[This is the final of a three-part series highlighting some of Hannibal‘s unique contributions to the television world, in commemoration of its final week on NBC. Black-and-white art by travelersfarfromhome. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and please note that this post contains spoilers through episode 3.2]

I became interested in watching Hannibal after I attended a panel about the show at a fan convention geared towards young women. This panel represented the active fans that the show’s Tumblr had helped cultivate, the “Fannibals.” I was struck by how much they spoke of their love for the show’s female characters. Generally in programs with two male leads—especially shows with horror elements—female characters are peripheral and don’t stay alive for very long. Hannibal is ultimately also limited in this way—an issue that Hannibal actor Hettienne Park (Beverly Katz) has eloquently addressed—yet Hannibal still has many more recurring, sharply drawn female characters than do other shows of its genre (Supernatural, True Detective). Showrunner Bryan Fuller changed several key male characters from the source material (Alana Bloom, Freddie Lounds) to female characters and created a number of new female characters (including women of color). These decisions opened up many new points of identification for female viewers. As a result, Hannibal has expanded the cultural work of this gothic horror text and the resonance it has for contemporary female fans.

Here, I am focusing specifically on Hannibal‘s portrayal of teenage killer/survivor Abigail Hobbs because she has been so prominent in the fandom, particularly on Tumblr, a space where fandom and feminism frequently intersect. On Tumblr, fans’ larger cultural critiques focus on such topics as women’s devaluation through feminization and sexualization, particularly in the media; poor institutional and familial responses to women’s trauma; and the pathologizing of female deviance. For many of these viewers, Abigail Hobbs provides not only a point of convergence for these concerns but, in many ways, validates them.

Hannibal‘s grounding in gothic horror defines the kind of critical work it can do. As a genre, horror foregrounds deviant characters and thus puts the normative into relief. The subgenre of gothic horror has always had particular appeal for women, in part because its romanticism privileges emotional intensity over rationality, which in turn has the potential to de-naturalize the “rational” institutions and oppressive structures of patriarchy. The “monster” character central to the gothic often appears, initially, as an attractive male, a symbol of professional expertise, generous paternalism, and romantic sincerity, but these qualities are revealed to be deceptive and threatening to women.

Fuller invokes these gothic horror tropes in Hannibal in ways that particularly serve today’s female and feminist fans. For example, Fuller pledged not to show sexual violence toward any female characters on Hannibal (another change from the source material), a move that has impressed his female audience and has given the show’s feminism real weight. This is not to say that the show does not depict eroticized violence. Like a vampire, Hannibal exerts a sensuous appeal and he derives pleasure from bloodletting and feeding. Significantly, as in vampire narratives, the site of Abigail Hobbs’ penetration is displaced onto her throat. This permits the show to allude to sexual violence without engaging in representations of rape.

Abigail Hobbs is a central figure of Hannibal‘s first season, and her presence haunts the text (literally and symbolically) thereafter. Abigail is initially introduced as a traumatized girl whose throat, in the pilot, is slashed by her serial-killer father (an attack from which she recovers). She brings out paternal feelings in Hannibal and Will, yet as the season progresses, she kills a man (impulsively, but in self-defense) and reveals that she served as a procurer for her father, luring adolescent female victims to him. She is smart, socially alienated, suspicious, reserved, and plagued with worry that her father’s hunter/killer training (whether organically or through socialization) has made her a monster too. Abigail’s social deviance as, at once, a trauma survivor and a killer, has made her a source of identification and love for many fans, who have devoted Tumblr sites to her, written fanfic about her, and created art featuring her. Abigail’s fears are vividly conveyed in this fanvid by kiki_miserychic [warning: graphic violence]

Reading Hannibal through Abigail’s point of view, we see how men in the text constantly misunderstand, abuse, patronize, deceive, and undermine her. With the exception of Hannibal, men do not see her as a complicated person. Will views her only as either a childlike victim or, later, as a pathological killer; she resists his paternalism very directly: “Just because you killed my father, doesn’t mean you can become him.” Likewise, we see how patriarchal structures (the justice system, the family) only serve to further traumatize her. She lies to the FBI and the police because she knows the criminal justice system would not put her crimes in context, and we know that too; the recent decision to try two 13-year-old girls as adults for attempted murder—the Slender Man case—points to the inability of the justice system to countenance violent girls. Hannibal also highlights Abigail’s persistent attempts at self-definition and agency, including an attempt to ensure her financial independence from Will and Hannibal by selling her story to journalist Freddie Lounds. Fans indicate their approval of these moments by reblogging “Abigail’s sassy face” on Tumblr.

Ultimately, however, Abigail cleaves to Hannibal because he does see her complexity and value (the ability to truly “see” another person is a significant theme in the series) and because he puts himself outside of the law, openly rejecting the social norms and boundaries that oppress her. Both Hannibal and the gothic horror genre provide fantasies of escape from social oppression, and a lot of the Fannibals’ dark humor comes from their pleasure in fantasies of deviance and subversion. For example, Abigail’s role as the daughter in the “murder family” with Will and Hannibal is the subject of much fan creative production.

At the same time, Hannibal provides a cautionary tale that taps directly into young women’s concerns about daily survival under patriarchy. In a contemporary context, Hannibal is the textbook abusive parent or lover who literally traps her, and Abigail’s abuse, captivity, and eventual death at his hands is the central tragedy of the series. But it’s because Hannibal allows viewers to see her struggle that her death has the significance and resonance that it does, haunting both characters and viewers.

The hostility of this rhetoric often conflated the organizers with the attendees, who were primarily female and queer teens, many of whom were local and attending their first con. The largest concentration of this rhetoric is the Dashcon tag and user reblogs spread it quickly; one early Tumblr post – reblogged over 67,000 times – characterized con-goers as “white kids in flower crowns rioting for the anti-sexualization of women in media while holding panels about homoerotic subtext.” Comments on other social media sites like Jezebel swiftly adopted this derisive tone, describing attendees as “dorks who live in their parents’ basement” or “hormonal teenagers who enjoy drama way too much” in contrast to the “mature” fans on Tumblr “who discuss theories.”  Such misinformed and misogynist discourse was accompanied by paternalistic horror about the possible exposure of teenagers to an informational 18+ BDSM panel.

As a counter to this discourse, I want to highlight some of the more productive social and cultural aspects and implications of the con. For attendees, it is a vital safe space for self-expression and community bonding, intellectual engagement, counseling, and social empowerment for attendees. In turn, the implicit discomfort and hostility directed at them reveals how this space threatens social hierarchies regarding, in particular, female sexual pleasure and knowledge, “feminine” cultural production, “mass” tastes, and non-normative sexual/gender identities and practices.

I attended DashCon because I am interested in the way social media sites, particularly Tumblr, and their related cons provide young female and queer fans the opportunity to fulfill social, emotional, and educational needs that more traditional institutions do not. Last year, I participated in a series of articles for Antenna about LeakyCon, an established convention with a similar demographic. The advanced publicity of DashCon indicated a related agenda, with a “social issues” track of panels devoted to overlapping concerns of Tumblr users, including feminist politics and mass media representation, LGBTQA support, social justice concerns, mental health care and, ironically, ways to combat online hate and bullying. I enlisted a couple of con-goers who were also media studies students, and we shared the coverage of various panels and activities (although these observations are mine alone).

The most visible way DashCon created a safe space for female self-expression was the community’s respectful treatment of its many cosplayers. In cosplay, attendees dress as their favorite media characters, often spending days creating costumes. Because attendees respected the maxim that “cosplay is not consent,” they did not touch or take photos of cosplayers without their explicit permission. Veteran cosplayers often noted with relief how unmolested they felt at DashCon compared to mixed-sex cons where they are often groped.

In addition to cosplaying, the activities of this con followed others of its type, and included games, singalongs, autograph signings, fan art sales, as well as panels. The “social issues” and media analysis panels frequently overlapped in content and politics. Media fans, especially in this demographic, are often already engaged in trying to locate alternatives to dominant ideologies through media texts, and DashCon attendees were eager to analyze the social aspects of media culture. My colleague Paul Booth has called fandom, “the classroom of your life” and it certainly had that role at DashCon, where attendees were able to learn about topics that are still largely not covered in high school or even college classrooms, where gender and queer studies are rarely integrated into the curriculum as a whole.

The panelists, a combination of academics, activists, and/or social media specialists, embraced more radical rather than liberal political positions, drawing on many aspects of queer theory and critical race theory as well as media studies. Media analysis panels emphasized the importance and lack of strong female characters, queer characters, and characters of color, and the discussion leaders were able to personally speak to these issues as well as offer strategies to advocate for more diverse representation. Straight and queer women’s investment in male/male “slash” pairings was addressed in nuanced ways tied to, for example, the lack of equivalent development of female characters.

The panelists crucially tied media production to larger social structures, noting that “people blame the media, but these are institutional problems, social hierarchies that get represented by the media. There is no villain in the tower.” Instead, they emphasized the importance of education, an understanding of historical context and change, and an appreciation of the intersectionality of identity. Panels about contemporary feminism offered both scholarly analysis and an opportunity for young women to share their stories and concerns.

The rape culture panel, for example, began by asserting that instead of telling women how to avoid rape, we as a society should instead be focusing on teaching men and boys not to rape, a message that is prevalent on Tumblr but rarely appears in the mainstream.

All the panelists, while critical of DashCon’s management, have noted how impressed they were – as was I – with the engagement and thoughtful questions of the attendees. They have also tried to debunk misinformation, noting, for examples, the racial as well as gender/queer diversity of panels and attendees, and protesting their misrepresentation and the attacks on them.

This con provided young people with an opportunity to further expand the alternative communities that Tumblr offers them. While its larger problems are disappointing, DashCon’s grassroots project should be appreciated for what it did accomplish despite its organizers and attendees’ lack of social power and resources. Other attendees felt the same. Panelist Brin posted a video of her participation in the LGBTQ&A panel (below) and another con-goer posted that he found its cost was “a small price against my first time truly feeling in a community of people who would love and understand me with almost no effort at all.”

This is the sixth of a seven-part seven about the 4^th LeakyCon Fan Convention held in Portland, Oregon, June 27-30, 2013

Men were the minority at LeakyCon among fan attendees but they represented about half of the invited performers. I was especially intrigued by the way masculine norms were altered to suit the desires of LeakyCon’s primarily young, female audience. As I discussed in my last post, attendees value the con so much in part because it provides a public space for them in which they are not primarily defined by their sexuality or treated as sexual objects. Normative, phallic masculinity is the one identity category that is not welcome at LeakyCon. Male-identified performers modeled more open, inclusive, and genderqueer versions of both straight and gay masculinity. They embraced “feminine”-coded genre practices, featured feminist and gay/queer narrative content in their shows, celebrated fans’ active participation, and enthusiastically addressed the romantic/erotic interests and concerns of this particular audience. While male performers popular with adoring young female audiences are often characterized (condescendingly) as sexually non-threatening, this dismissal disguises the larger threat they represent: while such masculine performances are indeed unthreatening to young women, they are deeply threatening to gender/sexual social norms and hierarchies. Many of LeakyCon’s performers have substantial followings; they have largely developed distinct personas outside the con in a variety of arenas: social media, fiction, theatre, and television. Their commonalities were put into relief when they were gathered together at LeakyCon, and these shared characteristics suggested an alternative, genderqueer masculine brand that – although largely subcultural – is clearly making a significant impact on millennial culture.

I first noted this type of masculine performance two years ago when I described Glee’s straight-identified star Darren Criss as modeling a kind of genderqueerness in his own star persona, one that reinforced Glee’s “radically fluid adolescent masculinites.” Part of my reason for attending LeakyCon, initially, was to see whether the theatrical troupe The Starkids, which Criss co-founded, shared his gender-blurring, playful performance style. Indeed they did, but so did the other male performers at LeakyCon. In addition to the Starkids, these included, most prominently, Rent star Anthony Rapp; some of the actors who play Glee’s Dalton Academy Warblers, who hosted wildly popular sing-a-longs; Tom Lenk,  (Buffy’s “Andrew”), who performed his show, “Nerdgasm;” and LeakyCon regular and favorite Hank Green, who this year combined “wizardrock” performing, Nerdfighter gatherings, web-advice panels, and Lizzie Bennett Diaries discussions (Green co-created LBD).

Of these, social media personality and web-series producer Green represents the public intellectual division of LeakyCon’s masculine brand.  His video blogs (“vlogs”) with his brother, Young Adult author and frequent LeakyCon participant John Green, inspired their Nerdfighter fans  to proudly assert their own identity as a nerd community (“DFTBA”!). In this popular vlog, “Human Sexuality is Complicated,” Green subverts masculine norms by presenting a non-binary, queer-theory-friendly explanation of human sexuality in a remarkably compact and accessible manner, notably situating himself along a gender/sexuality continuum in which he acknowledges the “womanly parts of me”:

The physical experience of being in a LeaykCon audience feels like a reimagining of populist theatre without the sexism, insularity, and surveillance that has often limited the value of such public spaces for women and queer people. Feminism and gender/sex non-normativity are explicitly a part of LeakyCon’s definition of egalitarian community, and hence become part of the performance aesthetics as well. Audience participation in total or in part is expected and encouraged. Performers emphasize the shared emotional experience of the players and the audience rather than the celebration of an individual performer. These fangirl popular aesthetics are genderqueer, but they are not camp; they require a sincere performance style. This distinction was evident in the Closing Ceremonies of the Con, which featured the “slash” (non-canon) wedding of two Harry Potter characters (performed by Dumbledore), Sirius and Remus, the couple who fans had voted that they most wanted to see wed. Even in this light-hearted sketch, the actors knew to perform their vows earnestly; their performance tied romantic and erotic behavior together, very like much of the fanfic this audience both reads and writes (vows begin at 6:17):

At LeakyCon, the primary generic frame is the musical. The ubiquitous sing-a-longs — both scheduled and spontaneous – are the most intensely emotionally involving entertainments, and the Starkids musical parodies provide the songbook that everyone knows. Of all LeakyCon’s players, the Starkids’ large troupe and devoted following have done the most to establish and sustain the con’s neo-masculine brand and community feel. As a popular genre, the musical has a democratic appeal, but Starkid shows further that potential by combining accessible songs, non-gendered (primarily group) dancing, and sincere emotional affect (“heart”), with feminist narrative content and the decentering of the heterosexual couple in favor of an inclusive group of friends. Although their shows feature every kind of drag as well as explicitly gay characters, these are never used as simply comic devices; rather, Starkid shows are character-driven and focus on emotional growth through loving companionship. Traits associated with dominant masculinity (grandstanding, bullying, desiring power and control, rigidity, exploitation of others, narcissism) are critiqued while desirable manhood is defined, by contrast, as the attainment of maturity through love. Falling in love is thus presented as more difficult and dangerous for male characters than battling their enemies because it forces them to break with masculine norms and open themselves up to emotional vulnerability. In the fan-favorite, canon-queering song “Granger Danger” from AVPM (2009) both Ron (Joey Richter) and Draco (brilliantly played, in drag, by Lauren Lopez) realize, fearfully, that they are falling love with Hermione: (skip to 1:38):

“Granger Danger” sets Ron on the road to mature manhood, but he doesn’t attain it until the third musical, VPSY (2012), in ‘I’m Just a Sidekick”:

While it is impossible to know how much of LeakyCon’s revised masculine brand will persevere or how it may be changed in the process of mainstreaming (Darren Criss’s career remains intriguing in this regard), it has been an undeniably affecting and inspiring model for thousands – if not millions — of fangirls (and fanboys), who are able to celebrate it through their own performances of masculinity at LeakyCon, such as this Starkid flashmob:

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

This is the fourth of a seven-part series about the 4^th LeakyCon convention held in Portland Oregon June 27-30, 2013.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of LeakyCon was the way it provided a supportive, generative environment for adolescent identity development. LeakyCon’s oft-repeated message to attendees is that they should “feel free to be themselves,” but the authentic self of the LeakyCon attendee is clearly not meant to be a fixed or singular entity. Multiple fandoms allow for multiple, changing sites of identification, and fans are likewise encouraged to explore and perform various aspects of their selves that they largely cannot at home. At an “LGBT”-defined “meet-up,” for example, fans testified eloquently about how LeakyCon’s fandom community (and the Tumblr fan community at large) have provided accepting, inclusive spaces for them to develop and affirm their non-normative gender and sexual identities. These fans also emphasized, more surprisingly, the critical importance of fan communities as sites for thinking through the limitations of dominant cultural formations regarding sex and gender, as well as providing invaluable opportunities for them to be perceived as something other, and more complex, than their gender/sexual affiliation.

Attending the LGBT meet-up seemed especially important at this moment of national change, and I was struck by the way in which these particular LGBT youth represented a generation in transition regarding this identity category. Indeed, the very term “LGBT” was often either qualified by attendees (“I’m bisexual, but I don’t believe in the gender binary”) or explicitly rejected; many attendees preferred to identify themselves by a term I was unfamiliar with, “GSM” (“Gender/Sexual Minority”), because they felt it was both more inclusive and less fixed. These attendees described fan communities as supportive, progressive spaces for renegotiating their identities and developing alternative concepts of sexual difference. Fan-focused social media sites were their primary informational sources and Tumblr, specifically, was repeatedly cited by fans as providing the vital space for in-depth, supportive discussions on the topic of their own sexual and gender identities. As one attendee explained, “I got into the fandoms [on Tumblr] and I started to meet people who said that you don’t have to be L,G,B, or T, you can be anything in between—and I really liked that idea because I didn’t feel like I belonged to any of them.”

There was also clearly a desire among many fans for the larger cultural focus on adolescent gender/sexual identity to broaden and include other aspects of their identities they viewed as equally important. Fans spoke about having parents who were so intent on being supportive of their potential sexual non-normativity (“I think [my dad] really wanted me to be a lesbian because he’s a feminist,” noted one) that they felt pressured to declare themselves early; one adolescent was embarrassed when her sexual identity changed twice during her formative years and felt she couldn’t “come out again” anywhere but on Tumblr and at LeakyCon. Another attendee strongly valued her identity as a Ravenclaw, the Harry Potter “house” defined by intellectual work and creativity, but noted that since she has come out to her friends, “it’s kind of become the only thing I am, just that ‘bi-girl’.” Her voice rose as she continued, tearing-up: “That’s why I like LeakyCon so much, because I’m not just bisexual. Yes, I am bisexual, but I’m also a Ravenclaw and I’m a Whovian! I’m a Pokemaster! A Starkid! And so my name is —— and I’m a FANGIRL! And I am bisexual.” Like Harry Potter, the boy who lived to become something more than only that, LGBT and GSM attendees at Leakycon have the opportunity to develop multiple aspects of their identities-in-process and to be valued for all of them.

Addendum: It is impossible to know how Tumblr’s recent purchase by Yahoo may threaten the very culture I’m discussing here, although recent structural changes regarding “adult content” are cause for concern, and they drive home how much these kinds of thoughtful, nuanced conversations about sex/sexuality are currently dependent on technological and industrial infrastructure. As someone who regularly teaches classes in the history of sex, my experience at LeakyCon reinforced the importance of social media as an informational and exploratory tool for young people, especially in the United States, where access to the most basic sex education remains uneven at best.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

The central contradiction at work here was the assertion that Kurt could not be an object of erotic attraction for women and girls, when in fact, beyond Glee’s textual confines, the opposite is true. Female (and many gay-identifying) fans eroticize Kurt/Chris Colfer constantly — more than any other character on Glee – at his concerts and in countless online fan sites. Kurt/Chris is a nexus of identification and desire for fans worldwide, and it is precisely his unique blend of feminine and masculine characteristics – his genderqueerness– that audiences find erotic about him. It is also what cultural authorities find discomfiting. Colfer is both feminine and an out gay man, and his popularity proves that his femininity and gayness do not preclude his eroticization; fan reactions to Colfer are notably not those of mere “tolerance” or “acceptance” but rather of passionate love and unbridled enthusiasm for the new queer erotics that he embodies.

Internationally, Colfer is in good company. Feminine men are the heartthrobs of popular culture around the world, particularly in Asia and Europe. U.S. culture, however, has historically been more resistant to the feminine male performer, belittling him and disciplining his audiences by tying his femininity to the stigma of homosexuality. But American youth today have been raised with mainstream gay images, and they widely support gay marriage; they also embrace a variety of gender-transgressive behaviors and many identify themselves as transgender. Many youth no longer even recognize cultural content that used to be marginalized as “gay” or connotatively queer. As anyone who attended the Glee summer concert tour (as I did) knows, Colfer is a popular idol, and fans react to him with the same erotic intensity as they did to the Beatles: screaming, crying, and tearing at their hair in ecstasy. Colfer and Darren Criss (who plays Kurt’s boyfriend Blaine) were the focus of the tour, which was attended by more than 500,000 fans. Colfer is mobbed in public, and he is the only Glee actor to have a permanent personal bodyguard because of the fervency of some fans.  Even as Colfer was galvanizing stadiums of fans this summer, however, U.S. media figures continued to make assertions that he did not have erotic appeal for girls. Even many who support gay rights or are even themselves gay, could not understand or did not support a feminine fashionisto as a mainstream erotic figure. One sarcastic 19-year-old female fan made a video retort to one such charge, made by a more masculine gay performer.

Trying to undercut Colfer’s erotic appeal at this point, however, is like locking the padlock door after the horses have bolted. The sexual component of Kurt/Chris’s appeal has actually intensified in the last 6 months. When Colfer first started Glee, he was an 18-year-old boy; he has since grown 5 inches, become leaner by 20 pounds, and become increasingly aware of himself as a sexual subject and object. His positioning as an erotic object in the text became decisive when the very attractive Blaine first kissed Kurt in March (a romantic moment between two men that was so intense it lost the program substantial viewers). The “Born This Way” number, which Colfer performed both on Glee this past April and on tour, represented Kurt’s coming out not as a gay man but as a sexually confident one, ready to play. Gay male fans became more visibly interested in Colfer, and he started ranking in national gay polls as among the top “hot” young men. Even more than “Born This Way,” Colfer’s concert performances of “Single Ladies” were the sexiest of the set, considerably more sensual than his performance of the number on the series two years before; his pelvic thrusts, gyrating hips, head tosses, and protruding tongue signaled to fans that he was all grown up.

Colfer fans were thrilled to see that he had passed through puberty, and they felt freer to eroticize him as a result.

Colfer fans fetishize all parts of his body and his gender performance, both the standard features of the young male heartthrob (eyes, ass, chest, arms, bulge, pelvic thrusts, “grinding”) and the more feminine or non-gendered aspects (clavicle, neck, tongue, profile, posture, fluidity of movement, hip gyrations, facial expressivess, “gay” hair, high-pitched voice). His talent as an actor gives a particularly affective charge to his androgyny, and Colfer is also a highly autoerotic performer, who frequently touches himself in areas that fans then eroticize. The beauty and variety Colfer offers make him ripe for fantasies of every kind, and he is an icon of Tumblr and other fan sites, which offer fan art, photocollages, videos, and fiction of Kurt/Chris in a variety of romantic/erotic roles that often transgress gender norms: (art credit alphonse-hummel.tumblr.com.)

While some fans exhibited disappointment with “I Am Unicorn,” they were undeterred. Colfer’s unexpected popularity has opened up a space for the queer-identified feminine male as erotic object on U.S. television that is not likely to be easily contained. Fans have gone about their eroticizing business in defiance of the cultural authorities that seek to dissuade them, which is perhaps the most significant aspect of this entire discourse.

Darren Criss, America's Boyfriend

This is the last of a 3-part series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

“Your eyes are like stars right now…Mind if I move in closer?” sings dreamy crooner Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss) to our countertenor hero, Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), as they perform the classic Hollywood duet, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.” This is only one of the many charming and provocative romantic overtures Blaine makes, in song, to Kurt as well as to other young men during the course of Glee’s second season, and it is only one of the many performances by Blaine, both with Kurt and with his a cappella group The Warblers, that queers the performance of a traditionally gendered song.

With Blaine’s character, Glee both honors and re-imagines the crooner for the new millineum. As I discussed in Part 1, the crooner has long been a liminal figure in American culture, operating both in the commercial mainstream and on the fringes of gender normativity, and has been culturally stigmatized for both reasons. But Dalton Academy is Glee’s version of Oz, where normative American gender expectations and roles have been suspended and gender hierarchies largely reversed. The allure of the prep/college boy culture has always been, in part, about prolonging male adolescence by delaying the assumption of normative male roles. Indeed, the first crooning idols originally emerged from college culture in the 1920s, and it is a world in which the crooner thrives.

Glee celebrates the crooner for the very qualities that masculinist America does not: his alignment with the cultural feminine through his preference for romantic songs and commercial pop, his status as an erotic object for male and female audiences, his beauty and sensitivity, his emotional openness and transparency. And Glee’s producers have cast an actor as Blaine, Darren Criss, whose star persona emphasizes and extends these same qualities to a remarkable degree. Like Kurt/Colfer, Blaine/Criss offers a new model of American male performer, one that goes beyond being gay-and-girl “friendly” to truly embracing a gender-queer performance style and persona. Blaine/Criss retains the sincerity of the crooner even as he performs beyond the boundaries of a fixed or normative gender identity.

As an all-male a cappella group, the Warblers sing de facto love songs to each other, a violation of gender norms that has generally made such groups accessible only to the cultural elite (they are dubbed by Tuft University’s Beelzebubs). But Glee takes its transgressions much further. Because Blaine is the lead singer, an out gay character, and seen primarily through Kurt’s desiring eyes, all of his performances have a homoerotic charge. Moreover, Blaine specializes in songs by female singers without changing the lyrics, thus often positioning himself in the feminine role, whether that be as the erotic object (the one who will “let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans”) of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” or the annoyed girlfriend of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” When Blaine does play the seducer (he’s versatile), he serenades other boys as girls, for instance, when he continually addresses a male Gap store attendant as “baby girl” while wooing him with the Robin Thicke song “When I Get You Alone.”

It is Blaine’s musical performances with Kurt, however, that give emotional and narrative weight to the Warblers’ gender-play. When Kurt transfers back to McKinley, Blaine and the Warblers come to sing “Somewhere Only We Know” to him, evoking the “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” period of Kurt’s stay at Dalton, but assuring audiences that, unlike Dorothy, Kurt will retain both the maturity Dalton gave him and a dreamy prince:

This particular performance sparked euphoria among fans as soon as the single and the scene were released on Youtube, which happened a few days prior to the episode’s premiere. The verbal and physical reactions to crooning haven’t changed that much in 80 years; fans repeatedly cry when listening to the song, compliment Darren Criss on the beauty of his voice, claim to be falling in love as well as erotically aroused by him (“Can this song make me pregnant?”), and indicate “repeated abuse” of the replay button to prolong their ecstatic state. What is less common here is the context for such intense emotion: the fact that Blaine is singing this song to Kurt makes the song more rather than less meaningful for fans, who largely identify with Kurt and love Blaine as the boyfriend Kurt “deserves.” Cross-gender identification is common practice for television fans, who often create “slashed” homoerotic fiction surrounding a relationship that is not homoerotic in the text. In this case, however, the intensity of fan euphoria is tied to the text slashing itself, further naturalizing gay relationships by revising the rules of the musical genre. As the warm, pure-hearted crooner, Blaine becomes the perfect counterpart and love object for the more ambitious, complex Kurt and for fans.

Part of the reason Blaine is so beloved is because of the young man who plays him. Darren Criss himself occupies queer cultural space in that he identifies as straight but plays gay, champions the mass culture associated most with women and children (like Disney songs), and is more than happy to be an erotic object for both sexes (see, for example, his spread in Out magazine). Perhaps most unusual of all, Criss writes and performs songs from a female point of view even outside of the Blaine character. Criss composed the song “The Coolest Girl,” for the character of Hermione in a musical adaptation of Harry Potter. In concert, he often performs the song, asking the largely female audience to join in, since “I am not a girl, although I try to be sometimes”:

Just as Colfer provides a model for queer kids who have not yet been represented, so Criss provides an equally significant alternative model for queer straightness. Both performers, through Glee and beyond it, give voice to radically fluid adolescent masculinities that do indeed offer their audiences new ways to dream.

This is the second in a series of articles on these male voices in Glee

Last year, in an undergraduate class on American Popular Culture of the 1900s-20s, I presented the historical concept that gender-fluidity in vocalizing was common and unquestioned in popular music at the time and that singers were valued by critics and the public for their wide ranges. The most prominent example was the countertenor, a male singer whose voice extends into the alto or soprano range, generally reaching to a high F above middle C (F5). Although I had examples of such singers from the period, the limitations of the recordings diminished their power, so I instead played a solo of Chris Colfer (as Kurt Hummel) singing “Defying Gravity” from that week’s Glee. This was Kurt’s first big number, performed as a duet on the show but also released in a solo version on iTunes. I asked the students to describe the voice to me. None of them yet followed Glee, and they were baffled. No one could say for certain whether the singer was male or female. For them, as for most of Glee’s audience, Colfer’s voice represented a new sound.

While countertenor soloists largely disappeared in the 1930s, from the 1890s-1920s, they were at the top of American popular culture. Publisher Edward Marks recalled that “they had a practiced quaver in their high, pure, almost soprano voices that served them for years.” Boy sopranos were also immensely popular and publishers employed them as song pluggers; their beauty and charm, as well as their affecting portrayal of the song’s narrative, was essential to selling sheet music.

Colfer’s is the first solo voice in recent memory to break into the mainstream as gender-queer, and as such, has become the site of both euphoria and anxiety. The gender ambiguity of his voice, specifically its “feminine” register, is always a prominent thread in discussions on websites ranging from YouTube to gay-specific blogs such as Towleroad, and this femininity is almost always framed as a problem (“he’s got a good voice, but he sings like a girl” or “he’s the worst gay stereotype”). Such responses reiterate dominant conflations of voice, gender, and sexuality, and Colfer’s deviations from these norms has spurred dismissive reactions to his “inauthentic” style and allegations of Auto-Tuning. But the nay-sayers only reinforce his cultural significance. Colfer and his voice embody the complex emotional life of what is usually the most ridiculed of gay stereotypes: the sissy. Initially a potentially stock character, Kurt has developed into a transformative one.

“Defying Gravity” is the earliest representation of what has become the Kurt/Colfer signature vocal performance sound and aesthetic: one that combines a soaring countertenor with a theatrical presentational style and, at the same time, a raw, emotional intensity and vulnerability that speaks to his marginalization as a gay teen in a hetero world. Colfer himself is an out gay adolescent, only twenty, with a long history of being bullied in school for his high-pitched voice. His character’s development has mirrored his own, and in the fall of Glee’s second season, Kurt’s arc synched up with the national grassroots campaign against gay bullying (“It Gets Better”). Colfer’s star discourse emphasizes the way he embraced his own difference by working hard to preserve his countertenor voice. While most adolescent boys are relieved to lose the stigma of femininity associated with a high pitch, Colfer fought to keep his by continually practicing songs in high ranges; he also preserved the vibrato trilling equally associated with effeminacy, which has become one of the most poignant, affecting aspects of his vocal production.

“Defying Gravity” both reflects Kurt’s character and transcends him, presenting the feminine male voice, as, quite literally, defiant. In Colfer’s hands, this song becomes a manifesto for a new generation of queer kids. Kurt is here defying the dominant gender norms that would keep his voice from taking flight, as well as defying the sex binaries of American mainstream culture that would prevent from him playing a girls’ role. In Glee’s narrative, Kurt protests at not being allowed to sing the song because “it is a girl’s song.” “Defying Gravity” is the beginning of Kurt/Colfer’s gradual erosion and queering of the gendered/sexed norms surrounding popular singing, which Glee most often presents through Kurt’s reclamation of the diva.

“Defying Gravity” began Glee’s practice of having Kurt reinterpret selections from the gay-fan canon of female diva performances, most of them from Hollywood or Broadway. While these songs are tributes to the singers, as well as an education in the history of gay sensibility, they are also an indicator that the torch is being passed. While the gay boy will surely continue to identify with (and sing along to) female singers, Kurt asserts that he can be his own diva, singing solos in traditionally female vocal ranges; Kurt performs “Le Jazz Hot” from Victor/Victoria because it allows him to “embrace my male and my female sides.” Kurt’s character thus gives young boys permission to make these diva songs their own. In “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, for example, Glee reframes the song as Kurt’s act of painfully, furiously, defining himself once and for all against normative masculinity, even as it is here represented by the father he loves; the reception of this performance by fans was particularly fervent and widely reproduced by many on YouTube:

At the same time, Kurt’s embrace of the cultural feminine has made him an icon of identification and desire for the girls who can sing along with him, and who share his feelings of isolation, longing, and gender-as-performance. When Kurt returns to the McKinley High glee club after briefly transferring to the Dalton boys school and meeting his dreamy crooner boyfriend Blaine (whom I will discuss in the next installment), he belts out his most showstopping performance yet, reinterpreting Norma Desmond’s “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from the Sunset Blvd stage musical as the triumphant homecoming of a mature teen diva. The number affirms that change is indeed possible, that it gets better, and that the countertenor is back and ready for his close-up.

This is the first in a series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

Part 1: The Trouble with Male Pop Singing

What immediately struck me about this still of Glee’s Chris Colfer (as Kurt Hummel) and Darren Criss (as Blaine Anderson) from Entertainment Weekly’s January 28, 2011 cover story is that this image might easily have been taken in the mid-to-late 1920s,  but it would have been unlikely to appear in the mainstream press since that time. Attractive young men in collegiate attire, sporting ukuleles or megaphones, singing to each other and to their adoring publics in high-pitched voices was a mainstay of 1920s American popular culture, then vanished during the Depression. Even the easy homoeroticism of a boy positioned between another boy’s legs dates back to popular images of the 1920s. In the early 1930s, a combination of greater media nationalization and censorship, increasing homophobia, and panic regarding the emasculating effects of male unemployment formed the context for the first national public attack on male popular singers as effeminate and as cultural degenerates. As a result, new, restrictive gender conventions became entrenched regarding male vocalizing, and the feminine stigma has remained. Until now, that is. The popularity of Glee, and, in particular, these two singers, has made me think that American culture may finally be starting to break with the gender norms of male singing performance that have persisted for the last 80 years. Since much of my research has focused on the establishment of these gendered conventions, I would like to offer some historical context and share some of the reasons why I find Glee’s representation of male popular singing so potentially groundbreaking.

Male singing has not always been so inextricably tangled up with assumptions about the gender/sexuality of the performer. Before the reactionary gender policing of popular singing, men who sang in falsetto or “double” voice were greatly prized. Song styles such as blues, torch, and crooning were sung by both sexes and all races; lyrics were generally not changed to conform to the sex of the singer or to reinforce heterosexual norms, so that men often sang to men and women to women. Crooners became huge stars for their emotional intensity, intimate microphone delivery, and devotion to romantic love. While they sang primarily to women, they had legions of male fans as well, and both sexes wept listening to their songs.

When a range of cultural authorities condemned crooners, the media industries developed new standards of male vocal performance to quell the controversy. Any gender ambiguity in vocalizing was erased; the popular male countertenor/falsetto voice virtually disappeared, song styles were gender-coded (crooning coded male), female altos were hired to replace the many popular tenors, and all song lyrics were appropriately gendered in performance, so that men sang to and about women, and vice-versa. Bing Crosby epitomized the new standard for males: lower-pitched singing, a lack of emotional vulnerability, and a patriarchal star image. Since then, although young male singers have always remained popular and profitable, their cultural clout has been consistently undermined by masculinist evaluative standards in which the singers themselves have been regularly ridiculed as immature and inauthentic, and their fans dismissed as moronic young females.

From its beginnings, however, Glee has actively worked to challenge this conception. The show’s recognition and critique of dominant cultural constructions of performance and identity has always been one of the its great strengths. Glee has continually acknowledged the emasculating stigma of male singing (the jocks regularly assert that “singing is gay”) while providing a compelling counter-narrative that promotes pop singing as liberating and empowering for both men and society at large. Glee‘s audience has in many ways been understood to be reflective of the socially marginalized types represented on the show, and one of the recurring narrative struggles is determining who gets to speak or, rather, sing. Singing on Glee is thus frequently linked to acts of self-determination in the face of social oppression, a connection that has been most explicitly and forcefully made through gay teen Kurt’s storyline this past season, which has challenged societal homophobia both narratively and musically. In the narrative, Kurt transfers to Dalton Academy to escape bullying and joins the Warblers, an all-male a cappella group fronted by gay crooner Blaine. Musically, Glee also takes a big leap, shifting from exposing the homophobic, misogynist stigma surrounding male singing to actively shattering it and singing on its grave.

From the very first moment Kurt is introduced to Blaine and the Warblers, as they perform a cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to a group of equally enthusiastic young men, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The song choice is appropriate in that it posits future-boyfriend Blaine as both a romantic and erotic dream object for Kurt, and it presents Dalton as a fantasy space in which the feminine associations of male singing are both desired and regularly celebrated. “Teenage Dream” was the first Glee single to debut at #1 on iTunes, immediately making Criss a star and indicating that a good portion of the American public was eager to embrace the change in vocal politics.

And “Teenage Dream” was only the beginning. This fantasy moment has become a recurring, naturalized fixture of the series. Just as Kurt turned his fantasy of boyfriend Blaine into a reality, so did Glee effectively realize its own redesign of male singing through a multitude of scenes that I never thought I would see on American network television: young men un-ironically singing pop songs to other young men, both gay and straight; teen boys falling in love with other boys as they sing to them; males singing popular songs without changing the lyrics from “him” to “her” to accommodate gender norms; and the restoration and celebration of the countertenor (male alto) sound and singer in American popular culture (I will address Chris Colfer’s celebrated countertenor voice in the next installment of this series). And instead of becoming subjects of cultural ridicule, Colfer’s rapturous countertenor and Criss’s velvety crooner have become Glee’s most popular couple, its stars largely celebrated as role models of a new order of male performer. It’s about time.