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