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xandromedovna(see this post for the rest of the paper)
Set in Lima, Ohio, Glee chronicles the creation and evolution of the McKinley High School glee club, New Directions. The show originally centered around Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and how he created the glee club; over its [first] four seasons, however, different characters and narratives have formed the focus at different points. Early in the first season, Glee settled into a fairly episodic structure: Will assigns the glee club a lesson for the week and the episode is spent dealing with that lesson, either consciously through in-practice rehearsals or subconsciously through happenings in the plot. The show was originally rather distinct from most high school-based series in that in the first season it put fairly equal emphasis on the lives and intrigues of the students and of the adults in the school. In subsequent seasons, though, the focus has shifted much more decidedly towards focusing on the students[d].
In terms of content, there are two main discursive themes in the show that sometimes work in harmony and sometimes work in direct conflict: identity celebration and heroic narrative. Each character is initially presented as a stereotype. In the episode “Throwdown,” cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the club’s primary antagonist, divides the New Directions into two camps based on minority or majority status. The litany of names she uses for roll call is an oddly appropriate introduction to these characters and how they have been presented to the audience: “Santana [Lopez (Naya Rivera), who is Latina]! Wheels [Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale)]! Gay Kid [Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer)]! […] Asian! Other Asian [Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz) and Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.)]! Aretha [Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), a black female student]! And Shaft [Matt Rutherford (Dijon Talton), a black male student]!” Later in the episode, Brittany S. Pierce (Heather Morris) and Noah “Puck” Puckerman (Mark Salling) are assigned to the minority group for being the dumb blonde and the Jew, respectively, though Puck’s initial stereotype was the burnout bully jock. Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) is initially left out of this discourse because her stereotype is the perfect popular cheerleader, but her queering has already begun by this episode, and her claim to the minority group is her pregnancy[1]. Excluded from this cataloguing are the two student characters most closely associated with the heroic narrative, and thus stereotypically unmarked majority members: Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith), the dumb jock male protagonist, and Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), the ambitious and talented female protagonist[e]. Through musical performance, however, each character exposes the nuances of their identities, thus subverting these stereotypes. These identities are celebrated and embraced by the other members of the club. This process is patently queer-positive: LGBT/queer identity politics are highly invested in subversion of discourses and (somewhat paradoxically) in naturalizing nonheterosexual noncisgender experience[f].
Stylistic variety allows space for such a large assortment of identities that can pick and choose how to express themselves. The show uses preexisting Western popular music almost exclusively, but the sources of this music are very diverse in terms of style; rap, R&B, swing, pop, hard rock, indie rock, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, folk, funk, disco, Latin, and electronic music have all been utilized throughout the series by multiple characters. Beyond the surface identity marker of style, these musics come with expectations for gender and sexuality, among other identities, based on their original contexts[2]. Each of these songs has original performances (many have simulacra[l] performances, as well)[g], and a sizeable portion have previous narrative associations either through their musical theater provenance or other filmic/television/media associations, in addition to the lyrics. As film scholar Barrie Gelles argues, every performance of these songs in Glee carries with it the “ghost” of those past performances and their attendant meanings and contexts, adding layers of possible identification, and many queer possibilities[h]. Two contrasting examples of these identity possibilities— one normative, one queer— are Finn’s pilot episode performance of “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon, which was originally recorded as a hair metal song by a (presumably) straight male artist[i], and his season 3 performance of Greg Laswell’s version of Cindi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which was originally written by a male, made famous as a pop hit by Lauper, a (presumably) straight female, and covered by a male in an acoustic performance. The first fits fairly neatly into Finn’s presented identity of jock male protagonist, whereas the second colours his identity with layers of signification; its complicated performance history and the lack of lyrical change between versions allow the viewer to read Finn as anything from a concerned straight male ally (as he’s presented contextually in this performance) to a trans lesbian, with the soloist identifying as a woman with a ‘male’ voice in love with a woman.
Though tempting, I do not mean to imply that Finn is consciously adopting the latter identity, nor that he is necessarily to be read in such a light. But all of those possibilities are present at once in this performance because of the competing layers of signification. What this second performance highlights is the performativity of gender. “Performativity” is the ability to take on gender(s) at will[j]. Judith Butler noted since gender is not the same thing as sex, there’s nothing inherent in the terms necessitating that there be only two genders, or that all males be men and all females be women, or that each body have only one gender at a time or over time[3]. If this is the case, “then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and […] gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.”[4] In Finn’s performance of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” he is neither “really” a straight man nor “really” a trans lesbian; he “is” neither, but both are identity possibilities he has (consciously or otherwise) taken up by performing this multilayered text.
Performativity is the strategy at the heart of drag, where “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself— as well as its contingency.”[5] Perhaps the juiciest example Glee has to offer in terms of drag sensibility, performativity, and layers of simultaneous gender signification is the episode “Props.” It could be argued that the entire episode centers on drag. Unique (Alex Newell), a black trans[ ]woman and the current star of Vocal Adrenaline (the major rival of the New Directions), generates a media frenzy by having performed presenting as a woman in a recent performance. Sue, who in this episode is trying to help the New Directions, tries to force Kurt to dress in drag so that the New Directions can compete with Vocal Adrenaline. He refuses, because though he is flamboyant and his gender expression is decidedly feminine, his identity is firmly male. The onus then falls to Puck, who we see walk down the halls in drag, which gets him harassed.
In addition to these narrative instances, a drag aesthetic permeates the episode stylistically. During one sequence, Tina hits her head and believes that all of the characters in the show have switched bodies. Glee accomplishes this switch by having the actors pair up and switch characters, so we see Chris Colfer play Finn instead of Kurt, and Cory Monteith play Kurt instead of Finn. This creates some fascinating pairings, with Puck and Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss), Will and Sue, Mercedes and Brittany, and Artie and Santana all switching actors. There are two levels of queer subversion going on in this sequence. The first is the surface level “cross”-gender signification and deployment of unexpected sexualities. Artie-as-Santana, Santana-as-Artie, Will-as-Sue, and Sue-as-Will are participating in the traditional manner of drag performance. Further, Puck-as-Blaine, Finn-as-Kurt, Mercedes-as-Brittany, and Artie-as-Santana overlay “straight” bodies onto queer characters and “queer” bodies onto straight characters, which calls into question these very associations, a more subtle drag strategy. The second level of queer subversion is the simultaneous convergence of signifiers and their surprising coherence. There is not just one layer of performance at play here, but two: actor to original character, original character to switch-character. Because we have seen the same actors play the same characters for three seasons, it is exceedingly easy for the audience to think that the actor “is” the character. So when we see the character play another character, the actor is completely erased, and we see the humour of a character with very specific semiotic codes performing another character with very specific semiotic codes, and more importantly doing it well. It is a testament to the skill of the actors in this show that they can be so convincing as their switch-character that the audience forgets that they are the actors, not the characters[6]. Mercedes-as-Brittany has mastered Brittany’s far-off stare and matter-of-fact voice, and Kurt-as-Finn is a spot-on prosodic match[7]. However, even as the actor and their identity is erased, all three identities are present simultaneously, providing an odd coalition of gender identities and codes. Blaine-as-Puck presents a straight actor portraying a gay character portraying a butchily straight switch-character. So which is his “real” sexuality? What is the “real” gender of Will-as-Sue? This strategy destroys the idea any such thing exists.
This sequence also deploys a related strategy: the Myth of Spontaneity, in which “authentic” musical performance is presented as natural and spontaneous without need for rehearsal or technological mediation, even as a performance is heavily mediated by technology and rehearsal[8]. Tina-as-Rachel suddenly bursts out singing a flawless rendition of Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” after having just said that she needed a few days to think about what song to sing. With few exceptions, the numbers that we see “in rehearsal,” such as this one, are as pristinely polished as the “performance” numbers, and yet we are led to believe through narrative and visual conventions that this presentation is natural and unmediated, spontaneously erupting from the performer. If we believe a song to emanate from its onscreen source the performance is called “synchretic,”[k] and believing that this synchretic performance communicates “authentic” emotions enables us to assume that song selections express identity. The musical identity expressed, much like gender and sexuality, is presented in such a way that it is seen as natural and inherent instead of performed and contingent. The Myth of Spontaneity is thus just another instance of drag, but of a type called “realness”: the ability of a performing subject to pass as hir performed identity in such a way that no one can tell they’re performing at all[l]. By creating the illusion that the musical performance is unmediated and authentic, the Myth of Spontaneity engages in realness by letting the audience forget they are watching a performance and not “the real thing.”
Some performances are so “spontaneous” as to activate MERM: Musically Enhanced Reality Mode[9]. MERM works by first justifying musical performances in a movie musical through diegetic performance[10]. Once musical performance has a place in the show, the audience is willing to accept that characters can break out into song at will. Glee is careful to ease the audience into that type of expression. In the first two episodes, all the performances are diegetically justified, either in a rehearsal context, an audition context, or some other narrative justification for the character to be singing (though there is one surrealist moment where Finn sees an old role model of his on the football field). Some of these songs move to extradiegetic functionality, such as “On My Own” from Les Misèrables and “Gold Digger” by Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx. But it isn’t until “Acafellas,” the third episode in the series, that there is a distinctly MERM performance, “This is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan. The moment is actually quite jarring; Will, Sandy, [Ken] Tanaka [(Patrick Gallagher)], and two other characters have just given a performance of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Will says, “hey, that was pretty good.” Suddenly, he turns to the camera and starts singing “This is How We Do It.” The audience accepts its presence because of the way MERM has been properly prepared according to Knapp’s formula, and yet Glee chooses to expose the seams by acknowledging how out of place this first moment of MERM is. The show thus sets up MERM as a queer strategy in that it is deliberately performati[c] for the audience’s sake. It violates boundaries, simultaneously reinscribes and subverts traditions, and performs identities—in this case Will performs TV performer.
Performativity and its explosion of possibilities for identity and individuality make Glee a richly queer space. Performativity, however, is at complete odds with the heroic narrative, which prima facie erases queer possibilities and serves as their boundary point. Interestingly, certain characters remain involved in the very traditional discursive patterns of heroic narrative. Will’s act of creating the glee club is heavily steeped in heroic paradigms: the creation of the glee club is his Quest and Sue his villain. Finn and Rachel are also involved in a heroic narrative: each feels a strong call to leadership in the group, and journeys to obtain the qualities necessary— i.e. “finding your voice”— to accomplish that leadership. These heroic narratives are inherently tied up with ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinity, and so very often serve as a point of conflict with the queer aims of identity celebration.
The heroic narrative is the organizing structure of an overwhelming majority of stories across history and across cultures, for various psychological and practical reasons. Its basic outline is this:
Campbell’s use of the “universal” ‘he’ is partially a reflection of the time of writing and his own potential gender biases, but also partially due to the heroic narrative’s predominant alignment with compulsorily heterosexual hegemonic masculinity. Though there of course exist women and other non-men who can be said to fill this role, the role of hero is traditionally reserved for masculine male men, and Glee extends this tradition faithfully. Finn is one of the two central heroes of the first season, and thus his presentation in the pilot makes a great case study for how this story works. We first see him in his humdrum life as a bully and mediocre student, unhappy with his position there. Will drags him to the threshold of adventure by planting pot in his locker and blackmailing him. The threshold is guarded by the football team, who do not allow glee club and football to live in the same world. He attempts to get past by lying, but he is discovered and shot with paintball guns, entering the Queer Underworld of glee club. His first test: survive a duet with Rachel; the second: rescue Artie from the portable toilet the football guys have trapped him in. His heroic narrative extends beyond the first episode, but the seeds of it are sown very clearly in the pilot.
In addition to its masculine heroes, Glee also utilizes what musicologist Rick Altman calls a dual-focus narrative: not one but two protagonists (in Glee, the most obvious are Finn and Rachel) are presented in parallel, and we watch as a heterosexual pairing evolves[13]. Altman argues that musicals employ the dual-focus narrative in place of a heroic narrative. However, in Glee, the two structures function simultaneously and in conjunction as a sort of heteroic narrative, wherein the heroic quest is always already bound up in heterosexual pairing with the dual-focus hero-partner, no matter the object. Finn has a heroic arc, but he also at the same time has a dual-focus narrative relationship with Rachel: both are the only two students in the pilot to get a voiceover (and the third goes to the other hero), in which they talk about what music means to them and how singing is their life. Indeed, Rachel puts Will on the search for a male lead to be her dual-focus partner, and Will finds hero-Finn, which intersects with Will’s heroic Quest to get the glee club up and running. The two strategies are intimately intertwined in this show.
Oddly enough, even as the intertwining of these two strategies into a he(te)roic narrative reinforces compulsory heterosexuality, it can simultaneously queer both original strategies. There are several men in Glee who, at various times and to varying degrees, have a heroic arc, but as noted, the two central characters to fulfill this role are Will and Finn. Interestingly, the pilot uses the traditional dual-focus strategy in a queer way to introduce the two heroes side by side. After an opening performance by the Cheerios, the show cuts to a shot of Will driving in. He walks past a crowd of guys at the dumpster and greets Kurt. He talks to Finn and moves along, but the camera stays with Finn as Puck and another boy attempt to toss Kurt in the dumpster. Finn stops them and has Kurt take off his jacket so it doesn’t get ruined. Cut to Will at the Altar of the Ancestors, by which I mean contemplating a memorial plaque of Lillian Adler, who apparently was the glee club leader at McKinley before her death in 1997. Next, we see Will teaching a Spanish class and Finn struggling to understand. By the end of this sequence, according to Altman’s argument, we could safely assume that Finn is being set up as the complimentary romantic partner for Will. In terms of canon, we know from the rest of the series that this isn’t true, but the queer possibility for such a pairing lurks under the surface. There are two heroes, each functioning at a different level of discourse, because in the first season Glee has a two stream narrative of the adult world at [sic] of the faculty and the teen world of the students at McKinley, and the show thus needs an economical way of presenting the audience with both of them. And yet, in using the structure it does to accomplish this, Glee’s intermeshing of traditions inadvertently paints a queer picture of two straight heroes.
Besides this subliminal queer structure, there is another way that Glee undermines this heteroic narrative and paints the heroes queer: the Queer Underworld. When Finn is discovered to have been lying about being in glee club, his paintballing initiated him into a journey through queer discourse as a queered subject. To demonstrate this, take the discourse created by the football team around glee club. On the sign-up sheet, anonymous team members wrote fake names of auditioners: “Gaylord Weiner,” “Butt Lunch,” and “Penis.” Glee club, and music in general, are presented as an inherently gay space steeped in fag discourse[m] about the proper place of the compulsorily heterosexual male outside of that space. By aligning himself with the glee club, however begrudgingly, Finn paints himself as queer in that world. This is made explicit throughout the next few episodes. Quinn, as his girlfriend, attempts to convince him to quit the (queer) club through seduction, promising he can touch her breast in return. When her conditions are unsatisfactory, he says no and asserts that he likes glee club; she responds, “people think you’re gay now, Finn, and you know what that makes me? Your big gay beard.” When Finn gets Kurt a football tryout, Puck quips, “so are you two an item now or…”[14] Finn retains this queer positionality until his return to his own world, where he has to leave behind his queer positionality and take up his heterosexual pairing with Rachel, which he more or less keeps throughout the series. Finn cannot leave the Queer Underworld until he completes his quest: to find his voice. Finn is lost at the beginning of the first episode, stammering as he waits for a voice to come out. Will forces him into glee club because he knows Finn has a voice to find. What neither knows is that his voice is hidden in the Queer Underworld. In order to become a happy heterosexual, he has to have this queer tribulation wherein he is initiated into music and can find a space for music in his life through his voice.
1) I use the term “queering” broadly to describe the narrative; here I refer to the process of subverting the character's original stereotyped presentation and creating a human character with boundary-crossing agency and intersectional nuance. This process can be explicitly linked to non-normative genders and sexualities, such as will be argued through the Queer Underworld. However, I also use it more generally: “queering” serves as a framework for theorizing intersectionality in general. [Quinn herself also undergoes queering in the traditional sense, such as the time she hooks up with Santana at a wedding. Also collapsing “intersectionality in general” into the rubric of queer is not helpful, or even an accurate representation of how intersectionality operates. What I meant was that I was using queer in an expanded sense that recognizes how notions of gender and sexuality and their transgression are always already shaped by other social categories (see Butler 1999, xvi).]
2) Barrie Gelles, "Glee and the "Ghosting" of the Musical Theater Canon," Popular Entertainment Studies, 2, no. 2 (2011): 90.
3) Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 142-3.
4) Butler, Gender Trouble, 143; emphases mine.
5) Butler, Gender Trouble 175. [Butler has clarified her position on drag to note that “it would be a mistake to take [drag] as the paradigm of subversive action or, indeed, as a model for political agency” (Ibid. xxii). Moreover, using a performance genre as an exemplar of performativity leads to misunderstandings about how performativity operates (see Salih 2007, 59-60). While drag like all gender is performative, it might be more useful to say drag is ‘performatic’ (Taylor 2003, 6).]
6) Though I suggest general audience reactions throughout this paper, I do so while recognizing that the idea of one unified “audience” that sees everything the same way is problematic. The effect of different positionalities of viewership on the queerness of Glee would be a very interesting topic of study. For example, racial intersections with viewership in Glee provide much room for discussion, as the black female gaze provides poignant challenges to musical identification. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
7) This is not the only time Kurt appears in butch drag: a less convincing performance is discussed [in the next section].
8) Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant,(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 443-7.
9) Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 67. As Knapp notes, MERM happens in stage musicals too, but the justification is not as immediately necessary.
10) In Glee, this performance occurs in the pilot directly after the opening title card, with “Where is Love” from Oliver! performed by Sandy Ryerson [(Stephen Tobolowsky)] and Hank [(Ben Bledsoe)].
11) Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 345-6.
12) Ibid.
13) Rick Altman, “The American Film Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative,” in Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42.
14) Ironically, Puck too finds himself in the Queer Underworld through seasons 2 and 3, and in some ways his he(te)roic narrative is more interesting than Finn's. [So does Quinn for that matter].
d) Starting in season 4 some of the students become the adults which complicates this somewhat; also I suspect I've overstated the uniqueness of this device.
e) Despite the fact that Rachel is also Jewish.
f) To cite a list of authors refuting these claims would be a paper in and of itself. For now, it must suffice to say 1) the show presents this as good LGBT+ representation but it is by no means “patently queer-positive”—it is a strategy that has strengths and weaknesses that both further and undermine LGBT+/queer political goals 2) LGBT+ politics and queer politics, while theoretically serving the same community, are at cross-purposes at precisely this juncture, with LGBT+ politics being characterized by neoliberal assimilationist tactics and queer politics being characterized by subversion and liberationist tactics (see Tilsen and Nylund 2010).
g) That’s not how Baudrillard’s simulacra works; the entire point is that notions of original and copy are hopelessly intertwined (see Jarman-Ivens 2011, 47-49).
h) Gelles, “Glee,” 90.
i) Although it has been queered in other contexts such as the musical Rock of Ages.
j) Performativity is much more complicated than this: not only is Butler highly critical of the notion of a coherent subject that chooses from already-existing, stable genders, but she also emphasizes the repetition necessary to make gender legible (1999, 177-78). Thus, one does not ‘choose’ a gender so much as one congeals into the illusion of a gendered person through repetition. This has lead to the understanding that performativity makes agency impossible (Salih 2007, 59). Instead, for Butler “‘agency’ […] is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (1999, 185, emphasis mine).
k) Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 5.
l) The immediate reference here is to Dorian Corey's articulation of the term in Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris is Burning (Miramax, 1990) which presents (and exploits) 1980s New York ball culture. More generally, the concepts of 'realness' and 'fish' that I expand upon in this paper are unacknowledged borrowings from queer AAVE.
m) C.J. Pascoe, Dude You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007), 54.
Set in Lima, Ohio, Glee chronicles the creation and evolution of the McKinley High School glee club, New Directions. The show originally centered around Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and how he created the glee club; over its [first] four seasons, however, different characters and narratives have formed the focus at different points. Early in the first season, Glee settled into a fairly episodic structure: Will assigns the glee club a lesson for the week and the episode is spent dealing with that lesson, either consciously through in-practice rehearsals or subconsciously through happenings in the plot. The show was originally rather distinct from most high school-based series in that in the first season it put fairly equal emphasis on the lives and intrigues of the students and of the adults in the school. In subsequent seasons, though, the focus has shifted much more decidedly towards focusing on the students[d].
In terms of content, there are two main discursive themes in the show that sometimes work in harmony and sometimes work in direct conflict: identity celebration and heroic narrative. Each character is initially presented as a stereotype. In the episode “Throwdown,” cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the club’s primary antagonist, divides the New Directions into two camps based on minority or majority status. The litany of names she uses for roll call is an oddly appropriate introduction to these characters and how they have been presented to the audience: “Santana [Lopez (Naya Rivera), who is Latina]! Wheels [Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale)]! Gay Kid [Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer)]! […] Asian! Other Asian [Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz) and Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.)]! Aretha [Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), a black female student]! And Shaft [Matt Rutherford (Dijon Talton), a black male student]!” Later in the episode, Brittany S. Pierce (Heather Morris) and Noah “Puck” Puckerman (Mark Salling) are assigned to the minority group for being the dumb blonde and the Jew, respectively, though Puck’s initial stereotype was the burnout bully jock. Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) is initially left out of this discourse because her stereotype is the perfect popular cheerleader, but her queering has already begun by this episode, and her claim to the minority group is her pregnancy[1]. Excluded from this cataloguing are the two student characters most closely associated with the heroic narrative, and thus stereotypically unmarked majority members: Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith), the dumb jock male protagonist, and Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), the ambitious and talented female protagonist[e]. Through musical performance, however, each character exposes the nuances of their identities, thus subverting these stereotypes. These identities are celebrated and embraced by the other members of the club. This process is patently queer-positive: LGBT/queer identity politics are highly invested in subversion of discourses and (somewhat paradoxically) in naturalizing nonheterosexual noncisgender experience[f].
Stylistic variety allows space for such a large assortment of identities that can pick and choose how to express themselves. The show uses preexisting Western popular music almost exclusively, but the sources of this music are very diverse in terms of style; rap, R&B, swing, pop, hard rock, indie rock, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, folk, funk, disco, Latin, and electronic music have all been utilized throughout the series by multiple characters. Beyond the surface identity marker of style, these musics come with expectations for gender and sexuality, among other identities, based on their original contexts[2]. Each of these songs has original performances (many have simulacra[l] performances, as well)[g], and a sizeable portion have previous narrative associations either through their musical theater provenance or other filmic/television/media associations, in addition to the lyrics. As film scholar Barrie Gelles argues, every performance of these songs in Glee carries with it the “ghost” of those past performances and their attendant meanings and contexts, adding layers of possible identification, and many queer possibilities[h]. Two contrasting examples of these identity possibilities— one normative, one queer— are Finn’s pilot episode performance of “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon, which was originally recorded as a hair metal song by a (presumably) straight male artist[i], and his season 3 performance of Greg Laswell’s version of Cindi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which was originally written by a male, made famous as a pop hit by Lauper, a (presumably) straight female, and covered by a male in an acoustic performance. The first fits fairly neatly into Finn’s presented identity of jock male protagonist, whereas the second colours his identity with layers of signification; its complicated performance history and the lack of lyrical change between versions allow the viewer to read Finn as anything from a concerned straight male ally (as he’s presented contextually in this performance) to a trans lesbian, with the soloist identifying as a woman with a ‘male’ voice in love with a woman.
Though tempting, I do not mean to imply that Finn is consciously adopting the latter identity, nor that he is necessarily to be read in such a light. But all of those possibilities are present at once in this performance because of the competing layers of signification. What this second performance highlights is the performativity of gender. “Performativity” is the ability to take on gender(s) at will[j]. Judith Butler noted since gender is not the same thing as sex, there’s nothing inherent in the terms necessitating that there be only two genders, or that all males be men and all females be women, or that each body have only one gender at a time or over time[3]. If this is the case, “then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and […] gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.”[4] In Finn’s performance of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” he is neither “really” a straight man nor “really” a trans lesbian; he “is” neither, but both are identity possibilities he has (consciously or otherwise) taken up by performing this multilayered text.
Performativity is the strategy at the heart of drag, where “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself— as well as its contingency.”[5] Perhaps the juiciest example Glee has to offer in terms of drag sensibility, performativity, and layers of simultaneous gender signification is the episode “Props.” It could be argued that the entire episode centers on drag. Unique (Alex Newell), a black trans[ ]woman and the current star of Vocal Adrenaline (the major rival of the New Directions), generates a media frenzy by having performed presenting as a woman in a recent performance. Sue, who in this episode is trying to help the New Directions, tries to force Kurt to dress in drag so that the New Directions can compete with Vocal Adrenaline. He refuses, because though he is flamboyant and his gender expression is decidedly feminine, his identity is firmly male. The onus then falls to Puck, who we see walk down the halls in drag, which gets him harassed.
In addition to these narrative instances, a drag aesthetic permeates the episode stylistically. During one sequence, Tina hits her head and believes that all of the characters in the show have switched bodies. Glee accomplishes this switch by having the actors pair up and switch characters, so we see Chris Colfer play Finn instead of Kurt, and Cory Monteith play Kurt instead of Finn. This creates some fascinating pairings, with Puck and Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss), Will and Sue, Mercedes and Brittany, and Artie and Santana all switching actors. There are two levels of queer subversion going on in this sequence. The first is the surface level “cross”-gender signification and deployment of unexpected sexualities. Artie-as-Santana, Santana-as-Artie, Will-as-Sue, and Sue-as-Will are participating in the traditional manner of drag performance. Further, Puck-as-Blaine, Finn-as-Kurt, Mercedes-as-Brittany, and Artie-as-Santana overlay “straight” bodies onto queer characters and “queer” bodies onto straight characters, which calls into question these very associations, a more subtle drag strategy. The second level of queer subversion is the simultaneous convergence of signifiers and their surprising coherence. There is not just one layer of performance at play here, but two: actor to original character, original character to switch-character. Because we have seen the same actors play the same characters for three seasons, it is exceedingly easy for the audience to think that the actor “is” the character. So when we see the character play another character, the actor is completely erased, and we see the humour of a character with very specific semiotic codes performing another character with very specific semiotic codes, and more importantly doing it well. It is a testament to the skill of the actors in this show that they can be so convincing as their switch-character that the audience forgets that they are the actors, not the characters[6]. Mercedes-as-Brittany has mastered Brittany’s far-off stare and matter-of-fact voice, and Kurt-as-Finn is a spot-on prosodic match[7]. However, even as the actor and their identity is erased, all three identities are present simultaneously, providing an odd coalition of gender identities and codes. Blaine-as-Puck presents a straight actor portraying a gay character portraying a butchily straight switch-character. So which is his “real” sexuality? What is the “real” gender of Will-as-Sue? This strategy destroys the idea any such thing exists.
This sequence also deploys a related strategy: the Myth of Spontaneity, in which “authentic” musical performance is presented as natural and spontaneous without need for rehearsal or technological mediation, even as a performance is heavily mediated by technology and rehearsal[8]. Tina-as-Rachel suddenly bursts out singing a flawless rendition of Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” after having just said that she needed a few days to think about what song to sing. With few exceptions, the numbers that we see “in rehearsal,” such as this one, are as pristinely polished as the “performance” numbers, and yet we are led to believe through narrative and visual conventions that this presentation is natural and unmediated, spontaneously erupting from the performer. If we believe a song to emanate from its onscreen source the performance is called “synchretic,”[k] and believing that this synchretic performance communicates “authentic” emotions enables us to assume that song selections express identity. The musical identity expressed, much like gender and sexuality, is presented in such a way that it is seen as natural and inherent instead of performed and contingent. The Myth of Spontaneity is thus just another instance of drag, but of a type called “realness”: the ability of a performing subject to pass as hir performed identity in such a way that no one can tell they’re performing at all[l]. By creating the illusion that the musical performance is unmediated and authentic, the Myth of Spontaneity engages in realness by letting the audience forget they are watching a performance and not “the real thing.”
Some performances are so “spontaneous” as to activate MERM: Musically Enhanced Reality Mode[9]. MERM works by first justifying musical performances in a movie musical through diegetic performance[10]. Once musical performance has a place in the show, the audience is willing to accept that characters can break out into song at will. Glee is careful to ease the audience into that type of expression. In the first two episodes, all the performances are diegetically justified, either in a rehearsal context, an audition context, or some other narrative justification for the character to be singing (though there is one surrealist moment where Finn sees an old role model of his on the football field). Some of these songs move to extradiegetic functionality, such as “On My Own” from Les Misèrables and “Gold Digger” by Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx. But it isn’t until “Acafellas,” the third episode in the series, that there is a distinctly MERM performance, “This is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan. The moment is actually quite jarring; Will, Sandy, [Ken] Tanaka [(Patrick Gallagher)], and two other characters have just given a performance of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Will says, “hey, that was pretty good.” Suddenly, he turns to the camera and starts singing “This is How We Do It.” The audience accepts its presence because of the way MERM has been properly prepared according to Knapp’s formula, and yet Glee chooses to expose the seams by acknowledging how out of place this first moment of MERM is. The show thus sets up MERM as a queer strategy in that it is deliberately performati[c] for the audience’s sake. It violates boundaries, simultaneously reinscribes and subverts traditions, and performs identities—in this case Will performs TV performer.
Performativity and its explosion of possibilities for identity and individuality make Glee a richly queer space. Performativity, however, is at complete odds with the heroic narrative, which prima facie erases queer possibilities and serves as their boundary point. Interestingly, certain characters remain involved in the very traditional discursive patterns of heroic narrative. Will’s act of creating the glee club is heavily steeped in heroic paradigms: the creation of the glee club is his Quest and Sue his villain. Finn and Rachel are also involved in a heroic narrative: each feels a strong call to leadership in the group, and journeys to obtain the qualities necessary— i.e. “finding your voice”— to accomplish that leadership. These heroic narratives are inherently tied up with ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinity, and so very often serve as a point of conflict with the queer aims of identity celebration.
The heroic narrative is the organizing structure of an overwhelming majority of stories across history and across cultures, for various psychological and practical reasons. Its basic outline is this:
The mythological hero, setting forth from his [sic throughout] commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark […], or be slain by the opponent and descend in death […]. Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely [queerly?] intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him […], some of which give magical aid.[11]
Once our hero has completed his Quest— that thing for which he went on this journey in the first place— he is given a reward: a heterosexual partnership, a new consciousness, and so on. Then, the hero must forgo “the transcendental powers” he has acquired in order to “reemerge from the kingdom of dread.”[12] Campbell’s use of the “universal” ‘he’ is partially a reflection of the time of writing and his own potential gender biases, but also partially due to the heroic narrative’s predominant alignment with compulsorily heterosexual hegemonic masculinity. Though there of course exist women and other non-men who can be said to fill this role, the role of hero is traditionally reserved for masculine male men, and Glee extends this tradition faithfully. Finn is one of the two central heroes of the first season, and thus his presentation in the pilot makes a great case study for how this story works. We first see him in his humdrum life as a bully and mediocre student, unhappy with his position there. Will drags him to the threshold of adventure by planting pot in his locker and blackmailing him. The threshold is guarded by the football team, who do not allow glee club and football to live in the same world. He attempts to get past by lying, but he is discovered and shot with paintball guns, entering the Queer Underworld of glee club. His first test: survive a duet with Rachel; the second: rescue Artie from the portable toilet the football guys have trapped him in. His heroic narrative extends beyond the first episode, but the seeds of it are sown very clearly in the pilot.
In addition to its masculine heroes, Glee also utilizes what musicologist Rick Altman calls a dual-focus narrative: not one but two protagonists (in Glee, the most obvious are Finn and Rachel) are presented in parallel, and we watch as a heterosexual pairing evolves[13]. Altman argues that musicals employ the dual-focus narrative in place of a heroic narrative. However, in Glee, the two structures function simultaneously and in conjunction as a sort of heteroic narrative, wherein the heroic quest is always already bound up in heterosexual pairing with the dual-focus hero-partner, no matter the object. Finn has a heroic arc, but he also at the same time has a dual-focus narrative relationship with Rachel: both are the only two students in the pilot to get a voiceover (and the third goes to the other hero), in which they talk about what music means to them and how singing is their life. Indeed, Rachel puts Will on the search for a male lead to be her dual-focus partner, and Will finds hero-Finn, which intersects with Will’s heroic Quest to get the glee club up and running. The two strategies are intimately intertwined in this show.
Oddly enough, even as the intertwining of these two strategies into a he(te)roic narrative reinforces compulsory heterosexuality, it can simultaneously queer both original strategies. There are several men in Glee who, at various times and to varying degrees, have a heroic arc, but as noted, the two central characters to fulfill this role are Will and Finn. Interestingly, the pilot uses the traditional dual-focus strategy in a queer way to introduce the two heroes side by side. After an opening performance by the Cheerios, the show cuts to a shot of Will driving in. He walks past a crowd of guys at the dumpster and greets Kurt. He talks to Finn and moves along, but the camera stays with Finn as Puck and another boy attempt to toss Kurt in the dumpster. Finn stops them and has Kurt take off his jacket so it doesn’t get ruined. Cut to Will at the Altar of the Ancestors, by which I mean contemplating a memorial plaque of Lillian Adler, who apparently was the glee club leader at McKinley before her death in 1997. Next, we see Will teaching a Spanish class and Finn struggling to understand. By the end of this sequence, according to Altman’s argument, we could safely assume that Finn is being set up as the complimentary romantic partner for Will. In terms of canon, we know from the rest of the series that this isn’t true, but the queer possibility for such a pairing lurks under the surface. There are two heroes, each functioning at a different level of discourse, because in the first season Glee has a two stream narrative of the adult world at [sic] of the faculty and the teen world of the students at McKinley, and the show thus needs an economical way of presenting the audience with both of them. And yet, in using the structure it does to accomplish this, Glee’s intermeshing of traditions inadvertently paints a queer picture of two straight heroes.
Besides this subliminal queer structure, there is another way that Glee undermines this heteroic narrative and paints the heroes queer: the Queer Underworld. When Finn is discovered to have been lying about being in glee club, his paintballing initiated him into a journey through queer discourse as a queered subject. To demonstrate this, take the discourse created by the football team around glee club. On the sign-up sheet, anonymous team members wrote fake names of auditioners: “Gaylord Weiner,” “Butt Lunch,” and “Penis.” Glee club, and music in general, are presented as an inherently gay space steeped in fag discourse[m] about the proper place of the compulsorily heterosexual male outside of that space. By aligning himself with the glee club, however begrudgingly, Finn paints himself as queer in that world. This is made explicit throughout the next few episodes. Quinn, as his girlfriend, attempts to convince him to quit the (queer) club through seduction, promising he can touch her breast in return. When her conditions are unsatisfactory, he says no and asserts that he likes glee club; she responds, “people think you’re gay now, Finn, and you know what that makes me? Your big gay beard.” When Finn gets Kurt a football tryout, Puck quips, “so are you two an item now or…”[14] Finn retains this queer positionality until his return to his own world, where he has to leave behind his queer positionality and take up his heterosexual pairing with Rachel, which he more or less keeps throughout the series. Finn cannot leave the Queer Underworld until he completes his quest: to find his voice. Finn is lost at the beginning of the first episode, stammering as he waits for a voice to come out. Will forces him into glee club because he knows Finn has a voice to find. What neither knows is that his voice is hidden in the Queer Underworld. In order to become a happy heterosexual, he has to have this queer tribulation wherein he is initiated into music and can find a space for music in his life through his voice.
Notes
1) I use the term “queering” broadly to describe the narrative; here I refer to the process of subverting the character's original stereotyped presentation and creating a human character with boundary-crossing agency and intersectional nuance. This process can be explicitly linked to non-normative genders and sexualities, such as will be argued through the Queer Underworld. However, I also use it more generally: “queering” serves as a framework for theorizing intersectionality in general. [Quinn herself also undergoes queering in the traditional sense, such as the time she hooks up with Santana at a wedding. Also collapsing “intersectionality in general” into the rubric of queer is not helpful, or even an accurate representation of how intersectionality operates. What I meant was that I was using queer in an expanded sense that recognizes how notions of gender and sexuality and their transgression are always already shaped by other social categories (see Butler 1999, xvi).]
2) Barrie Gelles, "Glee and the "Ghosting" of the Musical Theater Canon," Popular Entertainment Studies, 2, no. 2 (2011): 90.
3) Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 142-3.
4) Butler, Gender Trouble, 143; emphases mine.
5) Butler, Gender Trouble 175. [Butler has clarified her position on drag to note that “it would be a mistake to take [drag] as the paradigm of subversive action or, indeed, as a model for political agency” (Ibid. xxii). Moreover, using a performance genre as an exemplar of performativity leads to misunderstandings about how performativity operates (see Salih 2007, 59-60). While drag like all gender is performative, it might be more useful to say drag is ‘performatic’ (Taylor 2003, 6).]
6) Though I suggest general audience reactions throughout this paper, I do so while recognizing that the idea of one unified “audience” that sees everything the same way is problematic. The effect of different positionalities of viewership on the queerness of Glee would be a very interesting topic of study. For example, racial intersections with viewership in Glee provide much room for discussion, as the black female gaze provides poignant challenges to musical identification. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
7) This is not the only time Kurt appears in butch drag: a less convincing performance is discussed [in the next section].
8) Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant,(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 443-7.
9) Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 67. As Knapp notes, MERM happens in stage musicals too, but the justification is not as immediately necessary.
10) In Glee, this performance occurs in the pilot directly after the opening title card, with “Where is Love” from Oliver! performed by Sandy Ryerson [(Stephen Tobolowsky)] and Hank [(Ben Bledsoe)].
11) Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 345-6.
12) Ibid.
13) Rick Altman, “The American Film Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative,” in Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42.
14) Ironically, Puck too finds himself in the Queer Underworld through seasons 2 and 3, and in some ways his he(te)roic narrative is more interesting than Finn's. [So does Quinn for that matter].
d) Starting in season 4 some of the students become the adults which complicates this somewhat; also I suspect I've overstated the uniqueness of this device.
e) Despite the fact that Rachel is also Jewish.
f) To cite a list of authors refuting these claims would be a paper in and of itself. For now, it must suffice to say 1) the show presents this as good LGBT+ representation but it is by no means “patently queer-positive”—it is a strategy that has strengths and weaknesses that both further and undermine LGBT+/queer political goals 2) LGBT+ politics and queer politics, while theoretically serving the same community, are at cross-purposes at precisely this juncture, with LGBT+ politics being characterized by neoliberal assimilationist tactics and queer politics being characterized by subversion and liberationist tactics (see Tilsen and Nylund 2010).
g) That’s not how Baudrillard’s simulacra works; the entire point is that notions of original and copy are hopelessly intertwined (see Jarman-Ivens 2011, 47-49).
h) Gelles, “Glee,” 90.
i) Although it has been queered in other contexts such as the musical Rock of Ages.
j) Performativity is much more complicated than this: not only is Butler highly critical of the notion of a coherent subject that chooses from already-existing, stable genders, but she also emphasizes the repetition necessary to make gender legible (1999, 177-78). Thus, one does not ‘choose’ a gender so much as one congeals into the illusion of a gendered person through repetition. This has lead to the understanding that performativity makes agency impossible (Salih 2007, 59). Instead, for Butler “‘agency’ […] is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (1999, 185, emphasis mine).
k) Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 5.
l) The immediate reference here is to Dorian Corey's articulation of the term in Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris is Burning (Miramax, 1990) which presents (and exploits) 1980s New York ball culture. More generally, the concepts of 'realness' and 'fish' that I expand upon in this paper are unacknowledged borrowings from queer AAVE.
m) C.J. Pascoe, Dude You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007), 54.
