Now television, struggling in the era of multiple platform viewing and increased time-shifting, is turning to the clay feet of the musical for a wallop of financial and “special event” adrenaline. After 18 million Americans (hate) watched NBC’s live airing of The Sound of Music, it took less than five months for both NBC and Fox to announce their upcoming live musical projects, Peter Pan and Grease respectively. Of course this practice of airing live musicals has precedent. The New York-based 1950s live television era was bejeweled with live musical events. NBC’s 1955 airing of Peter Pan with Mary Martin garnered 64 million viewers. (Take that Carrie Underwood!) For the first time, television was bringing Middle America (and everyone else) the elusive sights and sounds of Broadway.

Today, the networks are struggling to find some way—other than awards shows—to draw a 21^st century, distracted, i-device obsessed audience to their living rooms. The ratings success of The Sound of Music seems to have been just the encouragement needed to reproduce the tele-theatrical disaster that was Underwood’s performance. The selection of Grease by Fox seems to ignore a string of warning signs.

(1) As was the case with The Sound of Music, Grease is an iconic text. Just as most Americans can only imagine Julie Andrews descending the Alps, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are Grease to most. As many of the press announcements note, Grease is the highest grossing movie musical of all time. Casting is going to be a bear. (2) The Broadway version—even the latest incarnation that hybridized the Broadway and film versions—is not the 1978 Paramount film. The energy is different. The songs are different. This means something when one is trying to capitalize on an audience’s existing emotional attachment to a property. It is nearly impossible to deliver on such a promise when millions are saddled with memories of specific choreography, inflections, phrasing, etc. Overcoming this is no easy feat. (3) Television viewers have already chimed in on Grease and they did not emit a rousing “we go together.” NBC’s 2006 reality show Grease: You’re the One That I Want served as a televised audition for the 2007 Broadway revival’s Danny and Sandy and ranked 75^th in annual Nielsens, garnering about a quarter the number of American Idol’s “hopelessly devoted” viewers. Fox’s Glee also took a shot at the musical with its own “Glease,” one of the lowest rated episodes of its drooping fourth season. (And let’s not even get started on Smash.)

As a devoted fan and scholar of the musical, I always try to root for the genre’s triumph over the jaded sensibilities of contemporary audiences, producers, and ticket buyers. (Although the lasting wounds from viewing 7^th Heaven’s musical episode may never heal.) That said, I often find myself disappointed by the nasty effects a network’s or producer’s hope for commercial appeal has on the musical product itself. Although Paramount TV President Amy Powell sounds like a latter day Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (NBC 1950’s head of programming/chairman of the board and cheerleader for the “spectacular”) as she states, “Fox’s passion for engaging audiences with bold storytelling and live musical formats make it a perfect home for this special broadcast,” perhaps NBC’s current chairman Bob Greenblatt was a bit more honest and on point in his response to the Sound of Music, “We own it so we can repeat it every year for the next 10 years…Even if it does just a small fraction of what it did, it’s free to repeat it.” Who knows, maybe this new trend will catch fire and save the networks and produce a whole new generation of musical fans, or just maybe we’ll all get a real treat and Stockard Channing—high on Good Wife street cred—will reprise her role of Rizzo, only slightly more age inappropriate now than in 1978.

I regret now that I didn’t get to know Alex Doty personally, and never told him how much his work has impacted me, not only in terms of its content but also his methodology, his modeling of the possibilities of scholar-fandom. As a scholar fan, I continue to share his intention to push at the divide between “high” and “low” culture. Though I never met him, I feel his loss keenly.

I want to share with you this fanvid/remix video that combines Glee with other popular cultural texts (mostly classic movies and movie musicals). I made this vid with Doty’s work and words in mind; I hope that it reflects not only his concern with the various ways in which queer meanings circulate in popular media, but also the way in which our investment in popular media shapes us and vice versa.

In the conversations at Henry Jenkins’ blog last fall, Doty spoke of his hope that “the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of ‘fan’ and ‘academic’ (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with…a space that allows ‘our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves’ no matter what their approach, methodology, or form.” In this spirit, the vid is dedicated to Doty. I hope that those who admired him and his work (as well as those who enjoy Glee‘s Kurt Hummel) will appreciate this offering.

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.

Terra Nova (Premiered 9/27/2011)

Guys, where are we? The pilot for Terra Nova felt remarkably Lost-like. I almost imagine the show being born when a Lost fan said, “remember that moment in the pilot when we hear a primordial noise in the jungle, and you sort of expect it to be a dinosaur? Well, what if it was a dinosaur?” After all, we’ve got the settlers in a lush environment, the fear of what lies outside the camp, the Others, daddy issues run amok, a lone renegade individual out there somewhere, scary creatures, a colonial outfit with unclear motives run by an untrustworthy guy with a long history with the place, an interest in do-overs, second chances, and destiny, time travel and the prospect for as many flash-forwards, flash-backs, and alternate realities as you care to imagine, and to top it all off, Allison Miller’s hair specialist seems to have consulted the same How to Make Your Hair Look Great in the Jungle specialist as did Evangeline Lilly’s. On the downside, the cast isn’t as strong (Michael Emerson > Stephen Lang anyday), nor is the writing as tight. And most of all, especially when compared to Lost, Terra Nova’s pilot suffered from being in such a rush. Too many issues, divisions, and fault-lines were introduced at once. All in all, I found the show intriguing, and I’m more captivated and keen to watch the next episode than I am to watch the next episode of any of the other new shows. I guess they couldn’t draw so heavily from the Lost creative pool without picking me up in the bucket at some point. And perhaps in time it will seem silly to compare this to Lost (the British Primeval seems just as obvious a forerunner in some ways). But right now, it’s teetering on the edge for me, and I’d like to see it slow down and trust itself, before (yes, a review about a dinosaur show must have the obligatory stupid dino joke) it finds itself extinct.

New Girl (Premiered 9/20/2011)

Erin Copple Smith, Denison University

I  have only one complaint about The New Girl: virtually every moment of the pilot made an appearance in the promos for the show, making me feel like I’d seen the whole thing before, albeit out of order. That being said, I liked the episode just as much as I’d hoped I would. I know what the
detractors are going to say: it’s too predictable, too enamored with Zooey Deschanel playing herself. It’s true–Deschanel is playing according to type as a goofy-but-beautiful misfit. But she does it so well, her fans in this house (both the humans, and at least one of the cats) didn’t mind. The supporting cast was also good, if playing toward common 20-something guy character types (bro, muscle head, lovable loser). But the acting was adept enough that I look forward to their continuing development as the series
progresses. So was The New Girl a bit predictable? Yes (particularly considering the seen-it-all-before-in-the-promos issue). But it was also refreshingly quirky and cute, much like Deschanel herself. The closing moments of the episode, when Jess’s roommates rescue her from being stood up by doing a group-sing of “(I Had) The Time of My Life,” exemplify the series’ tone as a successful balance of silly and sweet. In a sea of sitcoms exemplified by “edge”, I find that sweetness more than welcome. Will some folks complain that it’s too predictable, too saccharine, too…whatever? Definitely. But I thought it lived up to its promise. Zooey & Co., (I had) the time of my life…and I owe it all to FOX.

Alyx Vesey, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Zooey Deschanel’s voice is the aural equivalent to a photo taken in Hipstamatic. Its graininess simulates a superficial, imagined vintage aesthetic. Deschanel co-wrote and performs the theme to her new sitcom, The New Girl. Inspired by John Sebastian’s theme for Welcome Back, Kotter, it intends to present the actress and lead character as “adorkable”. Perhaps it was once a curious move for a film actress to star in a network sitcom. But The New Girl is another platform for Deschanel to assert herself as an indie pop star. If not Cotton ads, her lifestyle site Hello Giggles, or films where she plays the manic pixie dream girl, why not a sitcom with Glee as its lead-in?

Protagonist Jess Day often breaks into song, indicating the twenty-something’s supposed charm. The key difference between this free-spirited kindergarten teacher and Deschanel’s previous roles is that Day is considered ugly and repellent to men. Day impulsively moves in with three guys she met on Craigslist following a breakup. Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Coach (Damon Wayans Jr., who is returning to ABC’s Happy Endings) mentor Day on their definition of being sexy. Day’s best friend, model Cece Meyers (Hannah Simone, one of the few cast members of color), disapproves of this arrangement. However, she really wants Day to have a boyfriend. So she lends Day clothes for a date, even though she has a closet full of frilly dresses.

Creator and Fempire member Elizabeth Meriwether explored similar terrain in No Strings Attached, a comedy about Los Angelenos who hate their romantic prospects and seemingly each other. The New Girl has similar contempt for its characters. Worse, it also perpetuates the idea that young women are infantile co-dependents who need nerd glasses, insipid affectations, and male mentors to fashion an identity built entirely around men.

The X Factor (Premiered 9/21/2011)

Amber Watts, Texas Christian University

So, hey, remember back, like, 7 years ago when you still liked American Idol?  When Simon and Paula fought so adorably, and we thought Randy Jackson might actually have real words to say?  This is the same show, except the stage lighting is red (not blue), the judges have Pepsi cups (blue, not red), and Simon Cowell is doing Verizon (not AT&T) commercials.  Yes, there are other differences—contestant ages can range from 12 to senile, vocal groups are allowed, the judges will eventually coach contestants, and LA Reid has thoughts beyond “dawg” and “a’ight.”  Also, with a $5 million prize, the stakes of winning have been raised significantly.  The lack of an upper age limit further opens the range of tragic backstories—last night’s “Susan Boyle” was a 42-year-old single mom with a heart-wrenching “dream deferred thanks to an abusive relationship” tale (although the consensus in my house was that she was pitchy)—which gives us more possible reasons a reality show winner deserves $5 million.  In the end, though, I’m not sure if it will offer anything new, except, perhaps, exhausting the Fox-singing-competition audience before American Idol starts in January… That said, you should watch tonight’s episode; I was in the audience for the Dallas auditions, and the James-Brown-looking guy was pretty epic.

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.

While in the first part of this post I explored how some of Glee’s dubbed Italian promos help frame the show as a sometimes starkly different text, I now move on to consider locally produced promos, where an increased amount of creativity seems to be put forward and the intent is noticed of “domesticating” the show for the target culture.

The promo for Glee’s second season, aired by FOX Italia in the Fall of 2010, brings together scenes from the new episodes, while the voice over informs us that Glee is back with more auditions, nice songs, etc. Some of the key words heard in the voice over appear on screen with a slightly modified Italian spelling, i.e. with a ‘-ee’ instead of ‘-i’ ending, for example: audizionee (auditions), televisionee (lit. televisions), canzonee (songs), etc. While one could argue that using the dubbing actress who lends her voice to Sue Sylvester to promote Glee in such an upbeat, enthusiastic tone might not have been the most consistent choice, the promo clearly stands out for its verbal and visual creativity in superimposing alternative spelling on a grammatical feature of the Italian language, namely the plural noun and adjective ending ‘-i’. Thus the promo can be seen as successfully complying with the show’s verbal playfulness (both in other original promos and in the show itself) which is evident, for example, in the creation of ‘gleek’ and other Glee-inspired neologisms and in Sue’s elaborate and colourful insults. Perhaps building up on Glee’s hugely successful first season, this promo as a whole seems to be more daring than its first season counterparts. In fact, the inclusion of the clip in which Kurt makes explicit reference to himself being gay and Mercedes being black – and to these features making both of them “trendy” – calls attention specifically to some of the minority issues dealt with in the show.

The second case I consider here is the promotional campaign launched by the national network Italia1 when it started airing the first season of the show in January 2011. Italia1, traditionally famous for addressing a younger audience, used its well-known slogan “Italia Uno!” by adapting it to Glee and transforming it into “Gleeitalia Uno!”. In the promo we see a number of TV personalities putting their L-shaped fingers on their foreheads and saying “Gleeitalia Uno!”. The voice over at the end informs us that Glee, the “event TV series of the year”, is coming soon to Italia1.

This promotional campaign is obviously interesting from a number of different angles. First of all, on a linguistic level, it shows a certain amount of creativity in playing with sound and directly attaching the title of the show to the name of the network, thus superimposing new content on an existing – and highly recognizable – promotional campaign for the network. Secondly, a sort of cultural shift seems to be occurring as far as the ‘Loser’ gesture is concerned. While we can safely assume that the majority of Italian viewers will not be familiar with the L-Loser association (see previous post), the Italian VIPs who keep repeating the gesture seemingly unaware of its cultural significance in English also seem to invite Italian audiences to view the ‘L’ in the logo and on their foreheads simply as a visual extension of the /l/ phoneme in the word Glee, thus skipping the cultural significance of the gesture altogether. We could also comment on the use of local celebrities to endorse the show. Although it might make little sense for Italian VIPs to promote a foreign show, we could perhaps see this as mimicking and localizing the same strategy used – perhaps with equally awkward results – by  FOX in the US[1] or by FOX Italia at the beginning of the show’s first season. In this frankly surreal promo, for example, Italian actors, musicians and TV personalities talk about cast choices for a hypothetical Italian version of Glee.

While I can see how the hype surrounding the show even before its airing in Italy might have made Italian distributors confident with using celebrity images to promote the show from the start, I can’t help wondering whether this might have somewhat skewed the ways in which potential Italian viewers have walked onto the Glee phenomenon. Specifically, in addition to the “if you like these celebrities, you’ll like this show” effect normally invited by celebrity endorsement, I would also suggest that the use of mostly young, hip celebrities to promote Glee from its first season in Italy might have created glamorous associations that perhaps clash with the show’s message – or at least with the messages conveyed at the start of the first season in the US – of being confident with who you are even, and especially, if you are perceived as a nerd/loser.

I would like to suggest that many of the promotional strategies adopted for Glee in Italy seem to point in the direction of familiarizing the audience with the show by bringing it closer to the target culture and by closely engaging its fan base. In addition to the promos commented on above, this can be seen in FOX Italia’s idea to advertise Glee’s premiere with a flash mob in a busy shopping mall in Rome a few days before Christmas 2009 and in the recent launch of a web-based competition for the best fan rendition of songs featured in Glee, where winners of the competition will receive tickets to the London Glee concert. It seems safe to say that Glee is being brought (literally, in the case of the flash mob) to Italian viewers through shrewd use of locally produced – albeit sometimes slightly incoherent – paratexts which strategically appeal and reach out to both prospective and established gleeks.

Musical numbers are also used to express the inexpressible. When Gene Kelly performs the title number in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), his voice and his body radiate pure joy. He has just fallen in love and the only way he can express these emotions is through song and dance. Therefore, the transition from the real world, where a rainy day is dreary and depressing, becomes a dream world, where the pouring rain is a delight. For most of its run, Glee has eschewed this type of musical number. Song choices may relate to the narrative, but performances are rarely used to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality (for more on Glee’s mishandling of some of the basic conventions of the musical genre, see Kelli Marshall’s insightful Flow article). Instead the show often functions as a kind of “Glee’s Follies,” that is, as a musical revue featuring unrelated performances that showcase the talents of each of its stars and sell singles on iTunes.

However “Grilled Cheesus” (a fantastic title) is one of the few Glee episodes to not only establish, but also to play with, the opposition between dream world and real world in the musical. For example, early in the episode, Mercedes tells the Glee club that she has been struggling to come up with something comforting to say to Kurt after his father is hospitalized: “Then I realized I don’t want to say it. I want to sing it” she explains. Mercedes then launches into a rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Look to You,” which asks Kurt/the audience to believe in the ability of a higher power to comfort us in our suffering. The shot/reverse shot between Mercedes and Kurt at the conclusion of the number implies that Kurt has been moved (his eyes are filled with tears) and that he now “believes” in the dream world created by Mercedes’ performance. But instead, Kurt calls out the lie of the musical, telling Mercedes, “Your voice is stunning but I don’t believe in God.”

This scene thus pulls the audience into the dream world only to abruptly force us back out of it again. As Sue Sylvester notes, in a brutally honest argument for the case of atheism, “Asking someone to believe in a fantasy, however comforting, is an amoral thing to do.” Mercedes may have a beautiful voice, but Kurt should nevertheless be prepared for the possibility that his father will die.

Even Rachel’s schmaltzy version of “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” worked in this regard. The scene begins with Finn and Rachel sitting in the park at night. When Finn asks why they are outside, Rachel explains “Because I don’t want anything coming between us and God. And because Yentl was outside when she sang this song in the movie.” So while Rachel’s song is a musical prayer for Kurt’s father, it is also very much about Rachel’s desire to perform. The scene transitions from the dark outdoors to the bright interior of a hospital room, where we find Rachel singing to Kurt’s comatose father. Rachel’s passionate performance effectively transports the viewer into the dream world of song and faith. However, we are abruptly returned to reality when Rachel concludes her emotional song with“Who’s next?”

While I am prone to criticizing Glee, I think this episode worked as both an example of the musical’s primary theme—dream world versus real world—and as its critique. Yes, it is unrealistic that Kurt’s father wakes up from his coma at the conclusion of the episode. But the deus ex machina is not faith in God, but rather Kurt’s faith in his father.  The episode seems to be equating the former with fantasy and the latter with reality. And it’s hard to get too wrapped up in the dream world of the final number, “What If God Was One of Us,” when it is intercut with Finn contemplating, and then eating, his Grilled Cheesus.

With some incredible musical numbers, including a touching rendition of “To Sir with Love” and a return to Journey songs that helped launch the show’s initial success last fall, the finale included some of Glee‘s signature (if uneasy) aspects of spectacle, emotional appeal, and snarky self-awareness. But like many good television shows, the reactions and take-aways vary dramatically.

Kelly Kessler: “OH NO THEY DIDN’T!”  Oh yes they did.  Oh yes!  They totally went there.  I just want to say that I can name that tune in 2 notes.  I believe Lulu’s “To Sir with Love” officially trumped “Jessie’s Girl” as making my season through fabulous song choice.  The hyper-emotion connected to the musical genre came full force in the total cheesiness of this number.  So much crying!  Kurt’s voice was oh so high.  Everyone was saved by Shu (and “black guy” and “other Asian” even got to talk).  As I sit here crying during my second viewing of that number, I contemplate my inadvertent Antenna role as the defender of the powers that Glee.  Well, I’m okay with that, and I swear I’m not on the take.  Was it ridiculous?  Hell yes it was ridiculous.  Am I annoyed by that or do I feel led astray?  Hmm…no.  I really found this season finale to be the best of what Glee and the musical do (even if those things are at times ridiculous).  It gave me drama, fabulous (and at times forgotten) music, love, redemption, and dance, dance, dance.  I’ll forgive it for continuing to marginalize its secondary players, and I will continue to look forward to how it develops from here.  Season 2, I wait for you with bated breath.

Amanda Ann Klein: Much like Lost, the Glee finale left me with many questions: Have “the black kid” and “Other Asian” really made it through an entire season without names? How can Rachel claim that Jesse has “no soul” after hearing his kickass rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody”? How were the Glee kids able to stay for the duration of Quinn’s labor and delivery and still make it to the awards ceremony? Why did Quinn give birth to a 5-month-old baby? And should I be happy that Shelby Corcoran doesn’t want a relationship with her biological daughter but does want a relationship with someone else’s biological daughter? Am I to believe that Finn loves Rachel? Puck loves Quinn? Quinn loves Mercedes? Santana loves Glee club? And why did this nonsensical finale make me cry three different times–when New Directions performed their Journey medley, when Quinn first held her baby, and when Will and Puck performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?

Sharon Ross: Like almost every episode, last night’s finale featured great one-liners and touching moments riddled with an equal amount of drawbacks.  Sue came through with the snappy zinger, saying to Will after discovering he parked his car near hers:  “I don’t want to catch poor.”  The entire “To Sir, With Love” scene was touching and full of heart, while the worst moment in regards emotional realism was certainly Shelby adopting Quinn’s baby (read: adoption is easy!). Accordingly, the worst moment of the episode in regards to physical realism was Quinn’s return (read: you can go back to classes right after giving birth!). However, giving birth really is a lot like listening to/singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over AND OVER again (especially if one has had an epidural). Overall, it was a solid finale with good setup for next season, despite the fact that the duet-heavy medley was a tiresome return to Finn and Rachel (and honestly a bit of a yawn compared to past episodes’ performances).

LeiLani Nishime: The season finale encapsulated many of the things I enjoy about Glee and many of the reasons why I often walk away from the show feeling like I ate an entire bag of over-processed Cheetos. I loved the simultaneously campy and moving “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “To Sir with Love” productions, and the way the show completely undercut any lasting belief that competitions are based on a meritocracy. But the last fifteen minutes had me squirming. The showdown that wasn’t and the hideously mawkish final song made it much easier to say good bye to end of the season. And I hate to be too one-note about this, but minority representation, once again, came up short.

Ben Aslinger: Next Tuesday, my dentist will replace the permanent crowns on two of my front teeth because someone in the eighth grade pushed me into a chain-length fence for being different, unleashing a cycle of oral surgeries and braces as well as the root canals and crown replacements that I will have (and have to pay for) for the rest of my life.  While I recognize how Glee creatively uses music and encourages fan appropriations, I can’t stomach Glee, perhaps because the brutality and humiliations of the show hit too close to home.  Near the beginning of Paradise, Toni Morrison refers to high school as cruelty “decked out in juvenile glee,” and it is precisely this cruelty in Glee that makes this viewer’s attitude less gleeful.  The question then emerges as to whether (and why) those of us who experienced such cruelty would want to watch it represented on television in such a depoliticized and fantastical way.

Mary Beltrán: It dawned on me in the first minutes of the episode that New Directions of course could not win at regionals.  Because, post-PC humor aside, that¹s not what the narrative is about.  In my opinion it’s about losing, and doing it with heart (mentioned many times in the last few episodes) and scrappy style.  And what a better metaphor for these things than song and dance? One of my chief pleasures in watching Glee‘s last episodes also has been seeing the cast demonstrating more of their talent as their glee club counterparts are believably catching up to them, which has me looking forward, glee-fully, to next season. On another note, it was notable that much of the non-white characters’ development of the last half of the season was cast aside in the return to the Rachel and Finn subplot and duet emphasis in the competition.   Are the non-white characters destined always to be pushed back to the background when the going gets rough?

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Ranging from sheer joy to exhausted disappointment, reactions to the season finale bring forth some of the issues that make Glee so complex and contentious.  How do we navigate the simultaneous pleasures and limitations of such post-modern performance, reinvention and representation?