Queer

How is sexuality portrayed in the extract?

Andy Medhurst 1997- “In the real world you cannot “see” sexuality”. He states the sexuality is invisible. In the world of television and film however, a certain aspect of a particular sexuality is chosen and is magnified in order to make it easier for the audience to see which characters are heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual. Characters made out to be homosexual or bisexual are often seen as a minority in television, which again links to Mehursts theory that theses characters are shown as “awful because they are not like us”. The stereotype as noted by Medhurst says that gay men are “screaming queens” and gay woman are “butch dykes”.

This particular extract goes against the idea of “butch dykes” as both of the characters are very feminine in appearance and neither fit the stereotype of a lesbian woman. The extract begins with a medium shot at eye level of a female sitting upright in her bed reading a book, eerie but relaxing music can be heard at the beginning of the scene. The scene progresses to an eye line match of the mistress watching the maid getting undressed

Queer Theory

Orange is the new black

Simpsons

South Park

Eastenders

Skins

Glee

Game of Thrones

Stereotype of Gay men is often exaggerated (magnification)

“Butch Dykes” & “Screaming Queens” – Andy Medhurst (1997)

“Films and television comedies images of are full of gay men as effeminate screaming queens…it chooses that aspect of gay male behavior (SELECTION), inflates it into the defining male characteristic of male homosexuality (MAGNIFICATION), then establish it as the most easily recognizable image (REDUCTION).”

“Stereotyping becomes ideological the moment it stops being simply a method of description and becomes a vehicle for values: the image of the screaming queen does not just mean ‘all gay men are like that’, it means ‘all gay men are like that and aren’t they awful’, which in turn means ‘and they are awful because the are not like us.”

“This is why stereotypes of sexuality strive so vigorously to create two, polarized sexualities, hetero and straight, and to insist with such obsessive reductiveness that people who belong to those poles are easily identifiable – hence the recurring presence across media texts of the screaming queen and his female equivalent the butch dyke.”

Magnification – exaggerating a particular part of the stereotype (Michael Foucalt)

Sexuality is invisible but the media exploits this and magnifies this.

Age Theory

“Old people in our culture are also segregated and treated as though they are waiting to die. There are close associations between dependency, illness, dying and death. It seems that increasingly in our culture there are pressures that encourage a reversion to infantile feelings which have to be madly defended against.”

Disability Theory

 Evans 1998 -drawing on the works of Freud and other psychoanalysis, states:

“Disable people are seen as childish, dependant and underdeveloped and are regarding as ‘other’ and are punished by being excluded from ordinary life. Thus popular images and rhetoric of disabled people abound which comfort us with people who are imperfect, helpless, disgusting, shitty, dribbling – a threat to rigid ego boundaries. During the socio-developmental process of infancy, a range of strict rules of decorum involving standards of privacy, decency and dignity effect a representation of these activities as taboo…therefore images of disability which cause unpleasure to the self simply be representing that expelling as already complete. We become literally alienated from (and cannot identify with) the object/person we observe.”

In short, disability is portrayed as ‘otherness’ and as a weakness. Often it is not shown at all and when it is the disabled person (be that mentally or physically) is rarely seen as anything other than disabled (EVANS 1998).