Weekly reflection tips answer each question separatelyreview

Weekly Reflection Tips
Answer each question separately
Review the slides, they contain helpful definitions
When questions ask about readings, make sure to include at
least one quotation (with page numbers)
But don’t let the quotation do all that talking. Explain what is
significant about the quotation; the majority of your answer
should be in your own words
When discussing media texts, be specific! Descriptions of
exemplary scenes or sequences will best support your analysis
Use examples (both quotes and scenes) that go beyond what was
covered in lecture. This will emphasize the originality of your
ideas and demonstrate thoughtful engagement with course
material
Question1
In “Stereotyping,” Richard Dyer critiques popular modes of
(queer) characterization. According to Dyer, how do the “social
type,” “stereotype,” and “individual” reinforce Western
hegemony?
Question2
One Day at a Time (Netflix/Pop TV/TV Land, 2017-) is a
remake of a white-cast sitcom. In your opinion, does the series’
engagement with its characters’ ethnic and sexual identities
avoid “plastic representation?” Draw on at least one of this
week’s readings and a scene or sequence from One Day at a
Time to complete your answer.
One Day at a Time(also available on Netflix) :
https://depauledu-
my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/yzhou72_depaul_edu/EZxkCy

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Week 7 Queerness in
Mainstream Forms

Ellen (ABC 1994-1998)
Making queer television history - the significance (and
problems) of “firsts” Or, what can the (queer)
history of the sitcom tell use about social and industrial
progress—and struggle?
Ellen (ABC 1994-1998)
problems) of “firsts” “Ellen’s negotiation of
the queer place in television history was set in motion by the
‘historic event’ of the coming out episode, but it did not end
there[...] It’s fear of a quotidian, ongoing lesbian life on
television suggest that, although the network could support
queer television as a spectacular media event, it could not
sanction a lesbian invasion of serial television’s more modest
form of history making, the regularly scheduled weeks of
televisual flow. Queer TV, in short, could make history as event
television but not as what we might call ‘uneventful’
television.” (McCarthy 596-597)
Ellen (ABC 1994-1998)
problems) of “firsts” McCarthy charts how
promotional and historical narratives surrounding television’s

representational politics often overvalue spectacular “media
events.” In doing so, these narratives obscure the challenges of
crafting diverse television within the structure of mainstream
media industries at specific moments in American history.
McCarthy is interested in unpacking the complex, shifting
relationship between the sitcom and hegemony in America...
The sitcom and hegemony in America
Hegemony: dominant politics and culture, maintained through
force and ideology / ”common sense.” Hegemony defines
what is normal .
force and ideology / ”common sense.” Hegemony d efines
what is normal . Capitalism -> neoliberalism
Patriarchy White supremacy
Heteronormativity Individualism
force and ideology / ”common sense.” Hegemony defines
what is normal . Capitalism -> neoliberalism
Patriarchy White supremacy

Heteronormativity Individualism
BUT! “hegemony is an active concept – it is something
that must be ceaselessly built and rebuilt in the face of both
implicit and explicit challenges to it.” (Dyer, 356)
1950s: The domestic sitcom - establishing American norms
The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952-
1966) Father Know Best
(ABC, 1954-1960) Leave it to
Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957-1963)
The Donna Reed Show (ABC 1958-1966)
While a reductive narrative, midcentury domestic sitcoms are
often credited (nostalgically or critically) with helping establish
the white, middle-class, suburban family as representative of
“normal” America.
1950s: The domestic sitcom - establishing American norms
While some of the regressive qualities of this form are easily
recognized and parodied, some of its norms retain hegemonic
power.

1970s: The “progressive” sitcom - expanding American norms
All In the Family (CBS 1971-1979)
Sanford and Son (NBC 1972-1977) Maude
(CBS 1972-1978) Good Times (CBS 1974-
1979) The Jeffersons (CBS 1975-1985)
One Day At a Time (CBS 1975-1984) Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman (Syndicated 1976-1977)
All In the Family (CBS 1971-1979)
Sanford and Son (NBC 1972-1977) Maude
(CBS 1972-1978) Good Times (CBS 1974-
1979) The Jeffersons (CBS 1975-1985)
One Day At a Time (CBS 1975-1984) Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman (Syndicated 1976-1977)
Celebrated for their introduction of “realism” into the domestic
sitcom, Norman Lear’s projects challenged televisual
representations of everyday American life. They featured
working-class characters, characters of color, and single and
working mothers. These characters also actively and regularly
debated American politics.
However, the scope of the Lear project could only extend so far.
Though All in the Family’s “Judging Books By
Covers” (1970) is groundbreaking in its inclusion of an out gay

character, its imagining of queerness is limited. This is not to
dismiss All in the Family ; rather, the show’s
characterization of Steve can help us understand the aesthetic,
institutional, and political forces that impacted even progressive
media of the 1970s (and beyond).
Steve is a one-off character with no life beyond what he can
teach Archie. Although sitcoms were becoming increasingly
serialized, the form could not support ongoing queer storylines.
In its attempt to challenge gay stereotypes, All in the
Family offers what Richard Dyer would characterize as
assimilationist rather than counter-hegemonic characterization.
Stereotypes and hegemony
“Righteous dismissal does not make the stereotypes go away,
and tends to prevent us from understanding just what
stereotypes are, how they function, ideologically and
aesthetically, and why they are so resilient in the face of our
rejection of them. In addition, there is a real problem as
to just what we would put in their place…” (Dyer, 353)

“Righteous dismissal does not make the stereotypes go away,
and tends to prevent us from understanding just what
stereotypes are, how they function, ideologically and
aesthetically, and why they are so resilient in the face of our
rejection of them. In addition, there is a real problem
as to just what we would put in their place… ” (Dyer, 353)
“Stereotyping” was written in the early-1980s, as queer activism
developed in the face of HIV/AIDS. This political urgency,
especially the focus on solidarity and collective identity,
underlies Dyer concern with queer visibility.
“A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily-grasped and
widely recognised characterisation in which a few traits are
foregrounded and change or ‘development’ is kept to a
minimum.” (Dyer, 355) Social type
Stereotype Member type
Social type Stereotype “a system
of social- and stereotypes refers to what is, as it were, within
and beyond the pale of normalcy. Types are instances which
indicate those who live by the rules of society (social types) and
those whom the rules are designed to exclude (stereotypes).”
(Dyer, 355)

(Dyer, 355)
In All in the Family , Archie often functions as a
social type: a gruff, middle-aged man who is perplexed by the
changing world around him. Whether the show encourages
identifications with Archie is eternally debatable; however,
All in the Family definitely assumes he is a recognizable
participant in everyday American life. He is the protagonist
after all.
(Dyer, 355)
While Roger ultimately defies Archie’s stereotypical
expectations, his characterization demonstrates the social
function of stereotypes: to make the “non-normal” people easily
recognizable and dismissable. Due to his proximity to legible
queerness, Archie—and arguably the show as a whole—treats
Roger as a joke.

(Dyer, 355)
Except for his homosexuality, Steve fulfills the same social type
as Archie—in fact he “fits in” better; he even beats Archie at
arm wrestling! Thus, while All in the Family
challenges stereotypes, it does so by suggesting that gay men
can be “normal” too. In other words, it maintains hegemonic
boundaries.
“in stereotyping the dominant groups apply their norms to
subordinated groups, find the latter wanting, hence inadequate,
inferior, sick or grotesque and hence reinforcing the dominant
groups’ own sense of the legitimacy of their domination.”
(Dyer, 356) Stereotype

(Dyer, 356) Stereotype Stereotypes
are powerful and damaging not simply because they associate
specific social groups (or subgroups) with inherently “negative”
traits or behaviors. Stereotypes also position counter -
hegemonic traits or behaviors as “negative.” They demand
assimilation.
(Dyer, 356) Stereotype In
“Stereotyping,” Dyer attempts to articulate an alternative form
of characterization that challenges stereotypes while retaining
counter- hegemonic potential. To promote political awareness
and meaningful social change, he demands more than the
suggestion, posited by texts such as All in the Family ,
that queer people can be “normal” too.
Social type Stereotype Member type

Social type Stereotype Member type:
Dyer’s potentially progressive form of characterization
Social type Stereotype Member type:
Dyer’s potentially progressive form of characterization
“Member types [...] are linked to historically and …
openly gay character in 1977’s “Soap.” At the end of this
month, TV will
count a gay lead in a regular series, too.1
This litany of firsts is interesting because of its errors (why no
mention of Beulah,
or Desi Arnaz?) and because its length unintentionally
diminishes the significance
of the firstness of Ellen’s coming-out episode. In keeping with
the characteristics
of coming out as a speech act, the episode had “nothing to do
with the acquisition
of new information”; rather, it was a largely ceremonial first, an
occasion we were
all supposed to remember as the moment when queer lives
finally became part of
mainstream television.2 In other words, the event was a formal
one, in both the tex-
tual and the ritualistic sense of the word, within television as an

institution. Queer
fictions and characters could now permanently and officially
shape the structure of
American sitcom narrative (as opposed to haunting its edges
conspicuously, as
Tony Randall’s Sidney did in Love Sidney, or lasting only
temporarily, as Crystal’s
character on Soap did).3
There were good reasons to be ambivalent about this moment of
main-
streaming in television as an institution. As comic Lea Delaria
pointed out, not
only was the firstness of the coyly named “Puppy Episode”
highly manufactured,
but its celebration as a historic moment in lesbian and gay
political circles
reflected assimilationist celebrity worship that devalued the
work of entertainers
like herself, “butch dykes . . . drag queens or nellie fags” who
defy hetero-
normative conventions of stardom.4 Indeed, DeGeneres rejected
any connection to
defiantly queer forms of publicity. Eric O. Clarke notes that
DeGeneres’s media
statements about the coming-out episode only enforced
normative ideals of rep-
resentative gay citizenship, most notoriously when she
denounced “Dykes on
Bykes” as queer extremism in a Time interview. Transforming
the name of a ven-
erable pride parade contingent into a rhyming sound bite, this
slam on “scary”
homosexuals echoed another homophobic celebrity rhyme: the
“Adam and Eve,
not Adam and Steve” quip attributed to Donna Summer. As

Clarke argues, such
moments made DeGeneres fully complicit with the homophobic
sense of norma-
tivity that lies at the root of the public sphere as a political
category. Structured by
a “subjunctive” ideal, in which all subjects and alliances must
perform “as if ”
they were interchangeable to qualify for civic participation, the
public sphere
requires that queer subjects make themselves known through
“homogenized prox-
ies . . . lesbians and gay men who are just like everyone else.”5
DeGeneres
appeared to seek this proxy status for herself as an activist.
When she compared
herself to Rosa Parks during an interview with Diane Sawyer,
she offered a view of
social change based on a subjunctive sense of identity in which
race- and sexual-
594 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
GLQ 7.4-04 McCarthy 10/16/01 5:15 PM Page 594
ity-based oppressions are commensurable with, or at the very
least analogous to,
each other.
Racial analogies like this one largely structured the public
discourse on
Ellen. What enabled them to take hold, despite the fact that
visibility on television
is not particularly comparable to civil rights activism? One
factor was surely the

historiographical voice of television as an institution. As
several media critics have
noted, a sense of historical consciousness structures American
television’s forms of
textuality.6 The medium’s address to the viewer is characterized
by a seemingly
compulsive urge to narrate its flow of programming as
historical, eventful, and
truthful. Professional and popular discourses on media events
use signifiers of his-
tory to connect television broadcasts with broader moments of
national reckoning,
even when — as with Ellen— the news in question is
entertainment news, emerg-
ing entirely from within television as an institution. These
spectacular television
events in turn exist in an interesting dialectical relationship
with another mode of
mediated history: the unremarkable, ordinary flow of the regular
television sched-
ule. As Mary Ann Doane notes, it is through the rupture of its
own routine that
television appears to have “access to the momentary, the
discontinuous, the real.”7
The journalistic impulse to place Ellen in a long list of sitcom
firsts can be
seen as part of the diverse historiographical operations
performed by television,
encompassing both the banal familiarity of the sitcom as an
enduring entertain-
ment format and the spectacular punctuation of this banality by
the previously
unseen media event. Moreover, the obsession with firsts reveals
a key element in
popular and professional understandings of the history of the

sitcom: the idea that
the genre is a barometer of social change. Indeed, DeGeneres’s
self-fashioning as
a gay Rosa Parks affirmed such visions of what might be called
the liberal-
progressive narrative of television history. This narrative often
consists of Whig-
gish tales in which the sitcom became more socially responsible
thanks to pio-
neers like All in the Family producer Norman Lear, who, this
story goes, not only
retooled the sitcom’s demographic but changed its cultural
politics.
The rise of gay television as a genre recently might tempt us to
accept this
narrative as an accurate rendering of the way same-sex relations
enter into televi-
sion history. From this perspective, Ellen was a failed
experiment, while Emmy
Award–winning Will and Grace was a success, and now gay
television is no longer
controversial. However, the distinction between success and
failure rests on some
suspect assumptions. Failure is a term that can mean many
different things in the
rhetorics of network programming. For one thing, the fact that
so many unaired
shows are pitched, developed, and shot during a production year
means that any
series that makes it into the network schedule should be
considered a success.8
MAKING QUEER TELEVISION HISTORY 595

Moreover, as Ien Ang points out, ratings are best approached
not as accurate
markers of audience desire but as discursive structures through
which networks,
sponsors, and advertisers reach an economic and institutional
consensus.9 Fur-
thermore, as explained below, the “failing sitcom” is itself a
recognizable sub-
genre, with distinct characteristics of its own. In short, a
“success-versus-failure”
model of gay television obscures more than it reveals.
Seeing Ellen solely as a failure, whether one attributes its
downfall to its
being “too gay,” as Chastity Bono claimed, or not gay enough,
prevents us from
looking more closely at the kind of show it was. Perhaps we can
learn something
new about the political possibilities for, and constraints on,
queer historiography
that exist in popular culture and its commercial institutions by
revisiting Ellen.
Rather than try to adjudicate once and for all whether the show
was or was not
“progressive,” it seems more rewarding to explore the moments
when Ellen might
have registered ambivalence about the politics of television
representation and
television history and to ask how such moments opened up a
space for thinking
about television’s obsessive, multilayered historical
consciousness as a kind of
queer discourse. I take on this task in this essay, suggesting that

some key contra-
dictions in the liberal model of television history became
visible during the show’s
post–coming-out engagement with the televisual past and with
the structural lim-
its of the sitcom form. The significance of Ellen for queer
media studies, I argue,
lies in the way it became an arena in which questions about the
representational
forms and durationality of queerness — in the sitcom and in
prime-time television
in general — were staged. In even broader terms, Ellen teaches
us a great deal
about how the institutional forms of popular culture, like the
sitcom’s narrative
structure, shape the conditions under which queer
historiography can emerge in
public life.
Ellen’s negotiation of the queer place in television history was
set in motion
by the “historic event” of the coming-out episode, but it did not
end there. In the
episodes that followed, as the show became branded a “failure,”
historiographical
voices multiplied in it and in its production context. One
notable example was the
explanation of the show’s failure offered by ABC’s president,
Robert A. Iger. Evinc-
ing a curious durational sense of identity, Iger explained that
Ellen “became a
program about a character who was gay every single week, and .
. . that was too
much for people.”10 This statement is noteworthy for the way it
opposes queer
identity and televisual seriality, as if the ongoing flow of

situations and character
development that defines the contemporary sitcom could not
accommodate a
same-sex world of desires and identifications. The fantasy of
queer identity as
something that can be switched on for special occasions — for
sweeps week, per-
haps — voices something more than an institutional concern
that the show would
now be “about” the character’s identity as a lesbian and her
relation to queer cul-
ture. Its fear of a quotidian, ongoing lesbian life on television
suggests that,
although the network could support queer television as a
spectacular media event,
it could not sanction a lesbian invasion of serial television’s
more modest form of
history making, the regularly scheduled weeks of televisual
flow. Queer TV, in
short, could make history as event television but not as what we
might call
“uneventful” television.11 Tensions between queer history as an
interruptive event
and queer history as part of television’s repertoire of
unremarkable techniques of
narrativizing the everyday emerged in a number of ways in the
final season of
Ellen. They became visible in the show’s narrative structures
and forms of inter-

textual reference, calling attention to the ways that same-sex
narrative possibilities
enact a crisis on the formal, structural level of television texts.
Ellen demonstrated
that the problem of queerness on television is not simply a
matter of difficult
“adult content.” Rather, same-sex desire plays a deeply
agonistic role in the
unfolding of temporal structures associated with television’s
modes of (auto)histo-
riography — the media event, the television schedule, the
season run, the final
episode.
For this reason, we cannot grasp the full range of implications
for queer
media studies by focusing solely on Ellen’s coming-out episode.
Indeed, my focus
is on the rhetorics of history and historiography that arose and
became intertwined
in the show’s post–coming-out episodes, in which these
distinctions between inter-
ruption and continuity were negotiated week by week, and in a
second “media
event” that occurred during this period of the show’s life span:
the final episode. A
parody of cable television star biography programs such as E!
True Hollywood
Story and A&E Biography, this episode set in motion a
sustained analysis of the
queer politics of television’s historiographical narratives. In its
final season and in
its finale, the show articulated in the quasi-complicit, quasi-
ironic voice of the
1990s auteur sitcom the institutional and textual constraints
surrounding “every-

day queerness” on television.
Serial versus Episodic Homosexuality
In this final season of the show, as Iger’s remarks indicate,
ABC assigned Ellen’s
writers an impossible task: to produce an episodic rather than a
serial sense of queer
life. Beleaguered executive producer Tim Doyle plaintively
phrased the narrative
problems that arose from this absurd situation in terms of
televisual historicity and
temporality: “Are we going to write stories about her getting
locked in a meat
locker?” His reference to a stock sitcom plot, in which two
characters get stuck in a
meat locker and comedy, or a meaningful interpersonal
breakthrough, ensues, is
familiar to all Brady Bunch fans and is parodied in the cult
sitcom Get a Life.12
Doyle’s disparagement of this sitcom staple is worth noting
because it belies the fact
that, as the clock ticked toward its cancellation, the show
exhibited a fetishistic,
almost compulsive interest in sitcom conventions. The season’s
narratives, situations,
and punch lines revolved around knowing citations of
programming practices and

textual ciphers in American television history. It may not have
had a meat locker
episode, but it had a dream episode, a vacation episode, a car
crash, and a parental
funeral — all stock ingredients of late-period sitcom narrative.
This kind of historical awareness may be routine in the dense
intertexts
of contemporary television, but it takes on particular
significance in the context
of the sitcom, especially the gay sitcom. One of the many
curious aspects of the
sitcom as a television genre is that its historical consciousness
is itself a histor-
ical development. The distinction between episodic and serial
narrative that Iger
referenced was a paradigm-shifting moment in the development
of the genre in
the 1970s. During this period, in contrast to the Paul Henning
“rural” sitcoms
of the 1960s, sitcoms began to take on the characteristics of
serial narrative, as
part of the overall serialization of prime-time television. This
development was
popularly explained as a transformation in the sitcom’s
audience and in Ameri-
can society, although, as Jane Feuer notes, this explanation
obscured factors
such as shifting patterns in markets, and in network relations
with production
companies, in favor of a liberal tale of progress in which the
medium became
more socially responsible.13
This narrative of the sitcom’s development and liberalization is
not as sim-

ple as it seems. It at once brings history, in the sense of
historical struggles for
social justice and ongoing serial development, into the textual
repertoire onscreen
while erasing the institutional history and politics that shaped
this process. The
emergence of seriality and, with it, ongoing character and story
arcs was thus
overdetermined as a moment when history started to figure
prominently in the sit-
com. But if seriality marked a transformation in the sitcom’s
relationship to history,
it was a partial transformation at best. Gay and lesbian
characters were certainly
part of the supposed liberalization of the sitcom, as in a key late
episode of All in
the Family in which Edith discovers that her recently deceased
cousin was a les-
bian who left a precious family heirloom to her lover. However,
they were not gen-
erally part of the formal shift from one-off, static reiterations of
the basic comic setup
to full-fledged seriality. Indeed, narrative development in
sitcom was arguably a
hetero privilege. Feuer’s primary example of this trend is,
tellingly, the develop-
ment of Sam and Diane’s relationship on Cheers; this
foregrounds the extent to
which sitcom seriality seems to revolve around romance plots

and couples. In this
respect, the developmental path of television comedy, in which
the form appears to
grow into seriality, mirrors normative developmental narratives
of sexuality: queer
desire gets left behind as the genre “matures.”14
Thus, before Ellen queerness was an interruptive, marginal
force in the sit-
com, its duration limited to one-off figures in “very special”
episodes and sup-
porting characters.15 Indeed, serialization and the “adult”
retooling of the sitcom
actually limited queer possibilities in the sitcom, as it involved
the elimination of
the fantastic as a sitcom subgenre. Patricia White identifies a
firmly established
role for queer visibility in the 1960s fantasy sitcom when she
notes the “gay sub-
culture” of wizards and warlocks who thronged at the narrative
margins of the
show Bewitched. As she astutely points out, Agnes Moorehead’s
character, Endora,
“literally cast a dark shadow over heterosexual relations each
week when her
credit . . . appears on a black cloud of smoke blotting out
‘Derwood’ and Saman-
tha’s embrace.”16 With the rise of the serialized sitcom, rooted
in some sense of the
everyday, queerness became increasingly a matter for narrative
management. As
Lynne Joyrich notes, Roseanne thematized this very state of
affairs in a famous
1994 Halloween episode in which Dan, Fred, and Jackie
conspire to make Rose-
anne think that Fred is gay. After she catches Dan and Fred in

bed together, she
produces a detonator and blows the house up. Queerness here
destroys not only
the narrative arc but the very fabric of the domestic sitcom’s
diegetic universe. But
not permanently: next week, home life will resume as usual.17
Ellen’s coming-out episode was momentous because it promised
to make
queer life something other than an interruptive force, something
potentially assim-
ilated (and I use the word advisedly) into the repertoire of
romantic and personal
situations replayed weekly on the prime-time sitcom.18 But the
logic through
which this occurred was a heteronormative one. Although it may
have inaugurated
a queer developmental moment in the sitcom, the coming-out
episode did so via
conventions particularly associated with shows based on
romantic heterosexual
tensions, for example, the domestic-help romance subgenre
exemplified by The
Nanny and Who’s the Boss? In these shows, frequent hints, one-
offs, and missed
connections abound from season to season. They set up
romantic tension that can
last for years, with the implicit promise that it will be resolved
at the end of the
series. Similarly, the affective revelation of the “Puppy
Episode” was anticipated
via ongoing hints, winks, and “almosts” that communicated the
impending devel-

opment.19 Although this technique was self-reflexive and ironic
in its references to
the publicity that the show was getting, it was simultaneously
structured in con-
ventional sitcom terms, of which it seemed to have no
awareness.
This double voice, simultaneously conventional and self-aware,
is a tech-
nique through which sitcoms often signal their relationship to
their own history
and to the broader history of the form. As a mode of address, it
connects Ellen to
other auteur comedies of the 1990s, such as The Simpsons and
Seinfeld. But this
connection itself suggests a broader context for thinking about
the place of Ellen
in television history. As loyal viewers will recognize, the tone
of both of these
writerly, adult sitcoms changed as time went on. The formal and
narrative ele-
ments that signaled their ironic relationships to the conventions
of the sitcom, and
particularly to the genre’s “mature,” post-Lear interpersonal
politics, remained,
but the shows began to succumb to the conventions of the form
they were ridicul-
ing. In the eighth season of The Simpsons, for example, the
scripts managed both
to be highly ironic and “self-aware” and to recycle stock plots;
there was even a
meat locker episode in which Homer and Mr. Burns were

trapped in a hut buried
in an avalanche. Other story lines — including the addition of a
new character to
the Simpson family, a “clip show,” and a spinoff show —
borrowed and exhibited
the formal attributes of a series that is starting to lose steam.
Such moments are forms of historiographical representation.
What they
both lampoon and display is an interesting historical effect of
sitcom seriality: the
messy, baroque narrative style that defines the late-season
show. It should be
obvious to even the most casual viewers that when sitcoms
reach the end of their
runs, they start to display extreme textual artifice, reversing
their previous ideo-
logical and interpersonal rifts and accelerating character
development. No longer
oriented toward attracting new audiences, they start to reward
loyal viewers by
resolving narrative tensions and referencing their histories in
ways that only a
longtime fan could appreciate. The frictions that originally
animated a show’s
comedic situations get played out, and the story lines
increasingly replace comedy
with drama and pedagogy. We witness cloying rapprochements
between characters
formerly at war with each other or with “the system,” and new
settings suddenly
appear: the Bosom Buddies guys start their own ad agency,
Hotlips and Hawkeye
become allies, Fonzie becomes dean of students at the high
school, Roseanne
delivers an unironic monologue to God outside Dan’s cardiac-

ward room. Interest-
ingly, as sitcoms reach this point of narrative exhaustion, their
promotion often
starts to invoke the discourse of the media event.
Developmental speedups and
“issue shows” are frequently marketed as special episodes,
“very special” epi-
sodes, and season finales. These late-season moments of sudden
character devel-
to the routine forms of citation and intertextuality that
characterize prime-time
“quality TV” fiction today. The sitcom’s temporal and historical
form — its modes
of development, disclosure, pedagogy, and institutional
referentiality — emerged
as the richest, most elastic mode of discourse for this process of
negotiation in
Ellen’s final season.
Consider, for example, the episode “The Breakup,” which aired
on 17
December 1997. It is one of the episodes in which a bumper
bridging the program
and the commercial break features DeGeneres talking directly to
the camera. Her
hair is slightly longer and styled differently; combined with the
mode of direct

address, this makes the bumper seem to occupy a more “present-
tense” temporal-
ity than the episode in which it appears. Photographed on the
set with production
activity behind her, DeGeneres speaks not in character but as a
representative of
the show. She squirms and seems uncomfortable as she says,
without evident
humor, “Come back. And so will we. On ABC.” “Coming
back”— as opposed to
“coming out”— was of course the big question surrounding
Ellen for the network
at that moment. In October ABC placed a TV-14 rating on
episodes that showed
same-sex kissing and, it was subsequently revealed, requested
that the writers
focus on issues other than “gay themes.”21
The appearance of this bumper in this particular episode is
interesting,
because it raises the question of what the breakup in the title
refers to. Was there
a connection between the episode’s narrative exploration of
commitment (between
Ellen and her girlfriend, Laurie) and the idea of television
networks committed to
establishing a permanently queer television? As a narrative
event, the breakup
emerges from a stock plot involving misunderstandings over a
gift, although in this
case the misunderstanding leads not to comedy but to
melodrama.22 Ellen and
Laurie celebrate their one-month anniversary by going out to
dinner and exchang-
ing gifts. Laurie is nervous that her gift is presumptuous; she
has bought Ellen

tickets for Rent four months ahead of time. She is shocked when
Ellen gives her a
key to her house, mistakenly interpreting it as an invitation to
move in. This leads
to a painful discussion of their respective levels of commitment
to each other. As
they talk, Laurie speaks only as a mother. She tells Ellen that
her last girlfriend
broke her daughter Holly’s heart when she “walked out” and
that she is at a stage
in life where she needs stability and permanence.
One might cynically note that the episode’s staging of a breakup
conve-
niently supports the network’s official discomfort with same-
sex kissing, a discom-
fort manifested in the decision to run warning labels in front of
episodes in which
kissing takes place. Yet as the narrative unfolds, the breakup
takes on allegorical
dimensions. In asking how long lesbian relationships last and
what they do to chil-
dren when they enter the home, the episode articulates the
historical question of
the program’s permanence and its relation to viewers,
particularly child viewers. It
frames this question in a way that signals a canny awareness of
the fraught institu-
tional politics of uneventful lesbian representation. At the very

beginning of the
broadcast, at the moment when the warning label appears
onscreen, a snippet of
dialogue conveys the broader implications of the producers’
protest against the
network’s warning label policy. Holly and Laurie are at Ellen’s
house, and Holly
asks if she can watch TV. Laurie says yes but tells her not to
channel-surf because
“you never know what’s on.” Ellen retorts, “Oh come on, if
there’s something objec-
tionable on, I’m sure there’ll be a warning.” This institutional
in-joke makes Holly
the proxy child viewer referenced in the institutional battle over
the nature of
same-sex kissing as a television event. Its political objective is
to reinforce the
activist schema through which DeGeneres negotiated with
network executives over
what was, effectively, the possibility of coding queer romance
as an everyday
event.
This version of a normalization argument aligned history
making on televi-
sion with the banal rather than with the spectacular, an
alignment confirmed as
the dialogue continues. More references to television’s
institutional forms emerge,
presumably to locate the show and its ongoing situations in a
mundane televisual
world. Ellen’s father arrives, and Holly describes him as “the
perfect retro dad.
Hey no, you know what it’s really like, it’s like he’s from one
of those sitcoms on
Nick at Nite.” Through this child’s view of adult relationships

on television, we are
told that the syndicated “classic television” lineups of basic
cable networks like
Nick at Nite are the ancestors of Ellen’s gay familial
everydayness.
The reference to Nick at Nite links Ellen’s television family to
the aesthetic
economy of citation that Mimi White locates in cable
programming practices:
although they repackage historical television shows and in a
sense rewrite them,
they make “previously devalued and hard-to-see material . . .
increasingly valu-
able for stations seeking programming. However, the effect of
recirculating this
material offers an opportunity for historical re-vision.”23
Locating itself in a Nick
at Nite genealogy, Ellen attempts a kind of revision that affirms
the sitcom as a
kinship setting populated by characters both odd and familiar,
eccentric and nor-
mative, a space both queer and familial. The mechanism of
citation that sustains
both cable programming and the alienness and familiarity of the
television past
becomes, in this episode, a field of codes that contains (i.e.,
both holds and holds
back) same-sex possibilities in Ellen’s generic future. Later in
the episode, when
Ellen and Laurie discuss moving in together, Ellen’s response
involves a nervous,
wisecracking invocation of a previous same-sex living
arrangement on television:

Laurie: “What is so crazy about us living together?”
Ellen: “Obviously, you’ve never seen a little program called
Laverne and
Shirley.”
Is Ellen’s fear of intimacy really the network’s? Obviously, we
can offer no defini-
tive answer to that question; we can only note that the
expression of this fear in the
form of a television history citation reinforces the fact that the
episode’s commit-
ment troubles work on some level as a parable of those staged
behind the scenes,
within the network as an institution.
But this parable ultimately rests on a “family values”
foundation. When
Ellen decides to ask Laurie to move in despite her fears, Laurie
asks whether she
really understands what that would entail: “You move us in, it’s
instant family. . . .
Is that what you want now? I mean, you’ve just come out. The
whole world is open
to you.” Laurie shrinks from serial lesbian monogamy because
she is afraid that it
will damage her child. Positioned as the protector of the
children, she is unwilling
to be part of a queer household without some kind of familial
contract. Thus,
although the episode promotes lesbian parenting and offers
hints of a queer read-

ing of sitcom history, it advances under a neoconservative gay
agenda based on
moralistic censuring of queer couple formations in the name of
heteromorphic sta-
bility. Familial affirmation continues in the last scene, when
Ellen’s father grieves
the loss of Holly as a surrogate grandchild in the breakup.
With this normalizing emphasis on family, “The Breakup”
sought to bring
mainstream(ing) gay and lesbian politics into alignment with
the conventions of
the sitcom. Its subject matter may have confirmed the feeling of
some critics that
the show had become too serious in its final season, but its
sermonizing was
absolutely in line with the late-season sitcom’s tendencies.
What is perhaps more
noteworthy about Ellen in this period of its run is that its
sermons were consis-
tently delivered with an awareness of television programming as
an everyday his-
torical archive. In linking its representational politics to the
television past, evi-
denced in shows like Laverne and Shirley, the program
addressed a familiar queer
position in popular culture: that of a readership set against the
grain and focusing
between the lines, oscillating idiosyncratically between extreme
obviousness and
deep textual archaeology to recover the textual traces of same-
sex desire. The fact
that the final season was marked by the network’s desire for an
inconsistent sense
of part-time lesbianism meant that such heterogeneous, …

Stereotyping 353
From Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping.” In Gays and Film, pp. 27–
39. New York: Zoetrope, 1984.
© 1984 by Richard Dyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
23
Stereotyping
Richard Dyer
Gay people, whether activists or not, have resented and attacked
the images of homo-
sexuality in films (and the other arts and media) for as long as
we have managed to
achieve any self-respect. (Before that, we simply accepted them
as true and inevitable).
The principal line of attack has been on stereotyping.
The target is a correct one. There is plenty of evidence1 to
suggest that stereotypes
are not just put out in books and films, but are widely agreed
upon and believed to
be right. Particularly damaging is the fact that many gay people
believe them, lead-
ing on the one hand to the self-oppression so characteristic of
gay people’s lives,2
and on the other to behaviour in conformity with the stereotypes
which of course
only serves to confirm their truth. Equally, there can be no
doubt that most stereotypes
of gays in films are demeaning and offensive. Just think of the
line-up – the butch

dyke and the camp queen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic
queer, the predatory
schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot, and all the rest. The
amount of hatred, fear,
ridicule and disgust packed into those images is unmistakable.
But we cannot leave the question of stereotyping at that. Just as
recent work on
images of blacks and women has done,3 thinking about images
of gayness needs to
go beyond simply dismissing stereotypes as wrong and
distorted. Righteous dismissal
does not make the stereotypes go away, and tends to prevent us
from understanding
just what stereotypes are, how they function, ideologically and
aesthetically, and why
they are so resilient in the face of our rejection of them. In
addition, there is a real
problem as to just what we would put in their place. It is often
assumed that the aim
of character construction should be the creation of “realistic
individuals”, but, as
I will argue, this may have as many drawbacks as its apparent
opposite, “unreal”
stereotypes, and some form of typing may actually be preferable
to it. These then are
the issues that I want to look at in this article – the definition
and function of
stereotyping and what the alternatives to it are.
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354 Richard Dyer
Ideology and Types
How do we come to our “understanding” of the people we
encounter, in fiction as
in life? We get our information about them partly from what
other people tell us –
although we may not necessarily trust this – and, in fiction,
from narrators and from
the “thoughts” of the characters, but most of our knowledge
about them is based
on the evidence in front of us: what they do and how they do it,
what they say and
how they say it, dress, mannerisms, where they live and so on.
That is where the
information comes from – but how do we make sense of it?
Sociological theory
suggests four different, though inter-related, ways of organising
this information:

role, individual, type and member.4 When we regard a person in
their role, we are
thinking of them purely in terms of the particular set of actions
(which I take to
include dress, speech and gesture) that they are performing at
the moment we
encounter them. Thus I may walk down the street and see a
road-sweeper, a house-
wife, a child, an OAP, a milkman. I know from what they are
doing what their social
role is, and I know, because I live in this society, that that role
is defined by what
sociologists call “variables” of occupation, gender, age and
kinship. Although this
notion of role has developed within a tradition of sociology that
views social structure
as neutral (not founded upon power and inequality), it is
nonetheless valuable
because it allows us to distinguish, theoretically at least,
between what people do
and what they are. However we seldom in practice stop at that,
and role usually
forms the basis for other inferences we make about people we
encounter. We can see
a person in the totality of her/his roles – their sum total,
specific combination and
interaction – a totality that we call an individual, complex,
specific, unique. Or we
can see a person according to a logic that assumes a certain
kind-of-person performs
a given role, hence is a type. Both individual and type relate the
information that has
been coded into roles to a notion of “personality” – they are
psychological, or social
psychological, inferences. The last inference we can make,
however, is based on the

realisation that roles are related not just to abstract, neutral
structures but to divisions
in society, to groups that are in struggle with each other,
primarily along class and
gender lines but also along racial and sexual lines. In this
perspective, we can see the
person – or character, if we’re dealing with a novel or film – as
a member of a given
class or social group.
One of the implications of this break-down is that there is no
way of making sense
of people, or of constructing characters, that is somehow given,
natural or correct.
Role, individual, type and member relate to different, wider,
and politically signific-
ant ways of understanding the world – the first to a reified view
of social structures
as things that exist independently of human praxis, the second
and third to explana-
tions of the world in terms of personal dispositions and
individual psychologies, and
the fourth to an understanding of history in terms of class
struggle (though I extend
the traditional concept of class here to include race, gender and
sex caste). Since the
main focus of this article is stereotyping, I shall deal first and at
greatest length with
the question of type, but I also want to go on to deal with the
two chief alternatives
to it, individuals and members.
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Stereotyping 355
When discussing modes of character construction, it is I think
better to use the
broad term type and then to make distinctions within it. A type
is any simple, vivid,
memorable, easily-grasped and widely recognised
characterisation in which a few
traits are foregrounded and change or “development” is kept to
a minimum. Within
this, however, we may make distinctions between social types,
stereotypes and mem-
ber types. (I leave out of account here typing from essentially
earlier forms of fiction
– e.g. archetypes and allegorical types – where the type is
linked to metaphysical or
moral principles rather than social or personal ones.) I shall
deal with the first two
now, and member types in the last section, since they are in
important ways different
from social and stereotypes.
The distinction between social type and stereotype I take fr om
Orrin E. Klapp’s
book Heroes, Villains and Fools. The general aim of this book
is to describe the
social types prevalent in American society at the time at which
Klapp was writing
(pre-1962), that is to say, the range of kinds-of-people that,
Klapp claims, Americans
would expect to encounter in day-to-day life. Like much
mainstream sociology
Klapp’s book is valuable not so much for what it asserts as for
what it betrays about

that which is “taken for granted” in an established intellectual
discourse. Klapp’s
distinction between a social type and a stereotype is very
revealing in its implications:
. . . stereotypes refer to things outside one’s social world,
whereas social types refer to
things with which one is familiar; stereotypes tend to be
conceived as functionless or
dysfunctional (or, if functional, serving prejudice and conflict
mainly), whereas social
types serve the structure of society at many points.6
The point is not that Klapp is wrong – on the contrary, this is a
very useful dis-
tinction – but that he is so unaware of the political implications
of it that he does
not even try to cover himself. For we have to ask – who is the
“one” referred to? and
whom does the social structure itself serve? As Klapp proceeds
to describe the
American social types (i.e. those within “one’s social world”),
the answer becomes
clear – for nearly all his social types turn out to be white,
middle-class, hetero-
sexual and male. One might expect this to be true of the heroes,
but it is also largely
true of the villains and fools as well. That is to say that there
are accepted, even
recognised, ways of being bad or ridiculous, ways that “belong”
to “one’s social
world”. And there are also ways of being bad, ridiculous and
even heroic that do not
“belong”.
In other words, a system of social- and stereotypes refers to

what is, as it were,
within and beyond the pale of normalcy. Types are instances
which indicate those
who live by the rules of society (social types) and those whom
the rules are designed
to exclude (stereotypes). For this reason, stereotypes are also
more rigid than social
types. The latter are open-ended, more provisional, more
flexible, to create the sense
of freedom, choice, self-definition for those within the
boundaries of normalcy. These
boundaries themselves, however, must be clearly delineated,
and so stereotypes, one
of the mechanisms of boundary maintenance, are
characteristically fixed, clear-cut,
unalterable. You appear to choose your social type in some
measure, whereas you
are condemned to a stereotype. Moreover, the dramatic,
ridiculous or horrific quality
356 Richard Dyer
of stereotypes, as Paul Rock argues, serves to show how
important it is to live by
the rules:
It is plausible that much of the expensive drama and ritual
which surround the appre-
hension and denunciation of the deviant are directed at
maintaining the daemonic and

isolated character of deviancy. Without these demonstrations,
typifications would be
weakened and social control would suffer correspondingly.”
It is not surprising then that the genres in which gays most often
appear are horror
films and comedy.
The establishment of normalcy through social- and stereotypes
is one aspect of
the habit of ruling groups – a habit of such enormous political
consequences that we
tend to think of it as far more premeditated than it actually is –
to attempt to fashion
the whole of society according to their own world-view, value-
system, sensibility and
ideology. So right is this world-view for the ruling groups, that
they make it appear
(as it does to them) as “natural” and “inevitable” – and for
everyone – and, in so far
as they succeed, they establish their hegemony. However, and
this cannot be stressed
too emphatically, hegemony is an active concept – it is
something that must be
ceaselessly built and rebuilt in the face of both implicit and
explicit challenges to it.
The subcultures of subordinated groups are implicit challenges
to it, recuperable
certainly but a nuisance, a thorn in the flesh; and the political
struggles that are built
within these sub-cultures are directly and explicitly about who
shall have the power
to fashion the world.
The establishment of hegemony through stereotyping has then
two principal

features which Roger Brown has termed ethnocentrism, which
he defines as thinking
“of the norms of one’s group as right for men [sic]
everywhere”, and the assumption
that given social groups “have inborn and unalterable
psychological characteristics”.5
Although Brown is writing in the context of cross-cultural and
inter-racial stereo-
typing, what he says seems to me eminently transferable to the
stereotyping of gays.
Let me illustrate this from The Killing of Sister George.
By ethnocentrism, Brown means the application of the norms
appropriate to one’s
own culture to that of others. Recasting this politically (within a
culture rather than
between cultures), we can say that in stereotyping the dominant
groups apply their
norms to subordinated groups, find the latter wanting, hence
inadequate, inferior, sick
or grotesque and hence reinforcing the dominant groups’ own
sense of the legitimacy
of their domination. One of the modes of doing this for gays is
casting gay relation-
ships and characters in terms of heterosexual sex roles. Thus in
The Killing of Sister
George, George and Childie are very much presented as the man
and woman respect-
ively of the relationship, with George’s masculinity expressed
in her name, gruff
voice, male clothes and by association with such icons of
virility as horse brasses, pipes,
beer and tweeds. However, George is not a man, and is
“therefore” inadequate to
the role. Her “masculinity” has to be asserted in set pieces of

domination (shot to
full dramatic hilt, with low angles, chiaroscuro lighting and
menacing music), and
her straining after male postures is a source of humour. Sister
George emphasises the
absence of men in the lesbian milieu, by structuring Childie and
George’s quarrels
around the latter’s fears of any man with whom Childie has
dealings and by the
Stereotyping 357
imagery of dolls as surrogate children which are used in a
cumulatively horrific way
(analogous to some to her horror films, including the director’s
[Robert Aldrich]
earlier Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962]) to suggest the
grotesque sterility
of a woman loving another woman (and so denying herself the
chance of truly being
a woman, i.e. a heterosexual mother).
The idea that this image of lesbianism indicates an inborn trait
(hence reinforcing
the idea that the way the dominant culture defines gays is the
way we must always
be) is enforced in Sister George partly through dialogue to that
effect and partly
through a chain of imagery linking lesbianism with the natural,
bestial or low – the

lingered-over cigar-butt eating episode, the emphasis on their
relationship as founded
on physical domination rather than affection, George’s close
friendship with a prosti-
tute (someone who lives off her natural functions), the descent
into the Gateways
club, the important scene in a lavatory, the end of the film with
George mooing to
a deserted studio. The link between lesbians and animals is a
strong feature of the
iconography of gay women in films-they often wear furs, suede
or feather (e.g. The
Haunting, Ann and Eve, Once is not Enough), are interested in
horses or dogs (e.g.
The Fox, La fiancée du pirate), or are connected, through
composition, montage or
allusion, with animals (e.g. Les biches, Lilith, the cut from two
women kissing to a
back projection of a tarantula in the “hippie” club in Coogan’s
Bluff [1969]).
What is wrong with these stereotypes is not that they are
inaccurate. The implica-
tions of attacking them on that ground (one of the most common
forms of attack)
raise enormous problems for gay politics – first of all, it flies in
the face of the actual
efficacy of the hegemonic definitions enshrined in stereotypes,
that is to say, gay
people often believe (I did) that the stereotypes are accurate and
act accordingly in
line with them; and second, one of the things the stereotypes are
onto is the fact
that gay people do cross the gender barriers, so that many gay
women do refuse to
be typically “feminine” just as many gay men refuse to be

typically “masculine” and
we must beware of getting ourselves into a situation where we
cannot defend, still
less applaud, such sex-caste transgressions. What we should be
attacking in stereo-
types is the attempt of heterosexual society to define us for
ourselves, in terms that
inevitably fall short of the “ideal” of heterosexuality (that is,
taken to be the norm of
being human), and to pass this definition off as necessary and
natural. Both these
simply bolster heterosexual hegemony, and the task is to
develop our own alternat-
ive and challenging definitions of ourselves.
Stereotyping Through Iconography
In a film, one of the methods of stereotyping is through
iconography. That is, films
use a certain set of visual and aural signs which immediately
bespeak homosexuality
and connote the qualities associated, stereotypically, with it.
The opening of The Boys in the Band shows this very clearly. In
a series of brief
shots or scenelets, each of the major characters in the
subsequent film is introduced
and their gay identity established. This can be quite subtle. For
instance, while there
is the “obvious” imagery of Emory – mincing walk,
accompanied by a poodle,

358 Richard Dyer
shutting up an over-chic, over-gilded furniture store – there is
also, cross cut with it,
and with shots of the other “boys”, Michael going shopping. He
wears a blue blazer
and slacks, we do not see what he buys. It is a plain image.
Except that the blazer,
a sports garment, is too smart, the slacks too well pressed – the
casualness of the
garment type is belied by the fastidiousness of the grooming
style. When he signs a
cheque, at chic store Gucci’s, we get a close-up of his hand,
with a large, elaborate
ring on it. Thus the same stereotypical connotations are present,
whether obviously
or mutedly, in the iconography of both Emory and Michael –
over-concern with
appearance, association with a “good taste” that is just shading
into decadence. The
other “boys” are similarly signalled, and although there is a
range of stereotypes,
nearly all of them carry this connotation of fastidiousness and
concern with appear-
ance. This observation can be extended to most gay male
iconography – whether it
be the emphasis on the grotesque artifices of make-up and
obvious wigs (e.g. Death
in Venice), body-building (e.g. The Detective), or sickliness of
features, connoting
not only depravity and mental illness but also the primped,
unexposed face of the
indoors (non-active, non-sporting) man (e.g. The Eiger
Sanction).

Iconography is a kind of short-hand – it places a character
quickly and economic-
ally. This is particularly useful for gay characters, for, short of
showing physical
gayness or having elaborate dialogue to establish it in the first
few minutes, some
means of communicating immediately that a character is gay has
to be used. This of
course is not a problem facing other stereotyped groups such as
women or blacks
(but it may include the working class), since the basis of their
difference (gender,
colour) shows whereas ours does not. However, while this is
true, and, as I want to
argue later, some kind of typing has positive value, it does seem
that there may be a
further ideological function to the gay iconography. Why, after
all, is it felt so
necessary to establish from the word go that a character is gay?
The answer lies in
one of the prime mechanisms of gay stereotyping, synechdoche
– that is, taking the
part for the whole. It is felt necessary to establish the
character’s gayness, because
that one aspect of her or his personality is held to give you, and
explain, the rest of
the personality. By signalling gayness from the character’s first
appearance, all the
character’s subsequent actions and words can be understood,
explained, and ex-
plained away, as those of a gay person. Moreover, it seems
probable that gayness is,
as a material category, far more fluid than class, gender or race
– that is, most people
are not either gay or non-gay, but have, to varying degrees, the

capacity for both.
However, this fluidity is unsettling both to the rigidity of social
categorisation and
to the maintenance of heterosexual hegemony. What’s more, the
invisibility of
gayness may come creeping up on heterosexuality unawares
and, fluid-like, seep into
the citadel. It is therefore reassuring to have gayness firmly
categorised and kept
separate from the start through a widely known iconography.
Stereotyping Through Structure
Stereotypes are also established by the function of the character
in the film’s struc-
tures (whether these be static structures, such as the way the
film’s world is shown
to be organised, materially and ideologically, or dynamic ones,
such as plot). I’d like
Stereotyping 359
here to look at a group of French films with lesbian characters –
Les biches, La chatte
sans pudeur, Emmanuelle, La fiancée du pirate, La fille aux
yeux d’or, Les garces and
La religieuse. Others could have been used, but I am restricting
myself to films I
have seen relatively recently. I suspect that the vast majority of
films with lesbian

characters in them are built on the structures I’m about to
suggest, but that would
require further work. There is no particular reason for picking a
group of French
films rather than, say, American or Swedish, although lesbian
characters have been
relatively common in French cinema since the late forties (e.g.
Quai des Orfèvres, Au
royaume des cieux, Olivia, Huis clos, Thérèse Desqueyroux, La
fille aux yeux d’or etc.).
There is also some polemical intent in the choice – I have
deliberately made no
distinction between the high-class porn of Emmanuelle, the
critically acclaimed
auteurist films Les biches and La religieuse, the commercial
soft porn of La chatte sans
pudeur and Les garces, the quasi-feminist La fiancée du pirate,
and the chicly decadent
La fille aux yeux d’or. The point is that lesbian stereotyping is
no respecter of artistic
merit or intellectual ambition. Whatever the ultimate merits of
these films, in terms
of lesbianism there is little to choose between them.
There is some iconographic stereotyping in these films. The
chief lesbian characters
are usually considerably smarter than the other female
character(s) – they are often
associated with the older world of haute couture (older in the
sense both of a
previous age and of being for older women), their clothes more
expertly cut, their
appearance always showing greater signs of thought and care,
smart coiffure, use of
unflashy, quality jewellery, and a taste for clothes made from
animal skins. Mannish

clothes are also found – jodhpurs and hacking jacket for Irène in
La fiancée du
pirate, khaki shirt and trousers for Bee in Emmanuelle – though
this never goes so
far as actually wearing men’s clothes. Rather they are well
coutured women’s ver-
sions of men’s clothing. What both types of clothing emphasise
are hard, precise
lines, never disguising the female form, but presenting it
conspicuously without frills
or fussiness or any sort of softness – in a word, without
“femininity”. (The exception
here is the Mother Superior in La religieuse, who deliberately
softens the lines of her
habit with frills.) However, the full significance of this,
especially as it compares to
the rather dressed-down appearance of the central female
protagonist, only becomes
clear from a consideration of the films’ structures.
In terms of the structure of the lesbian relationships as the films
show them, it
seems that the films always feel a need to recreate the social
inequality of hetero-
sexuality within homosexuality. By this I mean that whereas
heterosexual relation-
ships involve people defined as social unequals (or oppressor
and oppressed, men
and women) – an inequality that while not insuperable is always
there as a problem
in heterosexual relationships – homosexual relationships
involve two people who,
in terms of sex caste, are equals (both women or both men).
Films, however, are
seldom happy to acknowledge this and so introduce other forms
of social inequality

which are seen as having a primary role in defining the nature
of the gay relation-
ship. In the case of the films under consideration, this is done
primarily through age,
but with strong underpinnings of money and class. Thus Leo (La
fille aux yeux
d’or), Elaine (Les garces), Bee (Emmanuelle), and Frédérique
(Les biches) are older
than “the girl”, Juliette, Emmanuelle and Why respectively,
while Leo and Frédérique,
as well as Irène (La fiancée du pirate) are also richer. (This of
course in turn relates
360 Richard Dyer
to the ideological connection of gayness with the idle sexual
experimentation of the
rich and the mistaken belief that there is no such thing as a
working-class gay.) This
inequality is more clear-cut between the Mother Superior and
Suzanne in La religieuse.
In the films under discussion, only Martina in La chatte sans
pudeur is no older or
richer than Julie. But it is clear that she, like Leo, Elaine, Bee,
Frédérique, Irène and
the Mother Superior, is the stronger of the lesbian pair. This is
partly because she,
like them, is shown to take initiative and precipitate various
events in the plot; and
partly because, like them, she is involved in the central

structure of the film, which
we may characterise as a struggle for control.
This struggle is for control over the central female character.
Control here means,
as much as anything, definition, for what characterises these
central figures is that
they are without character, they are unformed. (Hence their
dress is iconographically
almost striking in its non-descriptness.) They are not just
passive, they are nothing,
an absence. Suzanne takes no decisions after her initial
(defeated) stand against taking
holy orders – things happen to her, people struggle to make her
what they want her
to be. The same negative function holds for the others. Why
does not even have a
name – she is just a question mark. And similarly we never get
to know the name of
the girl with golden eyes.
In this struggle it is the lesbian who must be defeated. The
central character is
sexually malleable to a degree – she will be had by anyone, not
because she is
voracious but because her sexuality is undefined. But defeat of
the lesbian by the
man signals that the true sexual definition of a woman is
heterosexual and that she
gets that definition from a man. This is clearest in Emmanuelle,
where there is not
so much a struggle between a lesbian and a heterosexual male
protagonist as a
progression for Emmanuelle from vaguely unsatisfactory marital
sex through lesbian-
ism (with Bee) to relations with Mario. (In this Emmanuelle is

following the plot
structure of very many recent soft pornography films.) After her
affair with Bee,
Emmanuelle says “I’m not grown up yet” (i.e. that relationship
was not an “adult”
one), while Mario is explicitly introduced as a philosopher -tutor
in sexuality. The
filming further reflects this progression – where the lesbianism
takes place out of
doors and is suffused with light, white, the later sex scenes,
presided over by Mario,
are indoors, dark with patches of deep rich colours. The open
air purity and simpli-
city of lesbianism (“pretty enough in its way”, the film grants),
is replaced by the
dark, vibrant secrets of “mature” sexuality.
There are variations on this structure. In La religieuse the
opposite of lesbianism is
asexuality – but that is defined and demanded by priests, and
throughout the film
men are seen as sources of rationality set against the various
insanities of convent life.
In La fille aux yeux d’or the lesbian gets her revenge by
murdering the girl. In Les
biches, Why herself murders Frédérique and probably Paul,
who, having “defined”
her, have now both let her down. In all cases, the “committed”
lesbian (as opposed to
the “undefined” girl) is seen as a perverse rival to the man (or
men), condemned for
trying to do what only a man can – or should – really do, that is,
define and control
women.
The only exception is La fiancée du pirate, where Maria rejects

both Irène and the
men, and leaves the town. Yet despite the wonderful élan of the
film’s ending,10 it is
Stereotyping 361
still based on the same structure, …

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