For its part, and despite its neutered (spayed?) title, Frozen’s loose adaptation of “The Snow Queen” plays as a consolidation of this bent, with a plotline centred above all on a sororal relationship—one that is furthermore presented as the surprise lynchpin to the film’s climax in a winking subversion of Disney’s hetero-romantic narrative tendencies. Love saves the day again, but this time it is familial, sisterly love. This, in conjunction with the supposed LGBT-friendliness of “Let it Go”—its central, Oscar-winning musical set-piece—has created some renewed popular interest in the role of gender politics in Disney films.

For a while now, Disney has been negotiating a compromise between some of the more regressive social values it has attached to itself, and the need to maintain cultural relevance and dissuade potentially harmful critique. Frozen maintains the princesses, Eurocentrism and cookie-cutter character design (look at those tiny women and huge men), but places less emphasis on idealised heteronormative pairing in order to highlight other modes of female characterisation. In the context of Hollywood, and Disney in particular, this is commendable. At the same time, it shouldn’t be taken in any way as if it is at the vanguard of media representation within these parameters. It is simply indicative of symptomatic shifts within an otherwise largely entrenched ideological core.

The extent of this entrenchedness is most visible when examining how more recent Disney fare treats modes of representation discursively detached from girlhood’s growing importance in Disney’s media profile. In Frozen itself, this may be seen in the construction of ethnic/cultural otherness implicit in the film’s troll characters. Magical, familial, communal, amiable, open and deferential to the film’s human characters, Frozen’s trolls fulfill a checklist of characteristics distinctive of subservient cultural others, particularly of the type that serve narratively to facilitate white people’s ability to love and understand each other better thanks to their intuitive wisdom and connection to the natural world. In the trolls’ case this is both symbolic and literal, with the characters themselves being composed of living rock. In terms of performance, this communal otherness is accentuated by the ways in which the trolls act as a collective unit, scrambling and speaking over each other, often in the evident voices of non-white performers —all supremely interested and supportive of the protagonist’s agenda and eager to play matchmakers for her.

This characterisation is all the more notable for the contrast it presents to the behaviour and attitudes that inform the basis of the film’s main interpersonal conflicts, all of which are centred on intra-familial secrecy and individual self-control and denial. Indeed, the main conflict of Frozen is possibly the whitest to ever happen in a Disney film, based as it is in problems predicated by a conception of whiteness that sees itself in opposition to the raucous, communal earthiness so often attributed to other cultures and ethnicities, particularly those of Black, Hispanic and Mediterranean heritage. Throughout such conflicts, whites overcome the trappings of their over-civilisation by balancing them with the subservient wisdom freely offered by cultural others. In perpetuating these narrative relationships, Disney in particular and Hollywood in general demonstrate how relative discursive progression in some areas (or freedom for interpretation, as in Let it Go’s adoption as a coming out anthem) comes with little regard for entrenched regressive values in others. While Disney’s female characters have begun ever so slightly to shed their role as satellites to male protagonists, other modes of otherness persist in much the same way as they have since Song of the South. It’s almost as if Disney’s perception of cultural otherness is immobile. Petrified or static, if you will.

Claims about “creativity” anchor LEGO marketing strategies and the meanings ascribed to LEGO products.  The company pledges parent- and educator-friendly engagement “in the development of children’s creativity through play and learning.”  Countless press releases tout this support of creativity; even the embrace of media licenses like Star Wars was framed as a boon to (rather than limit upon) creative imagination.  The ideological frame of creativity also underpinned LEGO’s most recent gender-differentiated appeals to girl builders.  While the 2012 LEGO Friends theme commendably corrected the exclusive focus on boys, would-be inclusiveness manifested predictably as market segregation.  Girls and boys were not imagined as playing together, but instead as two classes of builders with different creative desires and needs.  Girls, according to LEGO, needed more role-playing and even different kinds of human representations (“minidolls” instead of minifigures).  Notions of inherent creative difference legitimated narrowly gendered marketing appeals.

Defenders of Friends nevertheless pitched the modular creativity of LEGO as a get-out-of-gender-free card.  Kids “don’t have to follow” the included instructions, this thinking went.  Gender normative bakeries and beauty salons could become pink and purple starfighters.  Though packaging and instructions offer what Ellen van Oost and Mary Kearney term “gender scripts,” the reconfigurable nature of LEGO product promised such scripts could also be “backdoors,” enticing already gendered subjects to creative experimentation.  The ideological utility of creativity for LEGO came in both demanding gender conformity and offering ways out of it.

The LEGO Movie ruminates endlessly on this idea of following instructions.  “Masterbuilders” like Vetruvius and Wyldstyle initially devalue Emmet’s interest in building and living by the instructions of mass culture.  And yet, the film does not completely disarticulate creativity from such instructions.  As Emmet takes on leadership, he explains the virtues of instructions as a platform for creative teamwork.  And while the film culminates (spoiler alert) in a live-action meta-conflict over proper use of LEGO toys between an instruction-minded father and free-building son, the compromise reached suggests the father will continue building by instructions, just with newfound support for his son’s reconfiguration of them.  The climactic action sequence in the animated world too turns on the idea of LEGO people rebuilding a prefabricated world, turning ice cream trucks into winged attack vehicles.  In line with LEGO’s marketing of instruction-based building sets as “creative,” the film locates creativity somewhere beyond the instructions, but still figures those scripts as a key first step toward creativity.  Meanwhile, the Ice Cream Machine can be sold in stores with instructions for building both on-screen configurations.

And despite the mélange of LEGO product in the film, including a visit to Cloud Cuckoo Palace that offers far more queer combinations of bricks than ever offered in prior instruction-based sets, the gender-specified creativity of LEGO Friends remains absent.  The minidoll does not exist in this world.  In the film’s concluding joke, meanwhile, the live-action father insists that a toddler sister join in the family play—a moment some take to task for suggesting that girls would disrupt the masculine creativity being celebrated.  But that critique may give LEGO too much credit.  As imagined by LEGO marketing, this toddler would be a user of larger DUPLO bricks, a product LEGO is still willing to market (in part) via gender-neutral appeals, in significant contrast to gendered segregation for older markets. The LEGO Movie does not acknowledge the possibility of girls aged four-and-up (or mothers) sharing in this creative LEGO play, more easily recognizing the creative commonality of privileged male consumers with DUPLO toddlers than with feminized Friends builders.  Rather than entertaining disruption of LEGO’s creative ideologies, this narrative extension of LEGO play to a less fully gendered toddler market affirms their boundaries.

Ultimately, this film helps positions creativity as something that unfolds in relation, but not strict opposition, to clearly defined scripts (gendered or otherwise).  Obviously, that serves the instruction-based product LEGO markets, but it also has implications for how we understand the “creativity” of those who make use of it.

Whether in the explicit pronouncements of pop culture commentators or in a cursory cruise of off-network, late-night television, there is ample evidence that young men remain both the primary producers and targeted consumers of much mainstream comedic content.  In the two years since the above-mentioned pieces, however, a number of incidents have invigorated offscreen debate about comedy and gender: among them, David Letterman firing his booker for sexist practices and remarks; Daniel Tosh shouting down a female heckler with a rape joke; Seth MacFarlane’s embarrassing song-and-dance at the 2013 Oscars; Jerry Seinfeld’s curiously tone-deaf take on diversity in comedy; and, perhaps most notoriously, Saturday Night Live’s clumsily PR-controlled search for and eventual hiring of African-American female cast member Sasheer Zamata.

Although it may be optimistic to suggest a correlation between those conversations and the recent programming decisions of comedy outlets, such dialogue does affect the discursive context in which we watch and talk about their shows.  In this light, the seemingly necessary belongingness between men and comedy dissipates a bit when considering the representational politics of Comedy Central’s spring lineup–namely, Kroll Show, Broad City, and the soon-to-return Inside Amy Schumer.  It isn’t just that comediennes star and/or figure prominently in the programs’ sketchy stories, something into which the network has put perfunctory effort in the past with The Sarah Silverman Program and Strangers with Candy.  Discourses of gender and sexuality additionally provide a generative grammar for the shows, imbuing their comedic portrayals of race, class, and homosocial bonding with the kind of polysemy customarily ascribed to Comedy Central’s much-lauded news satires.

The most simultaneously silly and insightful segment of Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, for instance, was a recurring bit called “Amy Goes Deep” which had the host interviewing, among others, a well-endowed man and a female dominatrix.  To be sure, the segments (like most sketches on Inside) use sexuality as a way to provoke and titillate viewers initially.  As the interviews progress, however, Schumer refrains from the sort of moralizing too-often implicit in portrayals of sexual taboos and instead gestures toward broader discourses about the ways in which we talk about those taboos.

Although nominally starring a male comedian and trafficking in the gendered caricatures so common among male-targeted comedies, Kroll Show is actually a “full-frontal assault on dude culture and the ideologies that support it, but in dickfest drag.”  It’s also the most cuttingly satirical sketch comedy show about television since Mr. Show.  Kroll’s favorite targets are the vapid fame-mongers, low-rent aesthetics, and crass commercialism of reality television.  Instead of merely reproducing and displaying televisual conventions with the lazy referentiality of an after-“Update” SNL-segment, though, recurring sketches like “PubLIZity” and “Rich Dicks” consistently ask viewers to consider the cultural and industrial discourses that construct and make commonsensical certain gendered representations of reality.

Of course, there exists real danger in the potential that viewers will decode the superficially heterosexist humor in these programs with the same unblinking acceptance as they do a show like Tosh.0.  It certainly doesn’t help, either, that Comedy Central has a tired habit of promoting its shows with the most memorable, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”-iest of sound bites.  Nevertheless, the infinitely mutable nature of comedy (and of the media infrastructures increasingly invested in it) means that no matter how loudly any one voice shouts, there are always plenty of hecklers.

Reality Gendervision:
Sexuality and Gender on Reality TV Conference
April 26-27, 2013
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

Submission deadline:  January 7, 2013

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of programming and scholarship about reality television, yet very little of that scholarship actively deals with the politics of gender that are so insistent on Reality TV.  From Survivor to Jon and Kate Plus 8 to American Idol to Jersey Shore, Reality TV constitutes an enormous and ever-growing archive about our collective desires and anxieties, which often crystallize around gender. The gendered politics of Reality TV’s production and consumption further highlight the need for a discussion specifically on how gender is of critical concern to Reality TV.

This conference is third in a series of international events and is aligned with two previous symposia: Gender Politics & Reality TV (Dublin, Ireland) and Gender Cultures and Reality TV (Auckland, New Zealand).  The US conference marks the imminent publication of a new edited collection, Reality Gendervision: Decoding Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality TV, edited by Brenda R. Weber and forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Outstanding papers presented at the Reality Gendervision conference will be invited for publication in a leading peer-reviewed journal in 2014.

Confirmed keynote addresses:

Misha Kavka, Department of Film, TV, and Media Studies,
University of Auckland

Laurie Ouellette, Communication Studies, University of
Minnesota

With a pre-conference presentation on Thursday, April 25th by:

Herman Gray, Sociology, University of California at Santa Cruz

Deadline for submissions:  January 7, 2013 (announcement of acceptances will be made by February 1, 2013).  Submit 350-word abstracts and a brief bio to Brenda Weber: breweber@indiana.edu or to rgv@indiana.edu

For more information, consult the conference website.

NBC’s gambit with Grimm is reasonably clear, and compelling on paper.  Grimm is structured like a crime procedural and includes many of the best aspects of this genre: a satisfying goal completed and mystery solved at the end of the episode, a high stakes focus for the narrative arc, and a resulting brisk pace. At the same time its novel twist, that the intrepid police detective is the last in the blood line of the Brothers Grimm and has the unique ability to see the monsters who are hiding in human form which lends itself well to the series additional serial level; where the mystery of the protagonist’s, Nick, family’s past can be as explored as well as the secret of the shadowy group implied at the end of the first episode. While this balance is structurally effectively, I have some serious concerns about its ultimate ideological effect. Early on in the episode, Nick is in the precinct and sees a random perpetrator briefly shift into a monster, the kidnapping of a young girl and an assault of a college student (stock plots of more traditional procedurals like Law & Order: SVU) is also traced to the work of a monster. This conceit’s potential ideological effects are troubling, it moves away from a period in which crime was depicted more contextually on television. It isn’t desperation, class or neighborhood issues, mental illness or family issues that cause criminal behavior, it isn’t even anything as messy and complex as motive, inside a criminal there is simply a monster. Since the criminal is truly a monster, the protagonist needs to have no qualms about shooting him or her and the producers seem to find nothing wrong with depicting a man who kidnaps a young girl as effete (complete with hand needlepointed pillows, hummel figurines, home cooked pot pie and an actor well known for playing gay characters) if he also happens to be a modern big bad wolf. There is much to like about Grimm, the filming is excellent, the writing reasonably tight and the premise strong. As a Friday night show on a struggling network it may even prove a success, but until I see more to the contrary I worry that Grimm is indeed a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

ABC’s Once Upon a Time fits less neatly into a popular broadcast television formula and as a result has both more challenges and more potential then its NBC cousin. Once Upon a Time’s premise is reasonably complex, there was a world and time in which fairytales were real and Prince Charming and Snow White reigned. The evil witch took revenge on them by transporting them to Storybrook, Maine where they would not remember who they were or their history. They can only be saved by Snow White’s daughter, Emma Swan, who just happens to be a bounty hunter, that was saved by the curse when they hid her in an enchanted wardrobe, a portal to the other world. By a tremendous coincidence Emma is lured to Storybrook by her own son who she gave up and was adopted by the witch, who in this world is the mayor of Storybrook. Got that? Good because the complexity of its narrative premise might ultimately be Once Upon a Time’s achilles heel. If Grimm’s concept and structure can be quickly discerned how Once Upon a Time will ultimately unfold is certainly a mystery, which is to be expected in a show conceived by two former Lost writers. This is in some ways to the series benefit, while some villains are clearly defined our heroine, Emma, is clearly no saint and our saint, Snow White, shows the potential to be anything but. As a result, Once Upon a Time evidences the potential for moral ambiguity that Grimm limits. Even so there is a strange backlash undertone to a show with such a strong female protagonist. In her everyday human context, the witch is a single career women, working hard to make it in local politics, whose evilness is indicated to her son (also Emma’s son) by a lack of maternalness – it is important that his damning accusation is not that she hurts him or fails to provide for him but that she only pretends to love him.  Emma’s ability to save the fairy tale characters, and to transform personally, comes from her willingness to stay in Storybrook and bond with the child that she gave up. If you are still not convinced about the series strange backlash undertone Rumplestiltskin actually is a snidely whiplash like character who menaces Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, owns almost the whole town and his last name is….wait for it….Mr. Gold. Despite this, the interesting female protagonist and the potential for innovation and interesting moral ambiguity makes me want to believe that these red flags will be less disconcerting as time goes on.

At the end of the day, I found myself disappointed by these two new additions to fantasy television. In many ways they were more artfully done, more visually beautiful and more narratively compelling then I expected, but, especially compared to their CW cousins, they were also much more ideologically problematic then I had anticipated. Fantasy has the potential to break the rules in profound ways. The fact that in this case it appears to be used to instate an authoritarian model of intrinsic criminality and backlash tales of bad mothers, mothers in need of redemption, and the sainted mother who martyred herself from the outset is disappointing at best and disconcerting during a time of cultural shift at worst. Nonetheless, there were elements of the programs that were promising and I hope to be proven wrong.

Below are our respective takeaways from our time in Seattle.

Ben Aslinger: Nancy Baym talked about her ongoing interview research with musicians on how musicians manage their social media presences (and absences). Baym emphasized that musicians must navigate why, how, and where to be present, given the proliferation of online music services and social networking sites. David Phillips profiled the emergence of a Quantified Self community and the potential implications of data being used not only in the hacker spirit of obtaining self-knowledge but also for repression and surveillance. Rosa Mikeal Martey presented ongoing collaborative research on gaming practices and identifications in Second Life, where she and her collaborators constructed a game in order to do virtual world ethnographic work. Tama Leaver posed a series of provocative questions about digital media presence, profiling the ethics and problems of parents creating social media traces (and thus digital identities) for their children (how much should parents share on online social networks, microblogging sites, and photo services?) and how digital identities are handled after death. Tom Boellstorff’s keynote featured a provocative discussion about how to treat the gap between the digital and the physical.  He drew interesting connections between his work on Second Life and his previous work on gay men and women in Indonesia. Alex Leavitt and Rosa Mikeal Martey’s presentations raised questions regarding how we balance our work as scholars with the work of archiving and preserving our objects of study. Is it our responsibility to save our objects of study? What new tools, software programs, and skills do we need to learn in order to preserve an object for study or keep our object of study around long enough for us to complete a research project? And through it all, there was the kissing booth, an experiment in presence, absence, viewership, and subjectivity designed by Theresa Senft.

Sean Duncan: One of the most interesting gaming-related sessions was scheduled at the very end of the conference, featuring four papers on the topic of sexual identity in digital games (including one of the authors of this piece, Ben Aslinger of Bentley University, also featuring Todd Harper of the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Lee Sherlock of Michigan State University, and Kevin Rutherford of Miami University).  In it, issues of sexual identity and game studies were addressed from four quite complementary perspectives — Aslinger through an engagement with the question of what a queer game studies might look like, Harper through the development of A Closed World, a game project that he led at GAMBIT, Sherlock through fannish practices around World of Warcraft, and Rutherford through the analysis of game mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas that yield the gay male character option as the optimal one.  Through each of these talks, issues of sexual identity were addressed theoretically, through design, through investigation of fan practices, and through a look at the procedural rhetoric of a game.  As the beginnings of a queer game studies seems to be taking hold, it was heartening to see these scholars attempt to address not just how fans express sexual identity through their gameplay, but each tied these forms of engagement in some fashion to design, either the design of games to explicitly engage players with these perspectives (as in Aslinger’s discussion of Stonewall Brawl and Harper’s discussion of A Closed World) or the ways that game design and game mechanics are implicated in popular, commercial games (such as Sherlock’s discussion of World of Warcraft and Rutherford’s analysis of Fallout: New Vegas).  As the connections between internet studies and game studies deepens, it’s a positive step to see us moving beyond an inordinate focus on synchronous virtual worlds such as massively-multiplayer online games to a broader consideration of the variety of games, their designers’ intents, and the means by which they are engaged upon via the internet.

Liz Ellcessor: On Monday, before the official start of IR12, I attended the conference’s doctoral colloquium. With over 30 Ph.D. students from a variety of disciplines, the colloquium took the form of small group meetings, in which 3-5 students were matched with mentors on the basis of shared interests or methodologies. These senior internet scholars led dedicated discussions of each group member’s project, drew connections between projects, prompted reflection, and offered advice and support. Obviously, experiences within small groups varied, but in wrapping up the day, organizer Elizabeth Buchanan observed that the groups all engaged with challenges regarding interdisciplinary work, work-life balance, and the ethics of research in an era in which expectations of privacy may be shifting for both scholars and our research participants.

Some of these concerns regarding methods of Internet research were also addressed in Wednesday’s Theoretical Reassessments panel. Ron Rice and Ryan Fuller began the session with an analysis of the prevalence of various concepts and theoretical found in article titles and abstracts related to online media in the past several years. Some concepts declined in popularity, such as “Web 2.0,” while others grew, including research using uses and gratifications theories. In concluding, the authors suggested that the field could benefit from more theoretical work on credibility, participatory media, relationship management and cultural differences. Similar data analysis from Matthew Allen addressed the discourses of Web 2.0. Using Leximancer as a tool to analyze a vast corpus of data and locate the key terms and relationships, which centered on “share” and “use,” he theorized that these uses of language ultimately produced a preferred “user” subject position, analogous to preferred reading positions, from which to engage with Web 2.0 media and technologies. Alex Halavais conducted a “genealogy of badges,” describing the religious and military traditions from which badges emerged, and the blurring of their uses as signifiers of authority or identity and items of commerce. This “baggage of badges” carries over into their use in new media forms, whether in games, FourSquare, or the current MacArthur badges for learning competition. Finally, Annette Markham focused on the difficulty of protecting the privacy of human subjects when doing Internet research in the current, searchable, web environment. She argued in favor of fabrication, pointing out that research composites, fictional narratives, and fabricated conversations can be used ethically as a means of camouflaging particular online identities and communities while still drawing upon real themes and concerns identified through research.

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.

On the face of it, Producer/creators Eric Overmayer and David Simon can’t do enough for the city. Treme is a love letter to New Orleans, famously praised by local bloggers and national NOLA-loving critics alike for “getting it right.” At the same time, these critic/fans are markedly uncritical of the trickle-down argument that increased tourism from Treme will make up for lost taxes. One can’t help but wonder how they would respond to the same case if it were made by, say, a manufacturer.  But it’s hard to focus on mundane questions when Treme says the one thing about New Orleans that was always my answer when my midwestern neighbors asked “Why do you want to move there? Why?  Because it’s the coolest city in the United States.

Simon and Overmayer clearly agree, and most episodes of Treme could be subtitled “The Hipster’s Guide to New Orleans.” From the beginning, every episode has been crammed full of references to bars, nightclubs, and restaurants—these are the good places, where we go to eat, hang out, and listen to music. The Spotted Cat and d.b.a. on Frenchmen, The Bon Temps Roule on Magazine, and Vaughn’s and Bullet’s farther out—these are the kind of places people don’t hit on their first or even second trip to the city, and before their shout-outs on Treme, you could still get a seat there.

The hip traveler’s to do list of restaurants, clubs, and musicians not to miss on their next trip was notably absent in this episode.  Instead, “Slip Away” opened with the funeral of Dinneral Shavers, high school band teacher and drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band. In a show known for intertextuality, where characters are based on real people and real people play themselves, “Slip Away” went a step (or several) further, re-enacting the actual funeral of Dinneral Shavers that took place in 2006, right down to the eulogy given by his real sister Nikita. There wasn’t much fun in this funeral as we see close ups of her anguish and that of the New Orleans musicians who were friends of Shavers and attended the original event.  No acting classes needed for these guys—the grief seemed fresh and raw.

With Dinneral’s funeral, Simon and Overmayer return to what is familiar territory for them and address the upsurge in violent crime that shook New Orleans in 2006.  LaDonna’s rape in the previous episode is a fictional introduction to two real murders: Shavers’ and the shooting of Helen Hill, a filmmaker killed in her home in the Marigny. The script becomes more documentary than drama as the ensuing (scripted) city-wide march against violence is juxtaposed with actual news footage taken at the time.  Film of actors and extras re-enacting the march is intercut with shots of a bewildered-looking then-Mayor Ray Nagin trying to respond to protesters and with live footage (ca. 2006) of Glenn David Andrews (who appears in the 2011 re-enactment of the funeral) speaking at the rally. The episode ends with LaDonna, safe (but not feeling that way) in Baton Rouge, watching the coverage as a lone customer as Gigi’s back in New Orleans does the same.

The producers/writers on Treme are under tremendous pressure: they ache to do right by New Orleans, they have to make a television show that people will continue watching, and they want to tell the truth about the city putting itself back together after the storm.  For my part, I’m starting to agree with those who argue that the show’s worshipful focus on New Orleans culture has occupied too much screen time at the expense of other things that make people watch.  But in an attempt to “get real,” the endless name-checking of musicians has been replaced in part by court cases about exorbitant police fees for Second Lines (with attorneys and judges playing themselves) and problems with the Sewerage and Water Board.  Once the writers run out of items for the show’s “Cool New Orleans” travelogue, their quest for verisimilitude will have Treme painted into a corner.  Real life is boring and tedious, except when it isn’t, and then it’s too painful for words.  I can’t predict what viewers will say about re-enacting a real funeral even with the permission of the family, but I’m glad I don’t have to take the heat for it.

Treme just hired a new writer, the first woman on their team, and already there are hints that things will be happening in the lives of Albert, Janette and Delmond. Some of my friends and I are rooting for Toni to hook up with a sexy younger musician. (Anybody out there listening?) Overmayer and Simon have more than established their street credibility as far as this New Orleanian  is concerned.  They’ve been keepin’ it real.  Now’s the time to start makin’ it up.

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 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.