Queer TV

Theories, Histories, Politics

Glyn Davis, Gary Needham, Glyn Davis, Gary Needham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415450454
• eBook ISBN: 9781134058556
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

How can we queerly theorise and understand television? How can the realms of television studies and queer theory be brought together, in a manner beneficial and productive for both?

Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics is the first book to explore television in all its scope and complexity – its industry, production, texts, audiences, pleasures and politics – in relation to queerness. With contributions from distinguished authors working in film/television studies and the study of gender/sexuality, it offers a unique contribution to both disciplines.

An introductory chapter by the editors charts the key debates and issues addressed within the book, followed by three sections, each central to an understanding of the relationships between queerness and television: 'theories and approaches', histories and genres', and 'television itself'. Individual essays examine the relationships between queers, queerness, and television across the multiple sites of production, consumption, reception, interpretation and theorisation, as well as the textual and aesthetic dimensions of television and the televisual. The book crucially moves beyond lesbian and gay textual analyses of specific TV shows that have often focussed on evaluations of positive/negative representations and identities. Rather, the essays in Queer TV theorise not just the queerness in/on television (the production personnel, the representations it offers) but also the queerness of television as a distinct medium.

Part I
Theories and approaches

Chapter 1
Epistemology of the console

Lynne Joyrich

PREFACE, A RE-VIEW

Seeing at a distance

In the US around 1997, there was a lot of buzz among both those who work in and those who watch TV (i.e. among almost everyone) proclaiming a new (tele-)vision of sexuality, instigated by the simultaneous ‘coming out’ of star Ellen DeGeneres and the character, Ellen Morgan, whom she played on her eponymous sitcom, Ellen. Did this herald a new age in American televisual treatments of sexuality, and, if so, how? And a new age of what, exactly? No one could answer this precisely … but industry insiders, critics, and viewers began looking for and/or lauding changes in the ways in which US TV might recognize and represent sexuality – particularly queer sexualities. After all, not only was ABC’s Ellen giving us the first openly gay fictional character in a prime-time network programme, but – for ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ in ‘open’ or ‘veiled’ ways, as ‘significant’ and/or ‘secondary’ figures – LGBTQ folks had been turning up, more and more, in programming ranging from news and talk shows to soaps and sitcoms, from inexpensive reality shows to ‘quality’ pay-channel dramas. And the greater disclosure and variety of sexualities that this seemed to announce affected not only tele-visions and tele-epistemologies of homosexuality but of heterosexuality as well. Just to give one, though particularly telling, example: in the midst of the non-stop media coverage that spurred the country’s explicit discussion of sexual acts engaged in by then President Bill Clinton (from when the first reports of rumours about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky emerged in mid-January 1998 until Clinton at last acknowledged the ‘improper physical relationship’ in grand jury testimony on 17 August 1998 and then, that same night, in a televised address to the nation), Sex and the City premiered (6 June 1998), also attracting the American viewing public (or at least those who could afford HBO) with its blow-by-blow account of the sex lives – and, not unrelated, consumption habits – of four stylish New York City gal-pals. Something certainly seemed like it was happening … and all we had to do was look at our screens to know it.

But what does it mean just to look at our TV sets and ‘to know’ – particularly when this means ‘knowing sexuality’? This was the question that I attempted to address in writing ‘Epistemology of the Console,’ in which I explored how television is both caught up in and helps to create the contradictions of knowledge and sexuality by which we – gay and straight; on the screen, behind it, or in front of it – are simultaneously placed and displaced. Looking back at this essay now for Queer TV gives me a unique opportunity to produce my own ‘tele-vision’ (a seeing at a distance – in this case, of approximately a decade) of that reading of how TV produces, and immerses us within, its strangely distanced yet also enclosing sight. Or, one might say, it is a chance to look back both at TV’s paradoxical both near- and far-sightedness when it comes to knowing sexuality and at my own view of that nexus. I appreciatively take this opportunity, not to attempt to bring my examples up to date (an impossible project, given the ever-changing stream of TV programming – the flow, constitutive of the desires and knowledges we entertain, that thus demands analysis more than any particular examples), nor to proclaim TV’s recent progress in that flow (for, while I wouldn’t want to argue that there has been ‘regress,’ the logic that I attempt to unravel would make such a proclamation self-defeating); rather, this preface allows me briefly to reflect again on that televisual logic so as to re-interrogate these very discourses of reflection and progression, vision and visibility by which we typically describe knowledge, sexuality, and television.

Blue light district

The phrase ‘blue light district’ has contrary meanings: in some places, it signifies an area where one might buy sex for money (a synonym for ‘red light district’); in other places, it means almost the opposite: an area filled with surveillance cameras and heavily patrolled by police so as to impede the selling of sex and other ‘harmful substances.’ Perhaps, then, it’s the perfect, paradoxical metaphor for TV, a medium defined by its own contradictions (flow through segmentation, continuity via its discontinuous texts, distanced yet overly close) – a medium that, through its glowing blue light, marks out an area for both the commodification of sexuality and its surveillance and policing.

We are accustomed, in Western society, to thinking about knowledge through metaphors of light – of illumination; of enlightenment; of making things visible; in effect, of shining a beacon (like a searchlight, or TV’s electron scan beam) of truth. These tropes, while applied to all sorts of ‘knowing’ (to a notion of knowledge in general), have been particularly significant in relation to knowing sexuality, especially given the appeals to visibility that have structured most recent LGBTQ movements. Yet I would argue that such appeals are paradoxically based on precisely the view of sexuality, vision, and knowledge against which they struggle: that is, while relying so heavily on discourses of enlightened visibility is certainly understandable in this post-Enlightenment society of the image, this nonetheless means that queer political and cultural opposition becomes framed in the same terms as the dominant ones that we’d like to challenge, thus undermining the effectivity of that opposition. For rather than universal knowledge that sheds light, there are specific knowledges that simultaneously both illuminate and obscure, produced by specific discourses and modes of signification (of which, as I elaborate in the following essay, discourses of sexuality and mass-mediated modes of signification are key); and rather than identities always already existing, even if in the shadows, waiting to be brought to view, subjectivities and sexualities are only formed (and deformed; formed as deformed) through those specific knowledges.¹

Within our culture’s construction of knowledge, sexuality is considered something ‘inside’ of each subject – permanent yet invisible unless brought to light, and thus calls to make it visible (not only as a strategy for each person coming out, but as a demand for public representation) have been central in LGBTQ politics. Not coincidentally, this demand also aims to make alignments between a politics of sexuality and politics of gender and race – clearly an important goal, but troubling when articulated in this way, in that an alignment based on the idea that sexual orientation should be made as indelibly ‘visible’ as race and gender (supposedly) are carries dangerous assumptions, taking this visibility for granted and not acknowledging it as itself a construction.² (And an inadequate one at that – obviously, we can’t necessarily simply ‘see’ gender and race identifications, nor would it be at all helpful to demand that we should, as this ignores the many complex ways in which subject and social positions might be experienced, claimed, and understood.)

The language of visibility, as a particular discourse of knowledge, a particular mode of mediation, and a particular political programme, thus retains its own blind spots. And when it comes to thinking about TV’s treatment of sexuality, and where we’d like it to go, we also have to consider whether ‘visibility’ is even the primary register. Television may be ‘seeing at a distance,’ but it has also been variously labeled ‘radio with pictures’ (emphasizing the central role of sound in TV programming) and ‘moving wallpaper’ (emphasizing its environmental, not just representational aspect), and, in today’s world of ‘media integration,’ it is just as likely to be experienced on a computer as a TV set, thereby even further increasing the already existing cross-media possibilities for multiple readings and writings, fantasy games and fan productions, ancillary texts and (of course) commodity tie-ins across numerous signifying and sensory modes.

It is for these reasons that, in attempting to understand television and sexuality, I focused on the question of knowledge – on the epistemology of the console – rather than on the more usual target of visibility. That is, rather than looking at how TV looks at (or away from) queer folks, I tried to understand how TV comes to know sexuality, how it comes to construct what we even count as knowledge about sexuality. Yet the danger for the academic or the TV critic – that is, for someone whose professional responsibilities are supposed to include the production of knowledge – also lies precisely here: what kind of knowledge can we produce about the formation of knowledge; what kind of logic should we use in analyzing TV’s logic? Is there a way to ‘think TV’ without thinking just like it, a way to understand how we literally ‘think through’ its epistemological forms without only reproducing the forms of this mass-reproduced medium?

Across the channel, down the stream

A critique that has been leveled at the essay, ‘Epistemology of the Console,’ is that, in parts, it may be a little too schematic: that, in outlining some of US TV’s typical strategies for knowing sexuality, it risks presenting them as simple options offered by television producers among which viewers might then select (much like, if planning an evening of viewing sustenance, one can choose a soap opera or a sitcom, a reality show or a drama, or, in the case of literal consumption, one can pick dishes, from among various categories, off a menu). In some ways, such heuristic categorization may be appropriate for an essay on television, given TV’s own conventions; indeed, in contrasting television to cinema, Rick Altman has famously argued that while ‘attention to classical Hollywood narrative is in large part goal-driven, …attention to American television narrative is mainly menu-driven.’ (1986:45, italics in original). That is, given its structure of flow and segmentation, television seems to offer a variety of tasty little bits, arranged by the networks but still available to be mixed and matched at the viewer-consumer’s own channel-changing discretion. Nonetheless, while my ‘menu-like’ attention to television’s strategies might thus seem fitting to its subject, this is also, I recognize, a potential pitfall – or a paradox.

As still the dominant media form in our culture (and today in most cultures around the globe), it is hardly surprising that television is, at least to a great degree, constitutive of the very ways in which we think – including the ways in which the television theorist thinks. Yet this is not only inevitable; it is also, I would argue, oftentimes instructive. In saying this, I am not trying to make an apologist case for television’s ‘educational’ (vs. purely ‘entertainment’) value; in fact, in my thinking about television’s thinking, I argue that TV undoes this binary (along with many others – continuation/interruption, totalization/fragmentation, protraction/ immediacy, stability/instability, inside/outside, domestic/social, public/private, real/virtual, and so on). Rather, I am suggesting both that it is important for television critics to acknowledge their kinship (indeed, shared identity) with television viewers and even with television textuality itself, which, as just indicated (and elaborated in more detail in the main body of the essay) engages a logic that confounds our usual categorical oppositions – thus offering, in the best case scenario, a productive model for theory (though, in the worst case scenario, a spiral of only increasing consumption and diminishing returns). But this ‘worst case’ also points to the problem with thinking only within TV’s own terms – to, then, the necessity to think beyond, beside, and/or between television’s texts so as to interrogate its epistemology with our own.

Yet what does it mean to think beyond, beside, or between TV texts? With a medium in which ‘the text’ itself is almost impossible to define – comprised as it is by an ever-growing temporal and spatial flow, with continuity created from discontinuity, unity from division (and vice-versa) – is there a beyond, between, besides? As I’ve been attempting to stress, television’s logic (and, I hope, my own in thinking through it) is more complicated and contradictory than it initially appears, not really operating by a simple ‘menu’ channel structure but as a complex, mobile field – one that cannot be assessed in simple textual (or, as I argue, sexual) terms. This is suggested by the very insufficiency of presuming firm categorical differences (as in the shorthand used above) between ‘a soap opera or a sitcom, a reality show or a drama,’ given the ways in which, for example, many TV series have become serialized in form, soaps include comic moments, reality shows are certainly as ‘dramatic’ as they are ‘real,’ and dramas market their ‘ripped from the headlines’ realism – that is, the ways in which TV crosses its own divides and links its texts in dynamic interaction. This too is suggested by that other use of the term ‘menu’ in today’s digital, hypertextual world. If TV (and, to return to Altman’s phrase, our attention to it) is ‘menu-driven,’ this thus needn’t mean that it is purely schematic, but, rather, that television constructs a multi-faceted, multi-accented, multi-meaning universe, where the usual distinctions we are likely to make (between programme types, media strategies, viewer investments, ideological effects) don’t necessarily hold in the usual ways. And this may be even more the case today than when the essay was originally written, with TV in our era of ‘media convergence’ even further combining and recombining its strategies just as we combine and recombine television texts in our viewings, thinking, lives.

Nonetheless, the breakdown of categorical discriminations on television certainly doesn’t mean an end to political and social discrimination; clearly, US TV is still a heterosexist (and sexist, racist, classist, ageist, etc., etc.) institution. In other words, while, as I argue, television’s logic may be one in which binaries become blurred – with, strangely, exclusion sometimes operating via inclusion, obscurity sometimes generated by obviousness, the ‘screened’ produced by exactly what’s screened – this doesn’t, of course, at all mean that it’s a ‘liberating’ medium, the model of Marshall McLuhan’s (1962; 1964) egalitarian ‘global village.’ But it does mean that instead of assuming that we know how and what TV knows, we truly subject its complex epistemology to scrutiny. As those interested in queer TV, it is critical to keep making demands of television; but articulating these in the usual terms (more truth vs. falsehood, more visibility vs. invisibility, more presence vs. absence), while marking important goals, may also contribute to the problem of a limited schema if these are the only ways in which we frame our demands.

This, ultimately, I would argue, is what TV logic can teach us: its paradoxes, spiralings, and double movements can ensnare us … but they can also criss-cross themselves, sometimes reinforcing ways of thinking that we want to move beyond but sometimes, maybe, re-envisioning categories in ways that allow us to see differently (or, as I say in the essay, that reveal how the logic can explode itself). In this, then, there is value not simply to tracing TV’s epistemology but to considering how its tracings can assist our own epistemologies; not only training our sights on television but allowing it, perhaps, to train our sight – and other means of knowledge – anew. In this way I continue to hope we might strive to expose the epistemology of the console so that it needn’t be just a consolidated box of our culture’s ignorance and fears.

– Lynne Joyrich, 2008

EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CONSOLE

Outbursts? Exploding closets and epistemological crises

The 1994 Halloween episode of Roseanne exhibits the Connor family and their friends playing a series of Halloween tricks on one another, each attempting to outdo the others. The plot focuses in particular on two extended pranks, both of which are referenced by the episode’s title, ‘Skeleton in the Closet.’ The most elaborate involves a ploy to persuade Roseanne that her brother-in-law Fred is gay. Roseanne ‘accidently’ witnesses Fred’s apparent familiarity with several gay men at a beauty salon and then at a costume party (in which he appears as Batman to his wife’s Robin); notes his discomfort at male attention that seems to allude to a secret history; and is spurred to recall her own memories of Fred’s past that include his hairstyle experimentation and a desire to see the film That’s Entertainment. After this series of coded references allows Roseanne to ‘recognize’ Fred as homosexual, the prank reaches its climax when Roseanne and her sister Jackie storm into the bedroom, only to find Fred in bed with Roseanne’s own husband Dan. Jumping out of the bedroom closet, family friends Leon and Nancy, two of the programme’s queer ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the pleasures of the tube
• PART I Theories and approaches
• PART II Histories and genres
• PART III Television itself