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Article Excerpt
Although the mass media have long offered images that explored, expanded and sometimes exploded society's gender boundaries, the majority of such images reaffirm heterosexuality (Gross, 2001; Williams, 1996). From Milton Berle's early drag performances and the cross-dressing Max Klinger in M*A*S*H, to films such as Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Mrs. Doubtfire, Hollywood productions have allowed their stars and their spectators to experience vicariously the "possibility of transgressing gender norms" (Williams, p. 27:3). But these possibilities are usually presented within the safe confines of comic contexts that imply that a heterosexual outcome is inevitable (Roof, 1996), reassuring audiences that Jamie Fart or Dustin Hoffman or Robin Williams are real men, simply pretending to be women to achieve some goal.
During the 1990s, images of gay and lesbian characters became more common in the popular media, but as Larry Gross (2001) explains, "they are still odd men and women out in a straight world. ... confined to stereotypical characterizations" (p. 117) that ultimately reaffirm "narrative's heteroideology" (Roof, 1996, p. xxvii). One popular television series that has challenged such stereotypical representations of transgressive sexuality is David E. Kelley's Ally McBeal. Starring Calista Flockhart as Ally, a Generation X attorney, the series portrays a successful Boston law firm employing a variety of odd characters. Because this series has received much attention, both positive and negative, for its gender depictions and its perceived pro- or anti-feminist stance (Bellefante, 1998; Cooper, 2001; Vavrus, 2000), Ally McBeal may seem an unlikely challenger to normative heterosexuality. But in fact, Ally McBeal is one of the few offerings by network television that has introduced transsexuality in ways that challenge heterosexual standards. (1) To illustrate how Ally McBeal's narratives serve to destablize hegemonic norms of heterosexuality, we analyze an episode from the series' first season, "Boy to the World" (Kelley, 1997). In this episode, Ally's legal defense of a young transsexual client arrested for solicitation, who is ultimately murdered by a "John," is juxtaposed against the comedic subtext of Randy Newman's satirical song about intolerance, "Short People"--who've "got no reason to live" (Newman, 1977). Throughout "Boy to the World," the plotline about the vulnerable transsexual figure of Stephanie Grant is played off against an absurd plotline of the funeral for a man who could not tolerate short people. Ultimately, these plots come together to dramatically illustrate intolerance's consequences. The final scenes show a gospel church choir in a foot-stomping rendition of "Short People" at the funeral for the man who hated the "vertically challenged." This comic intolerance is juxtaposed against the bloody body of Stephanie, killed in a bleak Boston alley by a customer enraged to learn that "she" was really a "he." We argue that the jarring incongruity of these overlapping narratives--one comic and one tragic--work to indict bigotry and intolerance, and thus resist heteronormative culture by exposing the inevitable limitations and consequences of the dominant discourses of heterosexual ideology.
Comic Narratives and Resisting Normative Heterosexuality
Social critiques such as those underlying the narratives of "Boy to the World" often are articulated within comic narratives, in which hegemonic ideals can be safely questioned by lampooning them because the humorous context allows audience members to participate in the mockery without feeling threatened or alienated (Gilbert, 1997). When audiences are presented with non-threatening or humorous media narratives, their experiences are "associated with pleasure, interest, and humor"; thus, the experience is more likely to be interpreted positively, and, as a result, individuals "are less likely to evaluate it as negative or to remain detached from and thus unaffected by it" (Foss & Foss, 1994, p. 424). As Yvonne Tasker (1998) observes, comic narratives provide a "space in which taboos can be addressed, made visible and also contained, negotiated" (p. 163).
This has been particularly true in the comedy of out-groups such as women, people of color and sexual minorities. "Whether explicitly `political' or not," Tasker (1998) wrote, "comedy operates partly through an inversion of cultural assumptions which render them absurd, a foregrounding and transgression of conventions" (p. 170). Queer theory scholars, for instance, have illustrated how narratives that include non-heterosexual characteristics work to "resist, dismantle, or circumnavigate hegemonic systems of sexual oppression and normalization" (Hanson, 1999, p. 4). As an example, when lesbian comic Suzanne Westenhoffer jokes, "I like straight people--I do. I just don't want them teaching our children," she is inverting the "tried and tested bigotry" inherent in normative heterosexuality (Tasker, pp. 170-171). In other words, much of the potential power of comic narratives to challenge dominant ideologies lies in the paradox of narratives that are simultaneously "subversive and conservative, offensive and inoffensive, serious and ridiculous" (Fry, 1987; Palmer, 1987, p. 182).
The strategy of such humorous narratives is to turn what at first may seem a stereotypical representation into a "thinly veiled indictment" (Walker, cited in Barreca, 1991, p. 185) that works to disrupt dominant hegemonic codes. In such contexts, regardless of the hegemonic norm under indictment, humor often derives its strategic power to advance social change through the "surprise, shock, dislocation, or sudden reversal of expectations" (Walker & Dresner, 1998, pp., 173-174) surrounding the contradictions underlying the narratives' comic incongruity. For instance, by appropriating the way men "see" women and reflecting these images "back to men in magnified proportions," media narratives can mimic and mock the "patriarchal definition of woman in order to subvert it" (Irigaray, cited in Tong, 1998, p. 204). (2) Thus, as John Fiske (1986) suggests, a character's seemingly sexist comment "can be read as part of a traditional chauvinist discourse of gender" or as part of the "strategies of resistance or modification that change, subvert or reject the authoritatively proposed meanings" (p. 394).
Researchers also have used Kenneth Burke's concepts of the pentad and the dramatic genres of comedy and tragedy to demonstrate how comedic discursive frames have been employed in political contexts to diffuse resistance while simultaneously building support for social change. Indeed, Adrienne Christiansen and Jeremy Hanson (1996) suggest that in some social contexts, a comic frame may be the most effective strategy because the humor "points out failings in the status quo and urges society to correct them through thoughtful action rather than tragic victimage" (p. 161). For instance, Christiansen and Hanson explicate how the AIDS organization ACT UP "strategically uses the comic frame to change perceptions of gays as scapegoats" (p. 158) for inflicting AIDS on the United States. It is a strategy that offers perspective by incongruity, they suggest, permitting the activist organization to reframe the "AIDS crisis in comic, realistic, humane, and pragmatic terms" (p. 158). In a different context, Edward Appel (1997) argues that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. used a comic style of discourse in the early days of his reformist movement to represent opponents of racial equality as "comic frame actors of admirable goodwill" (p. 390) who just needed to be enlightened. Ultimately, Appel asserts, this strategy provided King with the rhetorical means for his civil rights movement to transform the nation's social relationships (p. 398). On a lighter note, Kimberly Golombisky (1999) shows how columnists Susan Estrich, Mary McGrory and Maureen Dowd used "wacky role reversals" (p. 7) to integrate humor into their articles on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals. (3) Golombisky asserts that the women columnists' use of strategic incongruities--gender role reversals, or the political alignment of anti-pornography feminists and the Christian right, for instance--presented readers with new perspectives that could stimulate a "great leap in thinking" (p. 14).
Our reading of the comic narratives in "Boy to the World" as strategically resisting heteroideology may be situated within what Alexander Doty (1993) has termed a "queer space" (p. 3)--a narrative positioning that works to "challenge and confuse our understanding and uses of sexual and gender categories" (p. xvii). Applying this concept of queer space in critiquing media narratives, therefore, allows researchers to expose and question the inevitability of heterosexual assumptions in mainstream media narratives. (4) As Teresa de Lauretis (1987) has explained, "[M]ost of the available...
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