Cristy Turner, "Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City" (page 3 of 4)
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.
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