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.
