Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City
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."
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