Recently the third season of Queer Eye was released on Netflix. The premise of the show is 5 Queer people who makeover people who need a little bit of help. They film in Georgia and Kentucky which strikes me as a thoughtful choice to choose people in the South. By the end of the episode, the person who is getting the makeover gets a brand new wardrobe and advice on how to dress from Tan France. They also get their hair redone by Jonathan Van Ness and more importantly get advice on self-care and how to maintain good hygiene. Bobby Berk redoes their space and Antoni Porowski helps with food. Lastly, Karamo Brown is the culture expert and does an amazing job lifting up the person of the week. The best part of the show is that throughout the season you get glimpses into each one of these people's stories and they do a decent job on the show to be as diverse as possible. There's an episode where they help out a trans individual and another with a Black lesbian woman where they help her grapple with what it means to be a Black lesbian. They have also helped someone come out to their stepmom and helped another person tell their parents that he didn't actually graduate from college. I've included the links to each one of their Wikipedias in case you want to read more about them. I also highly recommend watching an episode if you have Netflix.
Tan -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tan_FranceJonathan -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Van_NessBobby -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_BerkAntoni -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_PorowskiKaramo -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karamo_Brown
I would also love to hear from anyone if they find certain parts of the show problematic because in some instances I think it could be but I'm not sure...
Thanks for posting about this! I think queer eye is really interesting. It's interesting how popular it seems to be. I've never been a fan of it, but maybe just because it wouldn't be my type of show even with str8s. But it's never felt very subversive to me. I am glad you pointed out that the new season apparently features a more diverse group of makeover-recipients, and it is of course notable that the makeovers take place in Georgia and Kentucky. But it's still just a bunch of mostly white gay men giving these fabulous bourgeois makeovers and we can't pretend that part of the joke/entertainment isn't seeing the effeminate subversion of masculinity on the part of these gay men contrasted with the stereotypically str8 men they are making over. That the gay men are confident (read: rich, famous, televised) enough to own their fabulousness despite being amongst macho Southern men can be read as a celebration of their attempts to redefine masculinity. We should not forget this and I am not trying to say that's not what's happening. But we must also remember the long tradition of laughing at gay men (remember the gay soldiers whose job was just to perform in drag shows so the str8 army men could have a good laugh?) and queer people generally. The fact that gay men have a TV show does not mean it is solely a celebration of them. It can simultaneously be that in some ways and exploitative entertainment for str8 people that merely laughs at effeminate men. There's so much more complexity that could be involved--TV has so much power to question, trouble, and queer what we understand about gender and sexuality; I don't think we should settle for something like Queer Eye, which would have fit just as easily into mainstream society in 50s New York, or any of the other sub-cultures/sub-eras when certain palatable mostly-male queers and queens were accepted as absurd and over-the-top entertainment. As they have been at various points in history, effeminate gay men and queens serve as affective commodities to be consumed by the str8 population (think: str8 girls at the drag show for a bachelorette party). These gay male entertainers are hilariously non-threatening in their contained subversions of masculinity and traditional gender. You can turn on an episode of Queer Eye and laugh at the sassy repartee, but you know this subversion of gender will not seep outside the boundaries of the show. Just like the gay soldiers had a valued place performing in drag for their fellow soldiers, but had their gayness been more threatening, had they refused to be commodities to be laughed at, or had they allowed their gayness to seep outside the accepted container of the drag show, they would have been swiftly removed from their positions of visibility. I posit that the same is true for something like Queer Eye. There's definitely some value to a show like this too; I'm not trying to shut down your post or totally rail against this show. Just something to think about.
ReplyDelete