Queer Eye: Stories Behind the Stories
Queer Eye’s new season dropped on Friday, June 5. I finished all ten episodes on Saturday, June 6.
I am drawn to the show for its offer of feel good makeovers, thorough commitment to understanding people and their circumstances, and its willingness to add layers of complexity to what would otherwise be simple narratives.
Yet, episodes of one hour usually leave out quite a bit. Usually, the desire to focus on the individual person at the center of the episode requires ignoring structural concerns that cannot be addressed in a week. This also creates a narrower focus on one aspect of a person’s life. The result: some viewers miss the nuance that comes from an attention to the structural limits facing the Fab5 including social, cultural, and institutional structures.
For example, when season four of Queer Eye featured Wesley, a Black wheelchair user, the internet streets were busy with concern about how the Fab5 handled his story. In particular, white disabled folks reacted negatively to how disability was portrayed, citing that his story risked being understood as “inspiration porn” and that Wesley needed structural intervention, not individual attention.
This got a much needed clapback from Vilissa Thompson, writer, activist and founder of Ramp Your Voice! She explained that discussing Black disability experiences was out of the range of many of those complaining most loudly. Thompson, also author of the #DisabilityTooWhite hashtag, gave an overview of what people missed as they were complaining: Black disabled fatherhood, Black male vulnerability, and the import of watching Black disabled people process their identities vis-à-vis ableism.
That is, the brouhaha over Wesley’s episode clarifies that Queer Eye produces several stories at once. At times, that story dovetails with Katherine Sender’s statement in The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences, “makeover television shows can be a source of information, a point of identification, a guilty pleasure.” Sender also points out that makeover shows “draw on already popular genres, including self-help literature, soap operas, and talk shows, that are attentive to intimacy, value emotional expression, and offer narrative frames within which audiences, especially women audiences, interpret their experiences.” I’ll add that those stories are highly individualized. Sender claims that these shows ask “how to live?” and she is right, but they are asking specifically “how do I live?”
Simultaneously, as the Wesley episode shows, the stories are also structural, cultural, and institutional. There are components of the person’s life that are enhanced or exacerbated by what they encounter in the wider world. There are aspects of the wider world that structure their ability to answer the question “how do I live?”
In this season’s episodes, I saw quite a few larger stories that structured the individual ones. At times, the Fab5 and the show’s producers deliberately address those larger constructs. Often, they don’t or can’t. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about them anyway.
Let’s go.
[Episode 1] [Episode 2] [Episode 3] [Episode 4] [Episode 5] [Episode 6] [Episode 7] [Episode 8] [Episode 9] [Episode 10]
