Gay men understand what's important—clothes, compliments, and cocks. —Samantha, Sex and the City

Fabulousness—embodied in a web of cultural markers that signify status, wealth, style, confidence, attitude, glitter, and panache against the banal backdrop of everyday existence—plays a central role in the structure and success of Sex and the City. The attainment of fabulousness opens up possibilities of gender performance beyond conventional heteronormative routes of marriage, children, and monogamous partnering, lending credence to an independent, career-driven, self-motivated existence as an enviable lifestyle, though not without its exclusions. Further, the term's subversive origins as a form of cultural capital, most notably among drag queens of color, allows audiences to disidentify with a level of status specifically meant for the rich, white, largely straight characters on the show. José Esteban Muñoz defines disidentification as "the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes" subjects who fail to conform to normative culture (Muñoz: 4). For nonwhite, queer, and poor audiences, disidentification strategically reclaims exclusionary, normative representations not meant for them/us as their/our own through affective connection and identification with certain facets of a character or narrative while simultaneously disavowing others. Yet disidentification with mainstream ideals can also occur within the diegesis of a show; the women of Sex and the City could loosely be described as constituting one such minority group, as they consciously disidentify with bourgeois family values in favor of the dazzling, idealized notion of fabulousness embodied in their gay sidekicks. While certainly upholding and perpetuating many strongholds of normative US culture—money, consumerism, heteronormativity, whiteness—the characters of Sex and the City also stray from certain conventions of femininity and tradition in favor of attaining this fabulous lifestyle and persona. However, the camp concept of fabulousness must be understood as a raced and classed construct, borrowed from the "flamboyance" of black queer culture and relying on the economic power of high-end consumerism.

From 1980s drag balls in the boroughs of New York to the increasing media coverage of drag style in the 1990s to Madonna's infamous co-optation of vogueing, queer culture has been transformed from marginal to mainstream in often unacknowledged ways. As Dick Hebdige notes, oppositional underground culture is rapidly appropriated by dominant society as capitalism turns subculture into style. In this view, what began as a survival strategy for poor queer people of color eventually morphs into sly and discreet markers of fabulousness for the rich, white, heteronormative characters on Sex and the City. While gender and sexuality frequently shape the story lines, race is elided and obscured; the main characters' whiteness is read as outside issues of race. Fabulousness exists merely as a free-floating marker of cultural capital, obscuring its subversive origins and capitalizing on a raced and classed cultural history without acknowledging the fierce politics behind it. In turn, a watered-down and consumer-driven version of fabulousness comes to serve the interests of assimilation rather than disidentification.

Considering the long and well-known tradition of "writing gay, casting straight," I have to wonder, though, whether Sex and the City is actually about four gay men, in which case the line between disidentification and assimilation blurs. As cultural critic Stephen Maddison points out, this code-switching phenomenon has played out with many prominent gay writers, notably seen in Tennessee Williams's character Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire (Maddison). Sex and the City presents a compelling case for this textual gender bending. The show's writers and creators, mainly gay men, have seemingly created four gay male characters in the guise of heterosexual women. If Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda are indeed "in drag," how might different audiences disidentify with certain characters and sexualized representations? Which aspects of the show would resonate and which ones would necessarily be disavowed? The portrayal of messy, uncontainable female characters in Sex and the City and other camp representations speaks to the instability of gender, opening up the possibility of a disidentificatory reading, in which the gay subtext of a character like Samantha becomes queerer than overtly homosexual characters like the stereotypically effeminate Stanford. Further, Stanford's drive for assimilation into heteronormative society as both the bearer of fabulousness and as perpetual sidekick to his "fag hag" friend, Carrie, perhaps suggests a compelling case for "writing straight, casting gay."

Stanford's Glitter

Gay men play a crucial role in Sex and the City as ambassadors of style and stand-ins for heterosexual relationships; gay men are the gatekeepers of all that is fabulous. Stereotypes of hyperfeminine, creative gay men—clichéd tropes of mainstream gay culture—create an idealized notion of glamour, the missing component in straight women's lives. The repetitious pairing of straight woman / gay man creates a glittering, cosmopolitan substitution for drab visions of conventional heterosexual monogamy and girls-only singledom. In this schema, male homosexuality is recoded as normative and decidedly nonsexual, while female sexuality is perpetually confined within gendered hierarchical relations of pseudo-heterosexuality. The heterosexual male is circumvented in the relationship, creating a space for identity and associations outside of heteronormative constraints. In this sense, the friendship seems to hold progressive potential because of its transgression of heterosexual authority. Yet, sexism and misogyny can and do exist among gay men, who still enjoy certain privileges as men in patriarchal culture. In this type of gay-straight/male-female dyad, women are exchanged for cultural acceptance in homophobic society while reifying heteronormativity. As Michael Warner argues, the intense "shame" attached to homosexuality is alleviated through efforts at assimilation into heteronormative society, often by public distancing from actual, bodily acts of sex in favor of sanitized, sexless subjectivity in mainstream culture (1999). Homophobic notions of immoral, seedy gay lifestyles are de-clawed through relationships with straight women.

On Sex and the City, Carrie's "gay husband" Stanford offers a prime example of both the assimilationist roles of gay male characters and the simultaneous paternalism of the relationship. "All That Glitters . . ." (episode 62), a particularly salient episode in season 4, depicts a burgeoning friendship between Carrie and Oliver, a handsome gay shoe salesman. They begin secretly to "date," unbeknownst to Stanford. He soon discovers their clandestine friendship and is visibly jealous, accusing Carrie of cheating on him. He cries, "I was prepared to lose you to [your fiancé] Aidan, but not this!" Carrie and Stanford's relationship takes on a decidedly heterosexual nature as Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of the exchange of women's bodies in kinship systems is literally played out in the interaction between Oliver and Stanford. The men bicker over who gets to "have" Carrie, who serves as a bridge between them. Cultural critic Helene Shugart argues that gay characters subtly exercise "paternalistic control of women . . . refram[ing] gay male sexuality as an extension of heterosexual male privilege predicated on control of female sexuality" (Shugart 80). The importance of homosocial bonds and the exchange value of women extend across male subjectivities, working to reify hierarchical gender relations and subtly condone sexism. Further, Oliver and Stanford seem to argue over who deserves to enjoy the privileges available through assimilation into heteronormative culture. This scene not only reflects the power of upward mobility for gay men, enabled through companionship with heterosexual women in a homophobic society, but also replays the straight woman's fantasy of having men fight over her. Homosexual interactions remain secondary to heteronormative relationships. The exchange of women delimits discourses of gay male sexuality, overshadowing relationship development and the exchange of sex between men. Why are these men fighting over Carrie instead of fucking each other?

Despite the necessary presence of gay male characters to buttress the fabulousness of straight female characters, heterosexual relationships and heteronormativity still take center stage. Gay men are useful only for their color swatches, fashion tips, and cheeky one-liners, as audiences are encouraged to ignore the sexual and gender politics deeply embedded in these social relations. Similar to screen relations in "black buddy" films of the 1980s, which dictated that "interracial buddies can be such only when the white buddy is in charge" (Bogle 272), Sex and the City's gay characters exist as accessories for increasing the cultural capital and "cool" of the female characters. Forever relegated to secondary status, the buddy serves a dual purpose: as a supportive presence for the protagonist, and as a cultural spokesperson for the marginalized group within mainstream discourse. Bogle notes that in interracial buddy films, "the black performer function[s] as a sidekick . . . or bless[es] his white friend with a tender loyalty and imparts some comforting spiritual insight" (272). We can see the similarities in Stanford's loyalty to Carrie; in times of crisis, he serves as a shoulder to cry on, stylish second opinion, or catty relationship guru. The buddy also perpetuates a strategy of containment, delimiting "safe" space around a non-normative character in order to neutralize possible alienation of dominant audiences. According to Ed Guerrero, the buddy formula attracts the "demographically broadest possible audience while negotiating, containing, and fantastically resolving the tangled and socially charged issue of race relations on the screen" (240). In a similar manner, the gay sidekick, contained within a normative role as the asexual, fabulous friend, presents a semblance of "diversity" or progressive intent. Yet ultimately the role works as a sanitizing and assimilationist attempt at demarcating the boundaries of acceptable queer culture within white heteronormativity rather than portraying the nuances of realistic queer life. Further, like the black buddy, the gay buddy is isolated from queer culture in the larger sense. Shugart observes that gay characters are presented as "capable of being wholly grafted onto established heterosexual communities and contexts; and second, that their presence is used as a catalyst for heterosexual characters' growth and understanding" (69). Just as well-adjusted and non-threatening interracial buddy characters serve as mediators for larger racial tensions in society, desexualized, fun-and-fruity gay characters stand as envoys of homosexual culture in a heteronormative society. Through Stanford, Carrie is able to disidentify from the mainstream marriage culture represented by her engagement to Aidan, but, in an unexpected turn, Stanford's stealth straightness repositions her in the same objectified and secondary gender position she would have occupied as a wife; his gay glitter is hardly queer gold.

Samantha's Cock

For feminist and queer audiences, Samantha presents a nuanced case for oppositional, disidentificatory reading—an analysis that recognizes her normative qualities (via race and gender) while also reading beneath the surface for her queer potential. Samantha embodies female sexuality in excess with her constant dirty talk, voracious sexual appetite, and endless chain of non-monogamous relationships. She seems to buck conventions of sexual piety and the feminized oversentimentalizing of relationships. However, her overt refusals to involve her emotions in sex and her exaggerated, caricatured performance of femininity point to the very fragility of gender. As psychoanalyst Joan Riviere and others have noted, so-called "genuine womanliness" and the "masquerade" of femininity are one and the same (38). Samantha performs her gender to the point of drag excess, destabilizing the "naturalness" of womanhood and spilling uncontrollably into an ambiguous gray area. Her campy failed femininity opens the possibility for feminist and other disidentificatory audiences to embrace Samantha as a queer icon, beyond constricting, conventional notions of gender.

Samantha's feminine masquerade is revealed as both subversive (self-consciously and socially constructed, playful, insincere) and assimilative (territorial, heteronormative, bordering on homophobic), a contradiction that becomes painfully obvious to the viewer as Samantha comes face-to-face with a more overt gender performance in the form of her "friendly neighborhood pre-op transsexual hookers" in the finale of season 3 ("Cock a Doodle Do!" episode 48). It is no coincidence that Samantha's transgendered nemeses happen to be black, bluntly confronting her with the fabulous diva culture the show so frivolously borrows from. Samantha is introduced one night to her three tranny neighbors, Destiny, China, and Jo, as she is abruptly awoken by their chatter outside her expensive loft in New York's trendy meatpacking district. A recently and rapidly gentrified neighborhood that was once home to many poor and working class residents of color, the landscape is now dotted with expensive restaurants, nightclubs, and high-priced apartments like Samantha's. Visible and audible reminders of the changing cityscape, Destiny, China, and Jo frequently return to Samantha's street to turn tricks with men in order to make a living. The displacement of poor communities of color in favor of market-driven gentrification is nothing new, especially in urban centers like New York. However, this cyclical moving of bodies is rife with questions of "home" and "ownership," questions that are problematically, yet realistically addressed through Samantha's angry disapproval and annoyance at her three neighborly disturbances.

The threatening non-normativity of China, Destiny, and Jo is an uncomfortable issue for Samantha from the start. The questioning and qualifying of gender authenticity delimits the episode's dialog, wavering between pronouns and repeatedly pointing out the gender hybridity of the "half man, half woman," "chicks with dicks," with "boobs on top, balls down below." The instability of gender, blatantly evidenced by Destiny, China, and Jo, calls Samantha's own femininity so violently into question that she must repeatedly distance herself in an "us versus them" discourse of othering. Yet, despite distancing, Samantha's visible discomfort undercuts her own delicate identity as a heterosexual woman. Destiny, China, and Jo's over-the-top, diva-like antics and forced femininity are effectively juxtaposed with Samantha's own brand of woman-in-excess, underscoring the fallacy of both presentations and undermining her usual self-awareness. She blurts, "It's like they're putting on a show," in reference to their gender performances, denying her own daily performative persona. Completely unsettled, Samantha's usually raunchy and explicit dialog suddenly shifts to a tone of prudish disapproval. She relays a story she overheard Destiny tell in which, referring to a trick, she says, "You better get that thing outta my ass or I'm gonna shit on it!" Samantha is appalled, responding with a look of utter horror and disgust, admonishing, "Isn't that the dirtiest thing you've ever heard?" The viewer's shock comes, however, not from the explicit anecdote but from Samantha's sudden discursive shift from an "anything goes" attitude to a decidedly less open position. Live and let live no more, not when sex moves from a white, heteronormative context into messier categories—e.g., the anally penetrated black transvestite prostitute—beyond easy definition or recuperation. Shit and blackness coincide as threatening and ultimately unacceptable in Samantha's ultraconservative backlash.

Buttressing her "authentic" female heterosexuality, Samantha is later shown deep in the throes of passion with an overtly butch male lover. Loud noises from the street disrupt their fucking and Samantha is obviously distracted and disturbed. She throws him off of her and yells, "Shut up you bitches! I called the cops!" Destiny retorts, "Suck my cock!" This poignant interaction destroys the gender masquerade in a double gesture of emasculation (Samantha calls them "bitches," a feminizing term referring to their queerness) and re-entrenched biological conservatism (Destiny's penis reference serves to remind Samantha and the audience who the "real" man is). Despite the insistent presence of their penises and flamboyance, Destiny, China, and Jo are never allowed authenticity as either male or female, relegated instead to the status of abjection. Further, Samantha threatens them with the law, relying on her own whiteness and class privilege to exercise power, insinuating that they are criminals and do not belong in her newly exclusive neighborhood. Considering dominant tropes of black men as a danger to white society, Samantha's highly potent threat conjures problematically racialized images of criminality in the United States.

In retaliation, Destiny responds with a threat to Samantha's own performative identity. She yells that Samantha is not as "fierce" as she thinks she is, not as fabulous as she strives to be. Samantha's masquerade of glamour and femininity is decisively revealed as a sham. The fabulousness she appropriates from black queer culture has been brutally revoked. Samantha furiously fills a pot with water and throws it on Destiny, knocking off her wig and revealing her padded breasts, exposing the "fraud" of woman in this dangerously indefinable queer of color. Fittingly, the police arrive and force China, Destiny, and Jo to leave, further reinforcing their marginal status as poor, queer, racially marked outsiders. Defeated and humiliated, Destiny is cruelly punished for pointing out Samantha's own fragile womanhood. Yet Samantha's actions only reify her excessive performance of femininity, playing into the trope of woman as hysterical and wild, uncontrollable. She exceeds the boundaries of normative, ladylike gender and her masquerade ultimately fails her.

After Destiny later returns to egg Samantha in the face, the narrative's volatile tensions are magically resolved with a reconciliatory barbecue celebration on Samantha's deck as the episode closes. Samantha realizes she cannot win the battle against these fierce trannies, as the symmetry between "genuine womanliness" and the masquerade is revealed. A queer sensibility triumphs, championing the unconventional yet undeniable fabulousness of Destiny, China and Jo. Samantha must embrace them in order to regain her own status of fabulousness. Like a rainbow coalition of glamour and attitude, Destiny, China, and Jo bring style and pizzazz to her life, neighborhood, and party. Complicated notions of gender identity and performance are suddenly allayed in a multicultural, pansexual soiree of acceptance. Carrie's voice-over oddly chimes, "Don't worry, they have a very lovely life." While it is unclear whether Carrie is referring to Samantha's ilk or to Destiny, China, and Jo, the implication is that despite the irresolvable differences we see, we are far more similar than it seems. We all exceed easily definable boundaries of identity and that is the true essence of fabulousness. The viewer, too, is encouraged to forget the racially and sexually charged disjunctures and displacements in favor of a carefree celebration of diversity and inclusion through fashion and cocktails.

Conclusion

Is a seamless resolution truly this simple? Do feminist audiences buy it? Despite attempts at progressive representations, Sex and the City falls headlong into traps of convenient pluralism in the name of maintaining the status quo of white, heteronormative culture. Yet, through disidentification as a viewer, we can read Samantha's overt racism and homophobia in the episode as yet another failure of her heteronormative fabulous white femininity. Samantha is aware of the total instability of her identity, driving her to vehemently protect her precarious fabulousness and the power differential upholding it. However, her overzealous efforts to maintain that privileged status only work to unravel the façade, revealing the queer similarities between herself and Destiny, China, and Jo. Samantha, much like a closeted homosexual who is also a fervent homophobe, necessarily protects her normative identity through public distancing and degradation of threatening others. The conveniently neat resolution of the barbecue actually reveals the queer revelation of sameness; it is the unmasking of Samantha's masquerade, and, ultimately, the acknowledgement of Samantha as a drag queen. As viewers, by disidentifying with the apparent racism and homophobia and instead viewing Samantha's actions as a defense mechanism protecting her fragile gender performance, the barbecue resolution can be recuperated and reclaimed for a deeper set of meanings, beyond normativity and as a further illustration of Samantha's failure as a woman. Thus, the oddly pluralist finale loses some of its patronizing sentiment and can actually be interpreted as a queer formation of people, none of whom neatly fit into any clearly demarcated categories; folks who revel in the spillages, the excesses, and the messiness of identity.

While feminist and queer audiences can take solace in Sex and the City's widening array of roles for women and the inclusion of gay men, as we have seen, these representations are not without problems. It is through strategic disidentification, both as viewers and through the recoding of characters, that truly liberating and productive readings are constructed for a panoply of spectators. Oppositional reading strategies tap into the unacknowledged raced and classed subtexts forcefully running through the narratives and recurring motifs, allowing accidental, non-normative audiences to insert themselves into the dominant meanings. Queer, feminist, poor, racialized spectators can take pleasure in and identify with characters' identity excesses and their penchant for panache while simultaneously disavowing the normative, appropriated representations of white, wealthy, straight women. We can claim a new, feminist version of this fabulousness for ourselves, acknowledging the underlying history rife with exclusions without denying ourselves the pleasure of experiencing a visceral connection to the text. Thus, if a disidentificatory reading demands that characters are playfully read as "in drag"—as being subtle markers for subversions of gender, race, class, and so forth—how might once exclusionary narratives discursively shift to take on entirely new and progressive meanings? If the four straight women of Sex and the City are indeed gay men in drag, or conversely, if Stanford is recoded as a straight man performing homonormative gayness, what are Sex and the City's writers saying about queer sensibilities and mainstream values? Further, how might the switching of race transform meanings of fabulousness and acknowledge the subcultural origins of the concept in new and unforeseen ways? Extending "drag" reading strategies a step further, why not adopt a drag persona as viewers in order playfully to embody the characters while infusing them with our own set of feminist values? Playing with the fluidity of identity categories while incorporating a feminist or queer epistemology opens the door for a new vision of fabulous. Donning the masquerade of wealth, status, normative whiteness, or hyperbolized gender as depicted in the characters of Sex and the City, viewers can envision a version of themselves as part of this constructed world while simultaneously queering the very same characters as part of the process. In other words, feminist and queer audiences must engage a reverse process of co-opting and appropriating fabulousness through drag, reinscribing the subversive histories and volatile politics along the way. I think Samantha, the gay black drag queen, would approve.

Works Cited

"All That Glitters." Episode 62 of Sex and the City. Written by Cindy Chupack. Directed by Charles McDougall. HBO. January 13, 2002.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 3rd ed. New York: Continuum, 1994.

"Cock-a-Doodle-Do!" Episode 48 of Sex and the City. Written by Michael Patrick King. Directed by Allen Coulter. HBO. October 15, 2000.

Guerrero, Ed. "The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood's Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties." In Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Hebdidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.

Maddison, Stephen. Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Riviere, Joan. "Womanliness as Masquerade." In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen, 1986.

Sex and the City. Created by Darren Star. HBO. 1998–2004.

Shugart, Helene. "Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media." Critical Studies in Media Communication 20.1 (March 2003): 67–91.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.