Making Things Perfectly Clear?

Making Things Perfectly Clear?

Alexander Doty's Making Things Perfectly Queer illuminates both the potential and the limitations of queer theory as praxis in the analysis of mass culture. By weaving together queer theory and popular culture methods, Doty goes where few theorists have gone before, seeking queer moments in the films of George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner and in sitcoms such as "I Love Lucy," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Laverne and Shirley," "Designing Women," "Pee-Wee Herman," and "The Jack Benny Program." Since Doty is working in relatively uncharted theoretical terrain, he begins by exploring the potential of "queerness" as a framing device. His analysis in this section serves to outline the rhetorical minefields that scholars engage as they begin to meld queer theory with issues of audience and reception theory. Several potentially useful concepts emerge for scholars working within the field of popular culture. Doty outlines the "queer receiver" as any individual (regardless of sexuality) negotiating and reading a popular culture text as "non-straight," and the "queer text" as any cultural product containing and expressing moments that do not support a dominant heterocentric ideology. In Doty's words, "basically heterocentrist texts can contain queer elements, and basically heterosexual, straight-identifying people can experience queer moments" (3).

In a theoretical move having important implications for queerists working with popular culture texts, Doty refutes scholarship which positions marginalized texts as subcultural and containing repressed meanings which must be "uncovered" (for example, the work of John Cawelti and the Frankfurt School mass culture critics). Rather, Doty argues that "the space...