Queer Identity

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy premiered on Bravo in 2003 to extremely positive reception. The premise was simple enough: “Each week [the Fab Five’s] mission [was] to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab.” An admirable endeavor indeed, and one that was been praised by Out magazine as “the greatest gay success stor[y]” of 2003. While Queer Eye’s popularity certainly indicates heightened public support of LGBT imagery in mainstream media, the content of the show is cause for concern. In her essay on the mainstreaming of LGBT/queer identities, Eve Ng argues that the integration of non-heterosexual identities is directly tied to queer marginalization in other spheres. The distinction between LGBT and

First used by British economists and philosophers, it is a framework which favors privatization, deregulation, and free markets. Until the early 1970s, the relationship between the state and the market was understood through the liberal economic reform following World War II. While Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal set up social safety nets through social programs – such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Public Works Administration – neoliberalism emphasizes individual responsibility as the primary means to achieve class mobility. While Franklin Roosevelt established social services to support struggling post-Depression Americans, the Fab Five swoop in to provide domestication services to reform male heterosexuality into a masculinity that is more compatible with neoliberalism.

Characteristics of U.S. welfare liberalism Characteristics of U.S. neoliberalism Examples on Queer Eye

Authoritarian government Individual responsibility The straight guy is blamed for his own failure to succeed at masculinity/heterosexuality.

Direct crisis intervention “Expert advice” The success or failure of the straight guy’s mission is contingent on his ability to perform without direct assistance from the Fab Five.

Centralized government “Hands off” approach The straight guy is expected to retain and put into action all information imparted

Ng points to the remaining underrepresentation of people of color in popular programming. Despite putting five gay men at the forefront of this show, Queer Eye fails to, in the words of Ng, “recogniz[e] sufficient diversity…[in] the range of lived realit[y].” Not just the straight men fall prey to the show’s whitewashing; of the five gay men featured, only one is a man of color. The “culture vulture” – who is put in possibly the most difficult position, that of “figure[ing] out where his tastes could use improving,” is the only role consistently assigned to men of color. First James Hannaham, an African American man present only in the pilot episode; Blair Boone, also African American; and Jai Rodriguez, the Latino man who replaced Boone. Muñoz asserts that Queer Eye “assigns queers of color the job of being inane culture mavens, while the real economic work is put into the able hands of the white guys, who shop.” Ultimately, the power of improving the straight man’s economic prowess is left to the knowledge of the four white