Katherine Sender

Queens for a day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the neoliberal project

This paper moves beyond a conventional critique of gay stereotyping on Bravos popular makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to consider how the show puts gay cultural expertise to work to reform a heterosexual masculinity that is compatible with the neoliberal moment. At issue are the newly public acknowledgement of gay taste and consumer expertise; the “crisis of masculinity” that requires that heterosexual men must now attend to their relationships, image, and domestic habitus; and the remaking of the straight guy as not only an improved romantic partner—the metrosexual—but a more flexible, employable worker. The author concludes by considering how camp deconstructs some of Queer Eyes most heteronormative aims, even while leaving its class and consumption rationales intact.

Epidemics of will, failures of self-esteem: Responding to fat bodies in The Biggest Loser and What Not to Wear

Fat people are greatly underrepresented on US television, and when they appear in fictional shows they are usually the objects of derision. Reality television, with its claims to authenticity and endless search for new participants, has offered more opportunities to represent obese people. Makeover television shows, in particular, have included obese people and explicitly addressed obesity as an issue. How do viewers of the US versions of two makeover shows, What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser, talk about the representation and treatment of obese people on these shows? Audience responses to the shows suggest that even viewers who consider themselves ‘fans’ critique them for narrow and unkind representations, and for inadequate or bad advice. Yet audiences concur with the underlying premise of both shows: an obese body is evidence of an inner malaise. In particular, epidemics of the will and failures of self-esteem are seen as both the cause and the outcome of the problems that makeover shows must address. What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser appeared on US television in the context of increasing concern about growing rates of obesity in the United States, where two out of three people are estimated to be overweight or fat (Ogden et al. 2006). This concern was reflected in press coverage of obesity; one researcher found 2700 US articles in a LexisNexis search on ‘obesity’ in the second half of 2007 alone (Nagler 2007). Yet although obese people have become the focus of much debate in society, they remain underrepresented on television. In 2003 Greenberg, Eastin, Hofschire, Laclan, and Brownell found a ‘comparative neglect of overweight individuals on television and [an] imbalance toward thinner men and, especially, thinner women’ (2003, 1346). In their content analysis of 210 hours of primetime network programming they estimate that ‘whereas 1 in 4 women in reality are obese, the television figure was 3 in 100, . . . [and] men in real life are 3 times more likely to be obese than their television peers’ (1343). Moreover, when larger people are portrayed on television, ‘fat women are frequently figures of fun, occasionally villainesses, often “bad examples” of people with no self-control or low self esteem’ (LeBesco 2004, 41, quoting Debbie Notkin). Fat men tend to appear on situation comedies (Drew Carey, The King of Queens) where the ‘frequent employment of the soft, fat male to represent the impotence of patriarchal power invests male fat with an effeminacy (or “sensitivity”) for which the heterosexual masculine ideal has little tolerance’ (Mosher 2001, 187). Except for those few occasions where obese men represent the threat of brute, physical power, as in crime dramas and The Sopranos, fat people in fictional shows are ‘figures of fun’ or failure, and are rarely credited with a subjectivity that isn’t entirely constructed by their size.

Selling sexual subjectivities: Audiences respond to gay window advertising

This essay addresses the relationship between audiences’ sexual identifications and their readings of “gay window advertisements,”; which appeal to lesbian, gay and bisexual consumers while remaining innocuous to heterosexual readers. Five focus groups, including heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian and gay participants, described nine magazine ads. Lesbian, gay and bisexual participants were more likely to produce gay readings of the ads, although there were cases where they did not, and other cases where heterosexual participants did articulate gay readings. I consider the dynamic between sexual identification and reading strategies, including the implications of constituting sexual identification as a basis for consumer appeals.

Neither Fish nor Fowl: Feminism, Desire, and the Lesbian Consumer Market

This article addresses gay marketers’ tardy and ambivalent attempts to imagine and organize lesbians as a viable target marketing niche. Practical considerations make lesbians less attractive as a market: They have a lower average household income than gay male and heterosexual couples and they are hard to reach for market research purposes and with advertising. But the lesbian market is also dogged by the popular image of lesbians as lacking both erotic and acquisitive desire, embodied in the stereotype of anti-consumption, parsimonious, unsexy feminists who resist marketers’ interest in them as consumers.

Book Review: Gareth Palmer (ed.) Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008, £55 Hbk (ISBN-10 0754674304, ISBN-13 978-0-7546-7430-6), 195 pp:

Despite its strengths, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down raised three sets of questions. First, I’m left wondering what a healthy, liberated sexuality might look like for young black women of the hip hop generation? Though Sharpley-Whiting addresses the complicated ways sexual choice has historically functioned as a form of resistance in black American culture, she ultimately argues women’s sexual participation in hip hop culture is an illusory version of sexual freedom. What would an un-illusory sexual freedom look like? Might young black women be seeking more expansive expressions of sexuality, beyond the limited ways black female sexuality in American popular culture has been historically represented and academically understood? A second question concerns Sharpley-Whiting’s dismissal of the productive potential of gender troubling in hip hop culture. Drawing upon the gender troubling works of Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, Mignon Moore, Kara Keeling and others, how might a new black female masculinity be encouraged and supported in healthy, gender-progressive ways, rather than framed as inherently problematic? Third, given the book’s scope, I’m perplexed by the inattention given to black women as hip hop producers, creators and artists, most notably women rappers. Such oversight ignores the complicated ways black women negotiate their participatory role in hip hop beyond that of a video vixen, groupie, (diasporic) sex worker or consumer; as such, women rappers’ unique experiences are neglected. For example, how are women formally and informally excluded from the industry, such as when business takes place in strip clubs? How does such exclusion affect the future of hip hop, particularly when we emphasize the necessity of black women’s voices for successful institutional change? In spite of these questions, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down is an ambitious project that engages, rather than skirts, the complicated domain of sex, gender, power and hip hop. The book is extremely readable and suitable for a variety of audiences, including undergraduates, academics and the general public. Moreover, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down is an important contribution to a growing body of hip hop scholarship, including the very promising and insightful work being done at the intersection of hip hop and feminism.

Review of Martha Gever, Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Self-Invention

As her characteristically witty title suggests, in her new book Martha Gever “entertains” lesbians from a number of perspectives: she discusses lesbians in entertainment industries; she addresses how lesbians have entertained a variety of audiences, including lesbians; and she provides an overview of the ways popular culture has entertained the idea of lesbian celebrity since the early twentieth century. Her project, however, is to offer neither a “portrait gallery of lesbian celebrities” nor a “blanket characterization of the transformations of popular culture” that lesbian celebrity may have effected (p. 191). Instead, she is concerned with lesbian celebrities’ “self-invention, which is intimately related to opportunities for self-display, as well as the continual monitoring and adjustment of selfimage” (p. 4). Taking the lead from Foucault and from critics of neoliberalist governmentality such as Nikolas Rose, Gever argues that lesbian identities are produced, not simply discovered and displayed, as advocates of “lesbian visibility” would suggest. She locates the technologies of such self-fashioning in dominant twentieth century discourses such as psychiatry and psychology that posited homosexuality as deviant, as well as in the opportunities offered by entertainment professions that foster fame, and in genres such as melodrama that have helped give shape to lesbian celebrity narratives. The strength of this book is in its detours through the changing social, industrial, and technological conditions that provided the very possibility of famously lesbian women. With data gleaned from meticulous historical research, she describes in depth a few case studies—focusing in particular on Radcliffe Hall, Mercedes de Acosta, and Martina Navratilova—to illustrate her argument for the active production of a public lesbian identity and for the negotiation of gender performance within that identity. The most successful chapter, “Going Public: Star Wars in the Liberation Movements” describes a profound ambivalence toward celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s: “Although it might seem inconsistent with efforts to identify noteworthy representatives, any lesbian who became renowned due to her involvement in the women’s or gay movement was suspected of using politics for self-aggrandizement. .|.|. [T]he concern with celebrity in lesbian cultural milieus was treated as a political problem as often as it was interpreted as an achievement” (p. 82). By the 1980s and 1990s, this ambivalence had largely been resolved through Navratilova’s successful reconstruction of herself as a lesbian icon, by deploying technologies of the body (her diet, exercise, and training regime) and by skillfully courting the mainstream press. For a rich description of Hall’s, de Acosta’s, and Navratilova’s respective rise to fame, Gever’s book is a useful complement to existing histories of openly lesbian public figures. Yet although I appreciate her attempt to do something different than construct a gossipy lineage of famously lesbian women—Greta, k.d., Melissa, oh my!—her microscopic focus on very few celebrities leaves submerged the trajectory of increasing possibilities for lesbian celebrity throughout the twentieth century. Most strikingly, she gives almost no attention to such pivotal moments as Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out as both a celebrity and as her eponymous character in Ellen in 1997, nor to Rosie O’Donnell’s open flirtation with the public on the topic of her sexuality until her “official” coming out in 2002. By concluding her historical overview with Navratilova, Gever ignores the rapidly changing meanings of lesbian celebrity that have been available to gay women in public life since the early 1990s, when the topic of “lesbian chic” erupted in the popular press and made the 1990s arguably the decade of lesbian celebrity. Gever does not attempt to link the growing possibilities for a nonpathologized public lesbian persona with the increased visibility that late twentieth century media offer, nor how these possibilities have been facilitated by