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
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