility on the condition of a
participation in the consumer logic of late capitalism, constructing
both gay and heterosexual masculinity as dependent upon consumer
spending and the erasure of class differences as well as on the
exploitative division of labor that makes possible the makeovers on
the show. This form of masculinity, then, perpetuates international
divisions of labor while simultaneously rendering them invisible.
[27]The show obscures the labor that makes possible the
“makeovers”—the crews that redecorate the houses and the often
exploited labor that produce the goods that the men purchase. The
interior design segments are probably the best example of this.
Though Thom is arguably the member of the Fab 5 who does the most
“work” on Queer Eye--he revamps entire rooms and apartments, while
other members make one dinner--the show usually doesn’t film the
labor required to do so (Gallagher). We don’t see the crews paint
whole houses, move furniture in and out, polish wood floors and
install wood paneling. Instead, we see the before shots, we see the
Fab 5 harshly critiquing the place, often with humor, and we see
them make a few small decorating changes. The fiction presented is
that Thom does it all between lunch and the main event. Queer Eye
obscures the hours of labor that obviously go into redesigning some
of the spaces, much of which is not done by the Fab 5. Like Martha
Stewart, they have a staff. This portrayal has serious implications
for the image of queerness created on the show. As Rosemary
Hennessey suggests about queer visibility,
Redressing gay invisibility by promoting images of a seamlessly
middle-class gay consumer or by inviting us to see queer
identities only in terms of style, textuality, or performative
play helps produce imaginary gay/queer subjects that keep
invisible the divisions of wealth and labor that these images and
knowledges depend on.(148)
The makeovers on the show, then, render invisible the economic
privileges and inequalities that make them possible. For instance,
we also don’t see other important labor. The show often goes to
stores like Crate and Barrel, Ralph Lauren, and other upscale places
to buy their products, some of which are produced overseas by
exploited labor through the globalization of capitalism.
[28]The show privileges an upscale model of masculinity that
requires consumption and is therefore unattainable for working class
and even lower-middle class men. The Fab 5 rarely take their guests
to Wal Mart or JCPenney (both of which would also perpetuate
international divisions of labor), and rarely do they shop at local
farmer’s markets or community-based stores. Instead, they take them
to upscale salons, furniture stores such as Pottery Barn, and to
couture fashion boutiques. In fact, Queer Eye has arguably done for
men’s fashion what Sex and the City did for women’s fashion. The
latter has been credited with bringing high couture fashion, such as
Prada and Dolce and Gabana, into the homes of mainstream America
(or, more precisely into the living rooms of those who can afford
cable). Sex and the City is also credited with popularizing
eclectic fashion combinations, so that women no longer have to wear
an entire expensive outfit but can instead pair one high-end piece
with other lower-priced clothing (which of course makes the style
more accessible to middle class women) (Sasvari). Similarly,
Carson, Queer Eye’s fashion expert, regularly uses the word couture
and takes the guests to Ralph Lauren, where, not accidentally,
Carson worked at one time. In one show, he even tells viewers—with
a clear disdain—that the proper pronunciation is Ralph Lauren, not
Ralph Lauren.
[29]Of course, other shows, such as Seinfeld and Friends, have also
popularized high-end fashion names for their predominantly white
middle class audiences. But what’s important about Queer Eye’s use
of upscale products is the way it suggests that the regular use of
these products is precisely how one becomes an attractive and
successful heterosexual man and, by extension, a proper subject of
the US nation. Indeed, the Fab 5 regularly scoff at the guests who
lack this upscale sense. Carson shrieks at fake Mohair and jean
shorts, Kyan is put out by disposable razors, Ted is deeply offended
by paper cups and frozen hamburgers, and Thom groans at 70s style
mass-produced furniture. Their “tasteful tips” make it clear that
this form of masculinity can only be properly achieved by middle to
upper class men—it is unavailable to people who cannot afford it.
[30]This consumerism runs rampant through the show, starting with
the General Motors logo on the SUV the Fab 5 drive all over (though
they never fill up with gas). Virtually every other scene involves a
close-up on a storefront, a label, or a smartly designed tube of
styling gel. Apparently, companies are lining up to have similar
product placement in the show, a move welcomed by the show’s
producers since it generates additional revenue. It is ironic, given
that the Fab 5 are supposed to be making recommendations based on
their own stylistic expertise rather than brand name, that their
recommendations are frequently brand names. Paradoxically, on the
Queer Eye Website where biographies of the Fab Five give more
information about them for the chronically curious, two of the Fab
Five respond that the worst faux pas a person could commit was
“trying too hard to be something they are not” (Jai) or “not being
yourself” (Carson).
[31]Each of the products works in the service of the Fab 5’s areas
of specialty: grooming, interior design, food, fashion, and culture.
The show therefore commodifies gayness, reducing it to a series of
products and outer accoutrements rather than an identity, community,
or politics. In effect, it reduces identity to a product that can
be bought and constructed. Since no one on the Fab 5 is a plastic
surgeon, we are perhaps lucky that the makeovers do not involve the
straight guests going under the knife as is increasingly done to
women in shows such as The Swan or Extreme Makeover. Nevertheless,
aside from Queer Eye’s campy humor (which, as we have noted, is also
problematic at times), gayness gets constructed in terms of
stereotypical elements of fashion and grooming, while other elements
of queer culture, such as social issues, relationships, or queer
resistance, remain absent. Indeed, the Fab 5 have themselves become
celebrities, and the show’s websites even assigns UPC labels to the
photos of each member of the Fab 5. However, they are neatly removed
from any real discussion of queer sexuality, as they contain their
queerness and shore up heterosexual coupling. This is just the
latest version of Hennessey’s point that gayness can only be
tolerated in public visibility when it can be commodified and
marketed to heteronormative audiences. The result is a “safe”
reduction of gayness, a way to contain it at a time when gay rights
are once again under assault by the state, (and the debate over gay
marriage is just the most recent of many assaults). And yet this
reduction is only “safe” for those few members of LGBT communities
who are made visible by the show.
[32]Indeed, if we follow Foucault’s notion that resistance is
ever-present but will always be coopted by dominant power
structures, we can see Queer Eye as a way to limit more progressive
advances made by LGBT communities. That is, as LGBT communities
make political progress, we need to be contained by reductive
portrayals. As we become more public, we are allowed to be visible
in mainstream media only as long as the representations reproduce
stereotypes and work in the service of conspicuous consumption and
racialized hierarchies. Indeed, one of the most disturbing
implications of the show is the way it is being touted as the
bastion of gay tolerance even as it buys that acceptance at the
expense of queers of color, heterosexual men of color, and the
working class (categories which are not mutually exclusive).
Racism, ethnocentrism, and classism thus become the tools through
which public gay visibility of certain groups are bought, giving a
surface nod toward “tolerance” while merely shoring up the
hierarchies already deeply entrenched in the US nation.
[33]When Queer Eye gets marked as a progressive representation of
queerness, it not only reduces queerness to a narrow and class-based
subset, it also puts a public face on some forms of gayness at the
expense of other marginalized groups, particularly queers of color.
Feminist, anti-racist, and queer cultural critics and activists need
to take careful note of this strategy, not only for its import for
cultural studies scholarship, but also because we should be cautious
of any strategy that on the surface benefits one marginalized group
while further scapegoating others. This form of gay visibility,
while generating a few laughs, ultimately serves as a decoy to
obscure the way gayness is used here to maintain constructs of the
white heteronormative US nation state.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper, entitled, “Performing
Masculinity,” was presented by Beth Berila at The First Annual
Conference of the College Male, St. John’s University, Collegeville,
MN, February 20-22, 2004. A subsequent version, entitled
“Commodifying Masculinity: Labour, Race, and Sexuality in Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy,” was presented by Beth Berila at the American
Studies Association Conference in Atlanta, GA, November 11-14 2004.
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Contributors Note:
BETH BERILA is the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at St.
Cloud State University. Her work has appeared in Feminist Teacher
and New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, edited by Rachel
Stein.
DIBYA CHOUDHURI is an Assistant Professor in the graduate Counseling
Program at Eastern Michigan University, specializing in
multicultural counseling.
Copyright ©2005
Ann Kibbey.
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