Skip to main content

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 This reboot of Queer Eye is designed to deconstruct the negative and outdated stereotypes of gay men.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


Word Count: 577
Labels:

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NO MORE DAISY DUKES

By Colleen Kelly This thematic series has begun to establish that female sexuality is an aspect of the music industry capable of crossing genre barriers. Country music has traditionally been labeled the genre with the least emphasis on female sexuality because of its socially conservative themes (Aubrey & Frisby, 2011, p. 477). I challenge this notion with my assertion that sexuality has always been present in country music but has undergone a change from a form of feminist liberation to a tool to objectify women. In the history of country music, particularly visible in the 1990s, there is a long-standing tradition of female artists using their music to advance feminist ideals and reclaim their sexuality (Berlatsky, 2014). Let me be clear that I am not asserting that these musicians are the long-awaited saviors of women. Rather, these female artists utilized the media to challenge societal norms surrounding gender and sexuality. Shania Twain was not only one of the biggest ...
6 comments
Read more

MEDIA FRAUD

By Duncan West Media fraud is a growing problem in our world today. The Media is very powerful. It can be used to do great things, but there are times it is used for not so great things, like the manipulation of its audience. Media Fraud can be a scam on the internet where someone says they are your buddy and need money and can be as pivotal as faking news. I think the root of this problem is that us, the users, believe anything and everything we see on the internet. People have incredible power via social media but this power can be manipulated. Take this case for instance, “In 2002, the U.S. invaded Iraq based on reports that Saddam Hussein’s government was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction… As of late 2011, U.S. troops are still in Iraq.”(Biegelman, 2013, p. 11) In this instance, even our own president was manipulated through fraudulence.  We have all heard of fake news in broadcasts but this fake news can appear in the form of internet fraud. Fake news is us...
3 comments
Read more

MISREPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN AMERICAN FILM

By: Graham Jaeger Minorities have always been misrepresented and stereotyped within American media. More specifically, Indians have had a very hard time getting past these false depictions of themselves, especially because of how they are portrayed on television. One show that does a great job of provoking thought on the treatment of how Indian men are represented comes from the Netflix Sitcom titled Master of None . Within this show, they make it clear to the audience that the media heavily relies on a prejudiced view of Indian men. This is mainly because Indian men are often objectified as “weird and amusing” (Pfeiffer, 2016). A lot of times, the media uses these stereotypes about the Indian culture as a joke in order to make the audience laugh. Racism has been around for hundreds of years and will constantly linger for as long as I live because of this exact culture that we live in today. A major problem with racism is how the media portrays Indian men through these stereotypes...
2 comments
Read more