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DECONSTRUCTING HOMOSEXUAL STEREOTYPES


By Tess Weigel
This year Netflix released a reboot of the Bravo series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with a new cast of five gay men. The 2018 Queer Eye casts consists of Antoni Porowski, Tan France, Kamaro Brown, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness. Each member of the Fab Five has a specialty of food, fashion, culture, design, and grooming, respectively. This reboot of Queer Eye is designed to deconstruct the negative and outdated stereotypes of gay men. In each episode, the Fab Five addresses topics such as homosexual relationships, homosexuality in religion, and minorities within the gay community. 


Before 2018’s Queer Eye, only 3.6% of gay males have been portrayed in television against the 94.9% of heterosexual males (Kidd, 2014). While the frequency of the presence of gay men in the media has increased, the negative stereotype of how a gay man is portrayed amongst the plot line in television needs to be reconstructed to represent all different types of gay men. For example, while some of these stereotypes promote “positive” representations, such as gay men are stylish, witty, or flamboyantly fun, it creates an idea that there is only one type of gay man and this man is vastly different than the heterosexual man (Miller & Lewallen, 2015). Most television shows, particularly sitcoms, associate gay men with highly stereotypical feminine traits and behaviors or are seen as the “butt of their own jokes” through hurtful and homophobic stereotypes (Miller & Lewallen, 2015). 

This feminized stereotype of the gay man can be seen in the 2009 show Glee with Kurt Hummel. Kurt loves fashion, dislikes sports, and is overly flamboyant. Similarly, this stereotype is recognized in 2009 show Modern Family with gay couple Cameron Tucker and Mitchell Pritchett. Inside their relationship, Cameron is seen as the ‘woman’ of the relationship while Mitchell is the ‘man’. This is due to Cameron’s depiction of the stereotypical gay man. He is overly dramatic, loves shopping, and is the stay-at-home parent for their daughter. 

These stereotypes were the typical representation of gay men in television until the 2011 sitcom Happy Endings. Happy Endings follows the lives of six friends in Chicago, one being Max Blum. Max is not like the ‘typical gay man’. Instead of being interested in shopping and being a girl’s gay best friend he wants to watch sports and hang out with his heterosexual male friends (Adams, 2013). Max completely disrupts the preconceived notion of what it means to be gay in television through his personality and mannerisms.

While Max’s gayness is regularly discussed in the show, it is rarely the main focus (Miller & Lewallen, 2015). This is where the importance of Queer Eye plays a role in the portrayal of gay men on television. Queer Eye is focused entirely around what it means to be gay in 2018, starting by deconstructing the stereotypes. While the Fab Five portray the ‘positive’ stereotypes as stylish and fun, they also are not afraid to discuss larger societal problems. This is seen in the first episode when a straight man asks about homosexual relationships and who is the woman in their own relationships. The Fab Five dismantles his assumptions of gay men from shows like Modern Family by explaining that not all gay relationships follow the model of a woman and man. As a result, contemporary shows like Queer Eye are working towards breaking down the hegemonic stereotypes of gay men to create a more inclusive society through media. 

                                                             References

Adams, N. (2017, March 31). Why Happy Endings' Max Blum was the most important gay character on tv. Junkee. Retrieved from https://junkee.com/why-happy-endings-max-blum-was-the-most-important-gay-on-tv/848

Kidd, D. (2014). Pop culture freaks: Identity, mass media, and society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Miller, B., & Lewallen, J. (2015). The effects of portrayals of gay men on homonegativity and the attribution of gender-based descriptors. Communication Studies,66(3), 358-377. doi:10.1080/10510974.2015.1018446


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Comments

  1. KHOctober 31, 2018 at 12:47 PM

    Tess,

    This is something of a mixed bag.

    On the one hand, the topic is clearly relevant to our interests and concerns this semester. What's more, you've located some useful literature to inform your efforts. All good!

    On the other hand, you don't do a very thorough job analyzing the Queer Eye reboot – as you seem to suggest you will do in your opening paragraph.

    Rather, the majority of your post revisits some of the relevant literature, but without offering your informed opinion on how well (or poorly) this new iteration of Queer Eye challenges one-dimensional depictions of homosexual men on US television.

    Put differently, you haven't deployed the relevant literature to discuss this "new" cultural object.

    Persistent errors with your use of punctuation marks around quotations further undermine your otherwise solid effort.

    26 pts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 1, 2018 at 12:16 PM

    Tess,

    Good job on this post! I am a huge fan of Queer Eye and have often wondered about the implications that the show has on sexual representation in our popular culture, so I am glad to see that it has been written about! Kidd notes that the most commonly represented homosexual individuals in media is the gay, white flamboyant male. Queer Eye makes a point to represent homosexuality across multiple races, which is another thing the show does well.

    After reading your post and the discussion of the hurtful stereotype of flamboyant gay men, I began to think of the Shameless, a show about a poor working class family in the South Side of Chicago. One of the six siblings that the show follows, Ian, struggles with being a homosexual in such a harsh, judgmental and violent setting. He and his eventual boyfriend, Mickey, portray a very different image of the typical flamboyant, white gay man that is represented in popular culture and media. I wonder what this representation has done for the LGBTQ community, if it has done anything at all. In my opinion, the show does important work by bringing attention to the hardship LGBTQ individuals face by not living in the typical "gayborhoods." Like Chris Crocker from Dustin Kidd's Social Media Freak: Digital Identity in the Network Society, Ian and Mickey are minorities in their communities and face a lot of push back for their sexuality.

    ReplyDelete

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