DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2512

 

Whatever happened to Fay Wray? Even as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (TRHPS) (1975) cemented itself within popular culture as a queer cult extravaganza, many of its references to early Hollywood science fiction and horror cinema icons and experiences fell by the wayside. The power that the film and the midnight, costumed sing-a-long screenings retain is its orgiastic appeal of queer excess played out across a backdrop of horror and Gothic genre tropes, functionally substantiating the production of a popular queer epistemology indelibly linked to the cultural development of speculative fiction. In essence, TRHPS successfully exercised in popular imagination the potentiality of Gothic and Horror to represent queerness within the phenomenological production of emotional affects. The “Floor Show” sequence at the climax of TRHPS, consisting of the songs “Rose Tint My World,” “Don’t Dream It,” and “Wild and Untamed Thing,” summarises the film’s thesis on interplay between queerness and speculative genres. This thesis links queer survivability to emotional and physical excesses beyond the boundaries of normative practice. TRHPS tells us to embrace the transgressive aspects of existential difference. In turn, Vivienne Medrano’s animated music video “Addict” rearticulates TRHPS’s polemic while also pushing deeper into the chaotic and contradictory repertoire of affects within the realm of the abject. Namely, “Addict” embraces the dangers of being the abject where survival is sometimes couched within self-destructive pursuits of fleeting moments of pleasure. As a result, rather than showcase a representation of queerness drawn from the neoliberal frameworks of easily digestible visibility, TRHPS and “Addict” showcase representation divulged from the emotional registers of queerness aided by the lexicon of speculative fiction genres.

Queer Representation: Thinking Beyond the Human Subject

The contentious issue at the heart of queer experience is the position of identity, subject, and self. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner position queer social practices as resistance to heteronormativity.^[1] This resistance is met by neoliberalism working to arrest the elasticity and fluidic character, what Lisa Duggan calls “the new homonormativity”.[2] This homonormativity, in turn, supplies the state with ideal subjects to redefine the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in advancing the state’s political and economic strategies internationally, what Jasbir Puar defines as homonationalism, or “an exceptional form of national homonormativity”.[3] Following Althusser’s theory of ideology, homonormativity functions through multiple layers of society including cultural institutions and practices. As Rosemary Hennessy contends, the centres of cultural critique and education, primarily within the United States, are implicated within the (re)production of neoliberal ideologies.[4] Within this system, queerness is provided a tenuous visibility through commodification which “invariably depends on the lives and labour of invisible others”.[5]

Normativity is seductive precisely because it carries the promise of safety and security. The further one resides from the socially proscribed dimensions of normativity, the greater the sacrifice required to appear as normal. Since normativity is marked by more than just sexual practices,[6] the dimensions of race and ethnicity, of psychic and bodily ability, class and citizenship, figure into even further proscriptions that one does not always have the privilege to “fix,” what Puar calls “biopolitical failures”.[7] When Sara Ahmed argues for the effects of deviation and disorientation, as produced through a politics informed by how one lives, they provide as an example “the very act of describing queer gatherings as family gatherings is to have joy in the uncanny effect of a familiar form becoming strange”.[8] Ahmed’s turn to queer phenomenology centres on “a way of inhabiting the world by giving “support” to whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place,” an orientation “toward queer moments of deviation”.[9] Rather than treat queer representation as those “representational mandates of visibility politics”, [10] I argue that queer representation must be an affect,  assembled by recognising one’s proximity to feelings, emotions, exclamations, and dis/order.  These queer affects are central to how Gothic and Gothic-derived genres like Horror, function.

(Dis)orienting Space: Chaos, Void, and the Inscrutability of Affects

At the heart of the Gothic genre is the conflict between the rational and irrational. Queer affects in Gothic media come from the structural components of the genre—components like plots, tropes, language, and composition—and the genre’s cultural, material, and historical dimensions. The historic origin of the term “Gothic” emerges as a derogatory trope in enlightenment period art that failed to cater to “neo-Classical tastes” and the growing fetish of rational humanism.[11] From the outset, then, the assumption of Gothic, either by means of dismissive critique or enthusiastic association, is an alignment with “low” taste and popular culture. Fred Bottling attaches two components to the historical emergence of Gothic media and subsequent relegation to the world of disreputable pop cultural production. As the genre developed with greater economic mobility and literacy, its popularity was decoded as “a symptom of a voraciously consumeristic commercial culture in which pleasure, sensation and excitement come from the thrills of a darkly imagined counter-world”.[12] Hence, “Gothic” was saddled as both expressively indulgent and tarnished by capital. At the same time, the subject material of Gothic media embraced diverse flows of transgressive desires that “predate sexuality’s codification” in the nineteenth century, [13] but then they develop alongside one another. The lurid gravity of Gothic pulls from the life codified by society as right and proper with the promises of pleasures beyond the bounds of binary registers of good or bad. Mair Rigby suggests that in the Gothic, “we really recognise… our own construction as uncanny beings, bodies of knowledge that ought to be repressed”.[14] These cultural links between Gothic and the queerness construct a recursive pattern of recognition and adaptation, constantly pushing the boundaries for what is imaginable for queer life. Gothic enables a “low theory” of queerness in culture, enabling the recognition of life beyond the normative.[15]

Emotions are interstitial, suspended between recognition and inscrutability. This leads to the need to “reign in” or “tame” our “irrational” emotions. The irrational world, unlike the rational world, contains all that cannot be codified in language and emotions and provides us with a glimpse into what might reside in such a space “beyond imagining”. Manuel Aguirre argues that “Gothic can be said to postulate two zones… the human domain of rationality and intelligible events; on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous which transcends human reason… These are separated by some manner of threshold, and plots invariably involve movement from one site to the other”.[16] Aguirre invokes the Mandelbrot set fractal as a metaphor for Gothic structure,[17] highlighting how in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian “distance is lengthened through partition, thresholds multiply, each move creates ripples which generate new obstacles and dangers… the whole threatening to stretch advance ad infinitum, to indefinitely frustrate it, or to consume it”.[18] The queer affect here is in feeling the desire to embrace the space beyond, to embrace those expressions deemed irrational, abhorrent, or excessive. That “Gothic” space is best expressed by Karen Barad’s poetic experiments in trans theory and theoretical physics described as “the materiality of imagining together with the imaginative capacities of materiality… Electrical energy runs through disparate topics in what follows: lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, Frankenstein, trans rage, queer self-birthing, the quantum vacuum, virtual particles, queer touching, bioelectricity, Franken-frogs, monstrous re/generations”.[19] Barad establishes theoretical physics as both a metaphor and an ontological basis for queerness, telling us that, at the quantum level, “the void is “the scene of wild activities.”[20] Perverse and promiscuous couplings, queer goings-on that make pre-AIDS bathhouses look tame. The void is a virtual exploration of all manner of possible trans*/formations. Nature is perverse at its core; nature is unnatural”.[21] Life is Gothic all the way down to the quantum level and within us is the kind of vacuous potential of infinite possibilities despite our own material finiteness. These paradoxes or contradictory aspects are at the heart of the queer affects in the Gothic, where emotions run rampant in ways rationality cannot possibly always anticipate.

Gothic Contemporaries

Why then does this case study select The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Medrano’s “Addict” to analyse when far “better” examples of Gothic/Horror media exist? After all, TRHPS is a popular parody of late-night cinema and “cheesy” science fiction. However, TRHPS is a reorientation of the Gothic from a queer (phenomenological) perspective. When Tim Curry appears as Dr Frank-n-Furter it is in a black vampiric mantle that is cast off to reveal the platformed and corseted figure beneath. Like Dr Frankenstein, Frank is also making a creature, and like Frankenstein’s creature, Rocky flees his creator. TRHPS is the queer irony of the Gothic; a monster let out of the closet and on full display in a marriage between the gaiety of musical theatre and the over-the-top drama of genre cinema.

“Addict” is an animated music video produced by artist and animator Vivienne Medrano’s SpindleHorse Toons and composed by songwriter Silva Hound, with vocalists Michael Kovach and Kelly “Chi-Chi” Boyer reprising their roles from Medrano’s Hazbin Hotel pilot. The video is connected to a multimedia project from the mind of Medrano that is set in a Christian inspired Hell populated by sinners and Hell-born demons. The two major media projects are Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, and both contain a significant element of musicality. In the Hazbin pilot characters break out into songs and reprises in the style of musicals, while Helluva features musical segments in the style of Fosse’s Cabaret where songs occur within the logic of daily life on radios, in theatres, or in classrooms. As Medrano works as both writer and designer, both projects are thematically and aesthetically similar. The characters present in “Addict” are from Hazbin Hotel and the song can function as companion to the pilot and future series as character formation, or it can function as an independent entity. Like TRHPS, Gothic feeling is not at work, but the elements of Gothic entities are, as is the framework of the “sinful.” Additionally, the work is excessively queer, populated with both queer characters and creators/actors, just like TRHPS. Both “Addict” and the Floor Show from TRHPS provide the “queer moments” of affective resistance to the normalising effects of identity-based representation.

Rose Tint my World, I am a Wild and Untamed Thing

The “Floor Show” is a ten-minute sequence at the conclusion of TRHPS consisting of songs “Rose Tint my World,” “Don’t Dream It,” and “Wild and Untamed Thing”.[22] The main cast performs the songs on a theatre stage with the camera assuming the position of the audience. Unlike previous uses of this camera positioning, this is the only time that we are positioned as the diegetic witnesses. This sequence enacts a phenomenological shift by placing us, as the audience of film, into the film as the audience members. Dr Frank-N-Furter is a mix between monster and damsel. When they first appear, they are wrapped in a floor length black cloak, appropriating a particularly vampiric silhouette.

This image of Frank is as both Dracula and Dr Frankenstein, both monsters with the power to birth other monsters. Having already “birthed” the libidinal Rocky, Frank dresses up film characters Brad, Janet, Rocky, and Columbia as mirrors to Frank’s own “perverse” costume. Each one shares their experience since meeting Frank, with Columbia and Rocky concluding their sections with the titular “Rose tints my world/keeps me safe from my trouble and pain.” Brad and Janet sing of how they have been released; Brad feels “sexy” dressed in corset, fishnet, platform heels, garter, and panties. Janet’s “confidence has increased,” her “mind… expanded;” Frankie’s “lust is so sincere.”

The scene transitions via a fanfare as the stage curtains rise and reveals Frank at the base of a stage prop radio tower. Frank sings of their desire to be “dressed just the same” as Fay Wray, declaring from the unfolding staircase about giving “yourself over to absolute pleasure.” They then jump into a pool with “The Creation of Adam” depicted on the bottom, surfacing in an S. S. Titanic lifebuoy singing “don’t dream it, be it.” This recreation of the Biblical creation erases the distance between God and man, through an unchained libido and undifferentiated gender. The four join Frank, swimming into a single snake like mating mass. As the action heats up, the chorus of “don’t dream it, be it” repeats in an ethereal, dreamlike loop until, suddenly, the music snaps into the bombastic drive of “Wild and Untamed Thing” with Frank rising from the pool on Rocky’s shoulders. Frank sings a solo stanza but is soon joined by the rest of the cast in a very wet chorus line. All the while, we are in these seats; the message is as much for us as it is for the performers on stage declaring their formerly repressed desires. This sequence is then broken as Riff-Raff busts into the theatre with Magenta, ending the climactic revelry.

Textually speaking, the sequence draws notice to the lines “rose tints my world, keeps me safe from my trouble and pain,” the second stanza of “Don’t Dream It,” and the final chorus of “Wild and Untamed Thing.” At first it is just Columbia, the veteran Frankie-fan, and Rocky, Frank’s seven-hours-old creature, who sing of the rose tint. Rose tint is an obvious reference to the western idiom of rose-coloured glasses, describing an unduly optimistic or positive outlook. Here it is presented as part of longer phrase, describing the rose tint as a form of protection. However, “rose tint” is presented in a circuitous fashion as both the source and the protection from “trouble and pain”. If we consider “trouble and pain” to be necessary, inevitable facts of existence, then one lesson the line imparts is the importance of seeking a pleasure that makes the pain both survivable and worth it. Brad and Janet, new to Frank’s company, are in the process of discovering the rose tint, allowing them to join the company for “Wild and Untamed Thing” along with Dr Scott.

The second segment of the Floor Show, “Don’t Dream It,” begins with Frank-n-Furter appearing as the stage curtain rises. For the second stanza, Frank descends the staircase one step at a time:

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure

Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh

Erotic nightmares beyond any measure

And sensual daydreams to treasure forever[23]

This second stanza is an embrace of hedonism, of the rose tint, and to “be it” not “dream it.” Line one signals an absolute, rather than an “ordinary” pleasure, which is further defined by the “sins of the flesh” in line two. Rather than merely signal an absolute sexual pleasure, it directly highlights the culturally endowed negativity of sex. It is not pleasures of the flesh, but sins. This signifies not simply a more conservative extra-marital heterosexual act, but a collective experience of what constitutes sinful bodily acts. This feeling is echoed by “erotic nightmares,” which is where this sequence starts dipping into the incomprehensibility of feeling where emotions register paradoxically and out of phase with the linear promise of normative emotional orientations. Nightmares are, for most people, negative experiences that issue forth negative effects such as insomnia, anxiety, nausea, and fear. These negative effects are imbued with the adjective “erotic” which ties to “sins” and “absolute pleasure.” Erotic becomes the rose tint, recolouring the nightmare into something incomprehensible and “beyond any measure”. An erotic eruption from the softer etherealness of “sensual daydreams”, perhaps? Either way, both nightmares and daydreams are invoked as something beyond the rational promise of measurability.

These emotional excesses endeavour to entangle the familiar with the unfamiliar, the conscious (daydreams – desirable) and the unconscious (nightmares – undesirable). The rest of “Don’t Dream It” is the recurring dreamlike “don’t dream it, be it.” This simple phrase insinuates a lot. What are we dreaming? What are we being? It calls on us to externalise the internal, to emote what we feel. From the interstitial space between Adam and God, Frank centres their uncanny self at the spark of all creation. The literal orgy that follows is presented as the expanding and contracting universe spawning new possibilities. The “rose tint” is a fantasy Frank is keen on teaching us, alongside Brad and Janet. We should not merely swim in the fantasies of erotic nightmares but to materialize those desires in our flesh.

With the lesson taught, and adherents earned, Frank launches into the sequence’s final climactic section:

I’m a wild and untamed thing

I’m a bee with a deadly sting

You get a hit and your mind goes ping

Your heart will pump and your blood will sing

So let the party and the sound rock on

We’re gonna shake it til the life has gone

Rose tints my world keeps me safe from my trouble and pain[24]

The stanza is sung three times, once solo by Frank, and the rest by the company. Frank is not the only “wild and untamed thing” as everyone else joins in singing. With the four back on stage, they are all dressed the same. Only Frank is marked with distinctive colours and make up. For these “wild” and “untamed” things, the rules of society’s propriety simply do not apply. Not only that, but the design of their makeup and costumes run counter to normative frameworks of attractiveness. In effect, they adopt a monstrous image to signal their belonging. The water only serves to equalise them more as their makeup runs.

When Frank is hoisted out of the pool on Rocky’s shoulders, they fully exhibit the wild and untamed thing as their makeup runs and their perm now plastered to their head. Furthermore, the section’s significance comes with the three bottom lines, which can be summed up as “party until life has gone keep[ing] me safe from my trouble and pain.” The party, the fun, the extreme life depicted throughout the sequence and the rest of the film is a way of seeing beyond the pain. It is hyper reality of pure sensation. However, this promise of the eternal “erotic nightmare” is interrupted, and the rose tint is smashed. Riff Raff storms in singing “Frank-N-Furter it’s all over/Your mission is a failure, your lifestyle’s too extreme.” Frank is forced to face their pain in the next song sequence, but the Floor Show ends with the declaration of “too extreme.” The lifestyle pushed through the whole sequence is a “failure” and “too extreme” resulting in the execution of Columbia, Frank, and Rocky.

In summation, the interplay of lyrics and visuals diverge from a linear progression of normative affects. The character’s invocation of “rose tints” links queer survivability with monstrous eroticism. By showcasing whirlwind narratives of contradictory emotions, sharing in both pain and pleasure, they align to the symbol of “erotic nightmare” inherent in the body and performance of their creator Frank’n’Furter. This orientation leads them into the wilderness of undifferentiated sexual desire and the conversion to “wild and untamed” things as their façades melt away. However, they are interrupted by the intervention of colonial/military authority of the “new commander” who deems the “wild and untamed” as “too extreme”, proceeding to straighten the lines diverging from the norm. As a result, they destroy not only the creator, Frank, but the space as well, leaving Janet, Brad, and Dr Scott in a crater. This is a reminder that these escapist fantasies, the rose tint, is contingent on both time and space, and places the survival of the self in danger from the structures of hegemonic power. Frank was the point of departure for the three, the force that knocked their narrative line askew. Without the old guard of Frank and Columbia, or even a tangible connection to that world through the “Frankenstein place”, they are left to crawl in hole left by the foundation, without direction.

Leave my Soul to Burn and I’ll be Breathing it in

About 45 years after the release of TRHPS, Medrano launched the full-length pilot for Hazbin Hotel on their YouTube channel, Vivziepop, depicting a Hell overrun with sinners. Charlie, the daughter of Lucifer and Lilith, launches a “rehab” hotel with the goal of preventing the annual Heavenly purge. However, this is Hell, and the sinners are not necessarily looking for redemption, their bodies twisted into impish and animalistic monstrous representations. Angel Dust (voiced by Michael Kovach), an androgynous anthropomorphic spider, and Cherri Bomb (voiced by Kelly “Chi-Chi” Boyer), a cycloptic woman, perform the song “Addict” composed by Silva Hound. The music video was released on the tail of the Hazbin pilot, joining a handful of paratextual media providing more narrative context and development of the world glimpsed in the pilot. There is a level of difficulty in considering a text like “Addict” because it is a self-contained music video that also happens to be part of an early portfolio of a developing franchise. Essentially, there is no master narrative to slot “Addict” into within a Hazbin Hotel timeline of events and developments. At the same time, only the lyrics can be detached from this still fractured narrative because both the visual and aural experience of “Addict” is inseparable from Hazbin, featuring recognisable vocals and character art. However, without the context of Hazbin Hotel, the significance of those recognisable sounds and images are lost. For clarity, this analysis recognizes “Addict” as sung by the Hazbin Hotel characters Angel Dust and Cherri Bomb but assumes an otherwise limited narrative perspective regarding the larger franchise narrative.

The music video opens with Valentino, the owner and operator of a large adult media conglomerate, smiling widely as the scene shifts to a stage. The curtains rise to reveal Angel Dust entwined with a pole. As the music starts and the lights flicker on, the demons in silhouette all fixate on Angel, who appears, at first, only as a black silhouette against a florescent pink spiderweb with a heart shape at the centre. Angel’s verse opens with “till death do us part/but we’re already past that phase/this is a brand-new start”.[25] This institutes a new life phase occurring after separation and after “death” from which Angel can recreate themselves. They are cynical and emotionally excessive, they’ve “let their emotions go” as though nothing matters after overdosing (“and ending up comatose”). Now they live by their mantra “fuck being a sober hoe.” Their life is yours to play with “till the end of the night.” In this case, “you” adheres to the viewer, Valentino, and Angel’s audience. Toward the end of the opening stanza, it cuts to Valentino who breathes out a red smoke cloud which orients to Angel. Angel dances down the pole platform and down the stage runway toward Valentino.

At the wind up to the chorus, the clouds of red smoke briefly coalesce around Angel’s wrists and neck before being inhaled.  Down here in Hell, “surrounded by fire,” their “passion ignites.” They take “a hit of that heaven and hell/ a helluva high.” Immediately, Angel presents themselves as unapologetic and exhausted by the control and expectation of society. As the song shifts into the first chorus section, with Cherri Bomb’s voice doubling Angel’s, the video goes through several jump cuts. From Angel, reclined on their back with eyes closed, continuing to dance, the scene cuts first to Cherri comforting Angel in a bed. The series of three cuts begin with Angel in the same orientation in bed as on stage (on their back with the camera positioned straight above). Unlike on stage, Angel is clutching themself and violently crying. The subsequent cuts have Cherri moving closer (first sitting on the side of the bed) and Angel shifting to their side until Cherri is the one staring up into the camera and Angel is turned away.

Can these two realities exist side by side? Can they exist separately? Or does the neon rose-pink tint of the scene suggest that Angel, despite the pain, is surviving as they can—where who they are brings both pain and pleasure in a cyclical fashion of divergence from a “straight and narrow” existence?

As the chorus continues, the scene focuses on the cartoonish representation of a discarded alcohol bottle that transforms into an improvised explosive device as the scene transitions to Cherri’s volatile assault on the metropolis outside. The video cuts between shots of Cherri jumping across rooftops and lobbing cherry bombs and Angel who leaves the floor, climbing hands over hands (they are a spider, they have extra hands) up the pole. Over the closing lines of the chorus, the pair are slowly drawn together until they occupy the frame simultaneously on either side of a pole. With a final close-up, Angel and Cherri give their most menacing look with wide smiles filled with pointed “teeth” and pupil-less eyes, glowing like pinkish-red lanterns.

Through the instrumental bridge into the second verse, we are given glimpses of Cherri continuing to throw bombs and dancing through rooftops, smoke, and explosions. Angel continues dancing among falling money and flashes of erotic and aroused expressions. As Cherri blows up a screen with a picture of Valentino the video transitions to the mobster’s limo where Valentino is counting cash before pulling Angel into their lap and violently forcing a kiss. The scene cuts to Angel in a bedroom, they violently throw a glass against the wall before sinking to the floor and crying, alone in the dark. This sequence of shots from the end of the first verse to the beginning of the second verse show the intense highs and lows that Angel experiences. Valentino and Cherri are objects in Angel’sorbit, and Angel is currently oriented on a line that leads to Valentino (and a bed with their back to Cherri).

The second verse is sung by Cherri Bomb from the city rooftops. The lyrics shift from the self-reflective focus of the first verse to an external “you”. The opening line “Yeah you fell in love/but you fell deeper in this pit” has no strong referent. “You” can be Cherri narrating their own past experience, the phantom image reflected in the puddle, or Angel. Like Angel, Cherri is unapologetic about their behaviour, “so what if I misbehave/it’s what everybody craves.” The referential ambiguity continues in the middle of the verse with Cherri addressing “you” again “to come if… feeling brave and fancy yourself a mate.” Here “mate” refers to friendship (Cherri Bomb is/was Australian), however, it is left ambiguous as to if this friendship pre-exists or will be established. “You” come because you are a mate, or “you” come because you want to be a mate. Later, Cherri’s “sinful delight” is likewise ambiguous as to it attaching to “your money and power” or the reiteration of “a hit of that heaven…” Here “your” more solidly adheres to image of the mysterious demon, but the other “yous” do not have to have the same referent. The verse closes with the same line as Angel’s. Cherri’s “sinful pleasure,” the hit that gets them high, is explosions, with the scene shifting from the mysterious demon back to Cherri pressing the detonation button. Rather than recalling Ahmed, Cherri’s proximity to explosions is more akin to Puar’s terrorist assemblage with Cherri as the explosive interruptions in normative lines of flight. By first exploding the image of Valentino and then the glitzy neon “Addict” sign, Cherri appears to be interrupting Angel’s line of flight as it pertains to Valentino.

The chorus is sung twice, drawing Cherri and Angel closer and closer together. The first iteration is Angel and Cherri in unison while the second time they trade between the third and fourth lines. The second half is then sung twice more, once to end the song and once more to bridge from the credits to Angel’s reprise.

I’m addicted to the madness

This hotel is my Atlantis

We’re forever gonna have a fucking reason to sin

Let me leave my soul to burn and I’ll be breathing it in

I’m addicted to the feeling

Getting higher than the ceiling

And we’re never gonna want this fucking feeling to end

Just concede and give in to your inner demons again[26]

The chorus elaborates on the “hit of heaven and hell” as they describe to what they are addicted. Only the second line “this hotel…” is out of place. Madness, sin, burning soul, higher, never ending, and inner demons all play to this antisocial alignment toward which Angel, as a queer sex worker and drug addict, and Cherri as a 1980s inspired anarchist punk, are oriented. Atlantis alludes to the hotel as an unfound, mythical place, or simply a fabrication. The line “Let me leave my soul to burn and I’ll be breathing it in” poignantly represents the refusal of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation does not fix the conditions, their “reasons to sin.” By letting your emotions go, you’re also “giv[ing] in to your inner demons again.” Here addiction does not automatically attach to narcotics, but to feelings and emotions. Angel and Cherri have found this feeling and a way to attain this feeling, and it is a way that is considered antisocial as they are both positioned as outsiders, as against our society.

The second chorus occurs after Cherri blows up the “ADDICT” sign and jumps off the roof. The video’s colour palette shifts and Angel and Cherri both don their own colourfully tinted glasses. Whereas the start was an off-vibrant rose hue, the closing is vibrant with whites appearing white and the pinks as unfiltered neon. As the music bridges into the next instrumental section, they are shown individually in a changing room from behind, Angel tightening a corset and donning long pink gloves, and Cherri pulling on a fluffy coat. These actions parallel the dressing up from TRHPS with Angel’s wardrobe being strongly evocative of Frank-n-Furter’s. The instrumental section cuts to another rendition of the chorus with the two dancing on stage, Angel in pink tinted glass, Cherri with a yellow tinted star on their one eye. Cherri then blows up the theatre and the pair strut out together as the block of Valentino-owned sex shops explode behind them. The video ends with Angel parallel with Cherri and their back to Valentino and their entire corporate sex enterprise.

In Marvel Cinematic Universe style, “Addict” includes a scene after the credits. The reprise thematically follows the juxtaposition of “hit of that heaven and hell” by doubling down on mixing negative and positive emotions.

I’m addicted to the sorrow

When the buzz ends by tomorrow

There’s another rush of poison flowing into my veins

Giving me a dose of pleasure that resides by the pain

 

I’m addicted, I’m dependent

Looking awesome, feeling helpless

And I know I’m raising Cain by every highway in hell

Maybe things won’t be so terrible inside this hotel[27]

The end of the first stanza focuses the reprise on “a dose of pleasure that resides by the pain.” Here the cycle presented in the opening verse with the video cutting between Angel singing and breaking down is reproduced as a form of survivability. When they primp in front of the mirror (looking awesome) there is a quick cut in the reflection to Valentino holding Angel in a position of forced penetration (feeling helpless). The flash is a reflection of what is/was behind them, as a reminder of what may recur; one possible avenue their life/death can take. “The sorrow” is any number of negative emotions and feelings from circumstances or coming down from a high. This reprise is the general come down or mellowing out after the high of the chorus. The emotions it communicates is a particular state of alienation, of the temporary alignment that is forced to return to an orientation out of alignment, from the feeling of a place beyond the social back to the antisocial. Those moments on stage, or high on PCP, Angel can imagine belonging, but when Valentino assaults them, they are reminded of their alienation from the objects they try to cling to. With only Cherri as an affective guide, Angel wonders if things will be less bad in the hotel, if it may contain such things as allies who accept them rather than exploit them. Meanwhile, to survive, Angel is cycling through these unbounded states of extreme emotions, seeking alignment however painful and exploitative they are. Getting high is the temporary solution to a wider structural problem of intense alienation. As the music dims for good, Angel crawls into bed; a faint smile forms after their pet pig licks their cheek.

The Wild and Untamed

The only significant thematic difference between TRHPS and “Addict” is death. By the nature of the setting, “Addict” takes death off the table as an outcome. The only threat is an eternity of the cycle of emotional pain and pleasure. Angel’s monstrous excess is not going to result in annihilation like Frank-n-Furter’s. Both sequences share in metaphors of sexual and emotional excess, trading in talks of demons and sins. In other words, both are celebrating a particularly antisocial outlook based on the rules of social propriety dictated by western norms produced from theological connections between evil and excess. With Frank and company, and Angel and Cherri, their monstrous antisocial behaviour is salient to queer experiences. What “Addict” adds to this framework in particular is a “fuck it” attitude that underlines the emotional excess expressed through Angel’s verses and the chorus. They refuse both help and cure from anyone outside their alignment net, especially from those who come from positions in traditional frameworks of power. The power that monsters have is fully embraced through a meta-narrative commitment to the antisociality of desire and indulgence. With queer positioned as monstrous, this is the same as staying queer and refusing the normalising gestures of discourses. This demonstrates a form of emotional or expressive representation that resists the commodification of visibility politics. Whereas representation based on identity visibility relies on linguistic codes, particularly social and legal definitions, “Addict” and TRHPS rely on inherent expressive politics that perform their queerness. Operating as they do from the genre position of Gothic; they reveal the queer potential within the expressive canon of Gothic media and produce a queer theory from within the widely accessible realm of the popular.

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Notes

[1] Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): p. 548.

[2] Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), p. 50.

[3] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 2.

[4] Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 82.

[5] Ibid, p. 111.

[6] Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” p. 548;

[7] Jasbir Puar, “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled,” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): p. 46.

[8] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), p. 177.

[9] Ibid, 179.

[10] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 204.

[11] Fred Bottling, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Putner (Oxford, UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 3.

[12] Ibid, p. 12.

[13] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 2.

[14] Mair Rigby, “Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): p. 55.

[15] For definition of low theory: Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 15-17.

[16] Manuel Aguirre, “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror, and Science Fiction,” Gothic Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): p. 2-3.

[17] Aguirre defines Mandelbrot as “paradigmatic” of fractal geometry, “characterized by an increasing complexity at its very edge: the closer one comes to the ‘frontier’ between it and the ‘outside’ (the complementary set), the more complex the structure of this frontier is shown to be”.

[18] Ibid, p. 11-13.

[19] Karen Barad, “Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): p. 388.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, p. 412.

[22] “The Floor Show,” Rocky Horror Wiki, accessed November 17, 2020, https://rockyhorror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Floor_Show.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] “Addict,” Hazbin Hotel Wiki, accessed December 7, 2020, https://hazbinhotel.fandom.com/wiki/Addict.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

 

Bibliography

Aguirre, Manuel. “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror, and Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 1–17.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006.

Barad, Karen. “Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 387–422.

Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66.

Bottling, Fred. “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture.” In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Putner, 3–14. Oxford, UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hazbin Hotel Wiki. “Addict.” Accessed December 7, 2020. https://hazbinhotel.fandom.com/wiki/Addict.

Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Puar, Jasbir. “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled.” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): 45–73.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Duke University Press, 2018.

Rigby, Mair. “Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic.” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 46–57.

Rocky Horror Wiki. “The Floor Show.” Accessed November 17, 2020. https://rockyhorror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Floor_Show.

 

Filmography

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Jim Sharman, United Kingdom, 1975)

Addict. (Silva Hound and Vivziepop, 2020) https://youtu.be/ulfeM8JGq7s.

 

Author Biography

John Francis is a PhD student in Media and Communication at Temple University. They hold a MA degree in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London and a MA degree in English Literature from Monmouth University. Their research focuses on queer affect and phenomenology in global entertainment media with particular focus on illustrated, animated, and interactive forms. This paper is particularly indebted to feedback received from faculty and peers in the Seminar in Queer and Feminist Studies at Temple University.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2511

 

In this article,[1] I explore the queer affective experience of disorientation in projective moving image installations through a case study of the artwork Swinguerra (2019) by Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca. Key literature on the uses of projection in contemporary art has described the experience of moving image installations as disorientating.[2] However, this literature has not fully addressed the complex meanings of disorientation or explored this experience in academic writing. Furthermore, a segment of this literature, published in the first years of the 2000s, approaches the experience with projection as phenomenological due to the wandering of the viewer in the gallery, as it occurs in installations that use multiple-projections. Conversely, this literature also approach the necessity to understand projection from a psychoanalytical framework in regards to the experience with works that use single-projection and apply elements such as storytelling, which would incorporate the need for greater concentration and result in a process of absorption.[3] Consequently, some accounts address a presumable experience of absorption emerging from the contact with works of the 1990s onwards as too passive and lacking on corporeal engagement, while others argue that the process of wandering around the gallery results in a distracted viewer that lacks critical engagement with the moving image. This highlights the binary wandering/absorption as the one most commonly used in the work of moving image art scholars writing in the 2000s, even if not directly or explicitly attached to psychoanalytical or phenomenological frameworks.

Nevertheless, the literature that emerged in the second decade of the 2000s challenges these binaries by arguing that a process of absorption does not mean a lack of corporeal involvement, and that wandering around the gallery does not necessarily equate to a lack of critical engagement.[4] However, disorientation as a phenomenological concept remains unexplored even in this context, as it is always only briefly mentioned to describe the experience within projective moving image installations. In order to address this theoretical gap, I employ a case study analysis informed by queer phenomenology and autoethnography, and connected with methodological accounts of “queer-life-writing”[5] and self-narration in the realm of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named “experimental critical writing”.[6] I adopt autoethnography in this study as a queer methodology that “engages personal experience, reflexivity, memory, and storytelling device” critically to address lived events and create what Tony E. Adams and Derek M. Bolen indicate as intense and vulnerable descriptions of these events through performative writing that engages with the experience of the body in a specific time and space.[7]

Sara Ahmed conceptualises disorientation as the living of specific moments of queer|failed orientation.[8] This means that being disorientated is related to how we react to the moments in which we feel out of place. Disorientation occurs when a common ground fails to support some bodies whilst experiencing certain orientated lines. At this moment, this non-supported body becomes oblique, strange, slips away from common experiences. Ahmed proposes that moments of disorientation can be a phenomenon that we must learn from, as they allow us to look at and read the world differently; i.e., queer the world.[9] According to Ahmed, one of the main results of feeling disorientated is a body that ultimately acts in “disturbing the others”, the core phenomenon of disorientation that will be explored in this study.[10] Disorientation happens in the process of destabilisation of both the bodies and the ground as a continuum feature, becoming a phenomenon that continuously moves around the space and affects how people decide to gather around specific objects to build a common ground.[11] Therefore, whilst moving around in the art gallery, it is important to understand our role as potential agents of affective transformations in the non-hierarchically sensorial environment produced by the process of becoming a disorientated body and consequently disturbing the other bodies. The case study analysed in this article evoked an experience of disorientation due to the constant and confusing process of having to decide which way to look, which room to enter, which side to walk towards, whilst spatially positioning myself (distancing and approximating) regarding the projections and the bodies that shared the common ground of the gallery with me.

Therefore, the main argument developed throughout this article is that the positionality we take in the art gallery concerning the distance and proximity to the projection, both physically and affectively, disturbs the other bodies differently, as it is necessary to implement a besideness attitude in relation to the other visitors and the content in the projected moving images. Consequently, besideness is the key concept used to discuss the disorientating phenomena of disturbing the others in projective moving image installations. Sedgwick conceptualises besideness as a positionality that challenges stable, hierarchical, and binary spatial positions such as beneath and beyond and dualistic thoughts such as “cause versus effect, subject versus object”.[12] Sedgwick further explains that besideness is comprised of “a wide ranging of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations”.[13] Consequently, Sedgwick claims that besideness is about creating affective spaces for several objects to exist alongside one another as conflicting elements that can foster the building of collectivity whilst drawing attention to particularities. In this direction, I understand besideness in dialogue with Katharina Lindner’s appropriation of this concept, as a spatial and affective attitude to opening yourself to the “spaces of possibility” that shape other people’s bodies according to their positionalities.[14] According to Lindner, this is to reach an affective engagement that allows non-normative forms of relationality and queer embodiments to emerge.[15] Hence, affectively approaching besideness requires an attitude of looking to your side, to what resides beside your body, which means close but not equal to, a distant proximity or a proximate distance.

This process of spatial orientation and decision-making is responsible for affectively activating besideness as an attitude that needs to be conveyed to face the moving image content, as the artwork Swinguerra exposes a besideness position regarding the relationalities established with the people that appear in the film. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca do not seem to represent someone. Instead, these artists speak nearby the bodies in the moving images, in the sense that Trinh T. Minh-Ha understands as not objectifying or speaking from a distance to the subject that speaks, but one that gets close enough to the subjects and amplifies their voices without undermining their competence of speaking for themselves.[16] To speak nearby is to establish a besideness attitude to give space to voices and positionalities that are frequently silenced in a heteronormative social arrangement, thus addressing the inequalities inherent in the voices that are allowed to speak easily and make decisions for others.

In the following pages, I present an analysis of the experience of visiting the art gallery in which Swinguerra was installed during the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2019, considering the role of the besideness attitude in establishing affective relationalities towards the objects in this space, these being our bodies, the projections, and the subjects in the moving images. I first offer an affective orientated description of this experience and subsequently theoretically explore the disorientated moments of this encounter in the section Distance and proximity as practices of inhabitation. I discuss the role of positioning myself, distant or proximate to the projection, in the creation of the besideness attitude. First I argue that, in moving image installations, projection can become a peripheral element because the visitors are distant from it, as they have to deal with the affective disturbance of the other bodies in the gallery. Conversely, I demonstrate how this process can be approached through the lenses of affective proximities with the projected moving images that do not necessarily require physical proximity in the gallery. Lastly, the subsection named Inhabiting beside approaches how articulating spatial distance and proximity can help us to understand the implementation of a besideness attitude and its developments in the space of the gallery through empathising with the content of the projected moving images.

Swinguerra (2019), by Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca

I wander through the streets of the Giardini in Venice, feeling the sweat running all over my skin and embracing the wetness of my body under an overwhelmingly blue and sunny sky, one that keeps my head facing down towards the warm stone floor since looking up is a sensory battle in which my eyes struggle to remain open while they are led by a nostalgic sensation of having felt this before. A few metres from where I stand, the Brazilian flag flaps smoothly on the national pavilion, and while I walk towards the entrance, my body seems to recognise the temperature that surrounds me as a sign of proximity incited by a potential encounter with a familiar environment. I move into the space, carried by an expectation of finding someone with who I can establish a proximity, one that leads to a certain comfort from being in the presence of what is easily recognisable. A recognition of language, of a body that could move like me, talk like me, while at the same time an upset stomach and breathing movement that seems to travel slowly but heavily through my chest and throat, appearing out of the tension of meeting someone that could match those expectations.

I walk rapidly changing my movements and almost tiptoeing around as if running away from an encounter with proximities that I am not completely sure I want to embrace. Meanwhile, I distance myself from the main entrance of the pavilion and now walk towards a song I can hear from a distance. While listening to this high frequency sound and enticing beats echoing throughout the environment, I quickly move towards the confrontation of an overcrowded and bright second gallery, where the natural light invades the space, filling every inch with a clarity that seems to introduce to the inside space the heat experienced outside in a constant rising of the temperature. While walking, I still perspire, this running water sticking my clothes to my skin, because of the almost tropical warmness, one that weakens my mobility, as if the warmth is pulling my body to the ground and turning my feet into being a heavier element that balances my weight in space and orientates my drowsy body.

In this lethargic itinerary, the song I can still hear drags me forward to the encounter of the amalgamation of bodies that, a few metres from me, seem to gather around, compressed by the sounds that still emanate from an unidentified source. I follow the music and consequently start shaping an encounter with these bodies because I can identify the loud beats as something that will lead me to the encounter with the projection. The high-frequency and frantic sounds reverberate in my body as if I am in a nightclub, one that is clearly overcrowded and where dancing is about the inevitable and accidental touching of other people`s bodies and the mixing of fluids that pass through our skins. I cannot avoid the touch of the other while attempting to find a space for myself to further explore the gallery. Inside of me, the strident tune seems to wander through my bones, energising every inch of my body, and each hair on my arms moves as a result of the random and fleetingly overwhelming movements and spams that my muscles and organs employ in response to the beat of the song reaching my ears and caressing my skin.

I lose myself amongst the other visitor’s bodies, as it is not clear which way to go to find the films I am looking for. As this proximity increases the warmness in the space, the fleeting and refreshing wind emanating from the movement of the fans in others’ hands alleviates the sensorial tension resulting from the occasional friction of skins that occurs in the barrier that the gathering of these bodies creates at the entrance of this gallery. The thickly textured beats, however, remain as an atmospheric magnet that keeps me moving towards the unknown settings of the space and to trespass on the space of the mass of bodies I am facing until I finally identify two projections on opposite sides of the long and narrow gallery. Situated in the middle of the space, between the two projections, I repetitively look from one side to the other, glancing around in a movement that strains my neck, and I mimic the same confusion I notice in other people’s behaviour, as they keep rotating their bodies from side to side.

I cannot seem to recognise differences in the films that would help me with choosing which way to move forward. I turn to the left, throwing my hands forward to intercept the space in between the other people around me, attempting to open a way that will allow my body to slowly move towards one side or the other, breaking the distance from the projection by infringing on the space in which the crowd is gathering in the middle of the gallery. On this side, the song echoes through my body as if an endless gust of wind is attached to the projection and is keeping my eyes open since I can hear lyrics in Portuguese and recognise a queerness in the bodies that I see dancing in the film. The comfort of listening to my mother tongue loosens the tension I feel in my muscles while I push my body against the wall, paralysed by the warmth from the laborious effort of trespassing on the amalgamation of the other bodies.

Watching the people dancing in the films provokes my own body to move as if attempting to sustain the high energy that encloses the space through the fast and uncontrollable beats, where the uneasiness of my tense muscles and rapid heartbeats of my seemingly immobile body viscerally drag me towards a self-questioning movement. What if I am missing something by not watching the film projected on the other side? While turning around to look back, I face again the other bodies and can identify, at a distance, the slight differences of camera angles in the films. I choose to stay here on the left, as the thought of the stressful journey of moving around in this gallery leaves me unsettled since the struggle to again trespass in the space where all these bodies are positioned does not account for the affective and moving relationships I established with the dancing bodies in the films.

While the loudness of the frenetic song seems to increase, I stare at these bodies in the film as if recognising in their movements my own possibilities of inhabiting this space. As if their dancing gestures can somehow mirror movements that are not only employed as a means of confrontation in this dancing battle that I seem to also live, here in the realm of a queer positionality in the gallery. Paralysed by the contact with the film, I move back to my earlier experiences in Brazil while seeing myself virtually beside a diversity of people with whom I can establish an affective proximity precisely because their movements gravitate around my daily gestures in the Brazilian landscapes I can also recognise in the film. After a while of standing by the wall and watching the film, I leave the gallery by walking away and crossing in front of the bodies that face the same projection as me, interrupting their view with my own movements re-energised through contact with the familiar bodies in the projections.

Distance and proximity as practices of inhabitation.

The previous section described the affective experience of disorientation whilst visiting this article’s case study, as an attempt to capture, as closely as possible, the queer affects and sense of disorientation emerging from the live encounter with the artwork. Using the term “encounter” to describe this action is also an attempt to address this moment as one involving “surprise”, [17] “conflict”,[18] “messiness”, [19] “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning”, [20] or the unexpected (sometimes pleasurable, other times frightening) where disorientation can emerge as a queer embodied affect. In a queer phenomenological approach, this embodied encounter is crucially informed by how moving images move us through the kinaesthetic experience of walking, breathing, or shivering but also through the histories and sedimentations that shape our bodies concerning gender, race, class, and sexuality.

For instance, Jenny Chamarette argues that, in a film-phenomenological account, description plays a crucial role in understanding the affective qualities of encounters with films.[21] The description is understood as unseparated from criticality since the act of describing already takes into consideration an analytical relationship between the viewer’s body and its contextual surroundings. Therefore, description is the most suitable method for capturing the fleeting disorientations and queer affects that emerge in the contact with projection. More than approaching queer phenomenology as a theoretical framework, in this article I highlight its use as a queer methodology that can provide queer, non-normative, destabilising and disorientated modes to analyse the experience within projective moving image installations. Consequently, queer phenomenology is understood as a mode to interfere in the academic form, voice, and style of moving image installations’ analyses, highlighting the role of embodied description, positionality, autobiographical approaches and first-person voice as crucial for this endeavour.

Therefore, the use of queer phenomenology and autoethnography includes the possibility to build up a critical analysis of moving image installations that connects the experience of the projection-related disorientation and the disorientations that shape queer lives. This theoretical alliance can help foster queer insights that challenge phenomenology’s universalist ideas of the bodily experience. In this section I will explore the role of the continuum between distance and proximity as a phenomenon that can lead us to build a besideness attitude in the space of projective moving image installations based on the affective description undertaken in the previous section. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s work Swinguerra made me inhabit disorientating environments in which the constant shift between distancing and approximating shaped the modes of relationalities with the projection and the other bodies in the gallery.[22] According to Anne Cvetkovich, art installations are spaces that “facilitate new forms of embodied experience, including feelings that take the form of moods and sensibilities rather than specific emotions. Refusing stable boundaries between the interior and exterior of both self and space, it creates new forms of collectivity and sociality”.[23] Hence, my focus in this analysis is not to highlight the discrete characteristics of distance and proximity as two different phenomena concerning inhabiting the space of projective moving image installations. Instead, I argue that these concepts, which seem to be part of an opposed binary, are interconnected as a mode to create relational affects in the spaces we inhabit as social and collective environments.

Proximity can connect us to something to occupy a space but detach us from the place we leave behind in a non-binary overlay of spatial and temporal dimensions. In this occupation, Ahmed argues that we orientate our attention towards something whilst failing to notice other objects around us.[24] Consequently, distancing from objects we have been attached to means leaving something behind whilst potentially creating an affective contact with other objects. This is in order to create proximities and supportive contacts that can make our positionalities less disorientated as we can detach from harmful affects that may have shaped our lives. Therefore, the continuum between distance and proximity presumes movement. This movement affects other that share the same ground as us, as the desire to distance from or approximate something is informed by the orientated tendencies that shape our bodies.[25] It is important to notice that in discussing the affective qualities of distance and proximity, Ahmed refers not only to physical movements of bodies but also to the relationality that is built based on similarly affective, historical, theoretical, or sexual orientations. The experience with Swinguerra demonstrated that distancing and approximating from objects is a decision-making process that is entangled with an interplay of being in the physical space and affective distances and proximities with what resides outside the gallery and that is embodied through our movements in this same place.

Alison Butler addresses the role of distance and proximity in moving image installations by arguing that these works are imbued with a deictic aspect, where binarisms such as “here and there, now and then, us and them” appear and can allow the viewers virtually to access locations in the world that they would not usually be able to, an affective movement that can provide us with affective displacements in the immersive space of the gallery.[26] According to Butler, whilst these binary positionalities can sometimes appear to be fixed, they can turn into a dialogical endeavour.[27] I would like to advance Butler’s arguments by demonstrating how a process of disorientation occurs not in the rigidness of either here or there, distance or proximity, but in the continuous movement of recognising the materiality and positionality of our bodies whilst establishing a besideness attitude with the content of the projected moving images and the other bodies in the gallery. Consequently, the magnetising aspects of a projective moving image, as eliciting gatherings and proximities in the gallery, lead to the access of queer affects that can disorientate the other bodies located in our surroundings or build queer communalities that turn the space into a queer space.

Based on the claims of Ahmed, I employ the idea of other not as a matter of negating or undermining the existence and experience of someone who is not me, but as a form of mutual bodily extension materialised through the queer affects that can emerge from the collision of different subjectivities. Hence, the other is not me but exists in the conflict of occupying a space beside me, where, according to Ahmed, desire plays a crucial role.[28] A desire to establish proximities with something else as an “affective social force, the glue”[29] brings to the experience a consciousness of what is not me. Nevertheless, an affective confrontation does not imply turning this mutual extension into a single body, as to Ahmed, establishing proximities does not equal merging with or completely understanding other body’s histories.[30] To identify an other, thus, is to recognise the limitations of our histories in addressing the diversity of experiences that shape the bodies that inhabit the same space as we do. A besideness affective attitude towards the other is a confrontation with the limitations of our bodies in speaking for the other, which can sometimes mean ceasing to speak. In the art gallery, my body and the ones I shared the space with mutually affected and disturbed one another, resulting in kinaesthetic empathic responses that were either orientated towards the moving image content or towards the other visitors during the moments of experiencing the work Swinguerra in-between distance and proximity.

In this direction, to distance is sometimes to leave a space towards the encounter with the uncertain, unsettling and disorientating, as the new objects that arrive close to our bodies might not support an orientation that allow us to move forward. Distance is, according to Ahmed, “the expression of certain loss, of the loss of grip over an object that is already within reach”.[31] Hence, the proximity of some bodies can prevent us from moving affectively, but other objects around us may work as an orientation device that redirects us towards more productive ways to proceed with our journeys. To Ahmed, this usually occurs when similar tendencies are followed, as “we tend toward that which is near, just as what is near shows us our tendencies”, and common ground is built to turn the space of disorientation into a queer space that supports the emergence of queer affects.[32] In the experience with this article’s case study, the physical distance from projection, for example, exists because of the proximity of the bodies that prevented me from moving towards the moving images, whilst the contact with the atmospheric qualities of sound worked to establish affective relationships that orientated me towards the subsequent encounter with the projections.

Inhabiting the middle of the gallery in Swinguerra affected my body as a sensorial temporal suspension of the process of decision-making. This happened because I could not move forward without having to engage in a kinaesthetic struggle in relation to the others’ presence, which consequently put me in contact with a queer embodiment in the process of implementing unusual gestures that I normally associate with overcrowded nightclubs, as mentioned in the case study’s description. Imagine you are dancing amidst a large number of people in a nightclub: Your skin will accidentally touch another person’s, you might become shy when someone faces you, you might deny any further interaction, or you might embrace the gaze as a possibility for building an affective relation. You dance moving your arms, your legs, and your head in different directions, as the sound seems to dominate your full body whilst you respond to the spatiality created by the movement of the other bodies that are not yours, but directly affect your sense of spatiality because their proximity disturbs your dancing movements. This is exactly the experience of queer embodiment and disorientation that being in the middle of the gallery in Swinguerra provided me. Now picture yourself dancing in the same nightclub, in the middle of the dancefloor, and you decide to go buy a drink in the bar you can only reach visually from a distance by looking to the other side of the space. You have to open space by positioning your leg amongst other legs, by using your hands to open a way to the bar. By using your hands, I mean not only moving them away from your body. Your hands metaphorically excavate the dancefloor, gesturing with distorted fingers that seem to challenge the normality of their orientation, because the small qualities of your fingers allow you to access the small and empty spaces between the bodies that prevent you from moving. This was my kinaesthetic engagement in the art gallery when attempting to distance myself from the amalgamation of bodies and move towards the projections on the left, whilst the energetic beats of Brazilian funk music kept viscerally moving my insides. However, whilst the amalgamation of bodies kept me fleetingly away from the projections, some other elements approximated me to them.

Consequently, what happens when we physically approximate objects? As Ahmed argues, “Some proximities exist to “support” actions – some surfaces are there to support. The work of support involves proximity and is the ground for the experience of other proximities”.[33] Approximating an object, in queer phenomenological terms, means establishing relationalities that can either start supporting our movements in the common ground (rescuing us from disorientation) or create hostile spaces from which we will need to distance ourselves because they can be extensively or fleetingly traumatic and disorientating for the senses.

In Swinguerra, the positionality of my body amongst an overwhelming and suffocating crowd of people was decisive for me to quickly implement decisions regarding which side of the gallery to direct my attention to and physically move forward. It was the disturbing and disorientating affects resulting from the proximities of the other bodies that put me in closer contact with the surface of the distant projection on the left side. The previously mentioned space crowded with bodies in the middle of the gallery demonstrated the potentiality of the encounter with projective moving images as forming areas of conviviality that consequently were zones of conflict and destabilisation that affectively disturbed the occupants of the space.[34] In the middle of the gallery, the elements that seemed to orbit around the projections were responsible for helping the bodies to choose which side to go or decide to maintain the disorientating experience of staying between the projections. The latter decision might happen as the moving images could not provide an affective relation that provoked some bodies to move towards the projections and approximate one of the sides.

In my experience with Swinguerra, the sound turned out to be mainly responsible for the emergence of a queer affective relationality. I decided to leave the gathering because I could not establish a proximity with the bodies around me. I moved to the left, approximating the projection because of the affective and kinaesthetic relationship that I had started building with the bodies I could see in the films, as they portrayed a queerness that conversed with my Brazilian body’s response to the contact with the Brazilian music that we were all sharing in the gallery and in the moving images. As Giuliana Bruno claims, “Film moves, and fundamentally “moves” us, with its ability not simply to render affects but to affect in transmittable forms and intermediated ways. This means that such a medium of movement moves to incorporate and interact with other spaces that provoke intimate yet public response”.[35] By subsequently taking the position of moving whilst affected by the moving images and closely facing the projection, I could finally identify common grounds that put my body in contact with queer affects supporting my occupancy of the space, as the previous contact with the other visitors did not provide me with any commonalities. The potential encounter with bodies that could look like me, talk like me, or move like me, did not happen in the gathering of bodies or in the first steps I took in the gallery, but in the affective displacement of contacting the bodies in the projections.

Therefore, the experience with the case study demonstrates how distancing from the other bodies in the gallery, either arbitrarily or intentionally, could create disorientating personal and intimate spaces. Conversely, approximating other people in the gallery was disorientating when these bodies did not support, and even disturbed, the movements I intended to employ towards the projections. In the disorientation emerging from the distant proximity or proximate distance from the bodies in the gallery and the projections, a besideness attitude emerged as a possibility to build an affective reconciliation with the queerness that shaped this process; this will be explored in the next section.

Inhabiting beside

In the previous section, I demonstrated how the binarism presumably inherent to the ideas of distance and proximity is instead formed by a continuum of distant proximity or proximate distance. This means that distance and proximity can only exist if understood in relation to one another, as a fluid and non-binary phenomenon that affects what it touches whilst moving to enable connections with different objects that can either support or undermine this movement. It might not be possible to inhabit a space without leaving behind the one we were occupying, the backgrounds, privileges, and histories that affected us, including the disturbing presence of other bodies throughout the temporal developments of our lives. However, it is conceivable to move forward carrying along and beside us a series of objects and affects that will help the improvement of queer movements because they turn the space into a queer space, providing common grounds for people who may live through disorientating lines.

Hence, a besideness attitude towards the other emerges in the fluid temporal and spatial movement of distancing and approximating from different objects, and of identifying who and what lies beside us, to find a common and supportive ground to build and maintain queer spaces. During this process, we might discover that experiences that look distant may have more proximity with us than we would consider. An experience that is not mine and does not affect me does not mean an experience with which I cannot empathise with and establish a besideness attitude to overcome harmful social disorientations that happen, for example, in the life of queer people whose existence challenges heteronormative lines of relationality. However, as stated in this article’s introduction, this means understanding when to talk beside the other. In this section I will explore how the recognition of bodies I encountered in a distant proximity or proximate distance to the surface of the projections rescued me from or pulled me towards disorientation. This happened due to the kinaesthetic empathy with the movements and histories of these diegetic bodies or the installation settings, which led to the rise of besideness as a mode of relationality with the moving images.

I would like to review briefly the kinaesthetic experience of being in the middle of the gallery and amongst the other visitors in Swinguerra. As previously stated, at that moment it was the suffocating atmosphere and the disorientation generated from the proximity of the other bodies that made me choose which side to go, even though I was not secure about the differences in the two projections that I could see from a distance. The initial sustained visual contact with the content of the moving images projected when I stood beside one of the walls to watch the films can easily be read as the moment in which my body established a kinaesthetically empathic proximity that subsequently led to a besideness attitude. Therefore, the first layer of a besideness attitude emerged in the encounter with the others and the disorientation caused by their bodies, and consequently my body, in the middle of the gallery. As discussed in the previous section, it was necessary to embody queerness as a mode to inhabit the same place with other bodies, thus having to implement movements that could only exist in the relationality with the others beside me. Through queer movements, informed by a besideness attitude, we all needed to move with each other, move because of the others, or open space for the other bodies to move, if we intended to reach the projections as a collectively desired object.

The subsequent decision of walking to one side seemed to relate to choosing which side of the battle portrayed in the films I was supporting in the gallery. However, it became virtually impossible to distinguish what side of the battle was chosen. This is because by moving to the left and staying there, it became impossible to access the film projected on the opposite side of the gallery since the amalgamation of bodies prevented me from visually reaching the projections and the sound playing around the environment was the same for both films. Through this process. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s installation appeared to implement in the space the second layer of a besideness attitude concerning their work, since moving to one side was based on the kinaesthetic reverberations of the act of looking at the bodies dancing in the moving image that, to some extent, affected my body. This affective relationship emerged as the bodies implemented movements informed by a queer kinaesthesia. Lindner draws on the work of Jonathan Bollen[36] to define queer kinaesthesia as the modes in which our bodies can move in the space, disrupting social expectations related to our assigned genders.[37] This is to disorientate normative modes of approach to binarisms such as femininity and masculinity, which according to Lindner are informed by the background of the bodies that implement this queer kinaesthesia, and are consequently intersected by relationships with class and race.

Lindner points out how queer bodies inhabit space differently because of the disturbance of binarisms, sometimes leading them to be considered socially wrong, deviant or inappropriate due to the differences implemented in relation to touch, distancing, approximating and contacting other objects. The bodies dancing in the moving images created a zone of conflict not only to keep the bodies of the visitors together but to keep us beside one another to choose which side to go in the dancing battle that happened in the films. Meanwhile, we had to deal affectively with the differences in inhabiting the space. It was the contact with the queer bodies on the screen that turned the space of the gallery into a queer space after the relative sensorially traumatic experience of inhabiting the middle of the gallery along with such a large number of bodies that prevented me from moving. By turning the space into a queer space, the films provided me with an affective mechanism to initiate a walk on common grounds and thus reconnect with the queerness of my body as a mode to overcome the previous stressful disorientation.

This argument does not imply that inhabiting the gallery with the other bodies was an unproductive experience. Rather, the queerness of the bodies in the moving images was potentially responsible for maintaining some other bodies in the middle of the gallery for a larger period than the one I undertook, as these other people may not have established proximities with the bodies in the moving images. However, even if a process of kinaesthetic empathy does not emerge for some visitors as a process of “in-this-togetherness”[38], as seeing themselves in that context, they could have potentially worked as mechanism to “raise awareness” and build an extended besideness attitude towards the dancers in the films and the bodies beside them in the gallery.[39]

The music video documentary format of Swinguerra opened up space for these bodies to speak for themselves by bringing their dancing movements to the surface of the projections through their own means of social and spatial engagements. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca created a film in which they do not approximate those queer bodies as if they were part of their context. Instead, they employ a besideness attitude, in the sense of letting the dancers shape their means of showing how their bodies can be portrayed in the moving images. Therefore, dancing in this film became a great example of what Lindner states is a spectacular way to re-orientate normative embodiments[40], opening space for the gallery visitors affectively to “investigate questions of gender, sexuality, and desire by paying attention to ‘movement style, spatial negotiation, or relational positioning’”.[41] In the sustained contact with the queer bodies in the moving images a sense of ‘feeling at home’ emerged through recognition of those bodies as part of a cultural context that affectively talked to me as a Latinx American.

According to Cvetkovich, this sort of commonality is crucially informed by affect as it intends to underpin alternative relationalities and “modes of being, and being with others, when established cultures and institutions might not be available”.[42] In the recognition of a Latinx context, a home from which I had been geographically distant, I quickly established proximities with the moving images because the normative aspects of the art gallery did not support my affective movements amongst the other bodies. Regarding being distant from home, Ahmed argues that “’distance’ is also an effect of an orientation we have already taken, which makes what is ‘near’ close to us in more than a spatial sense”.[43]

Ahmed’s words exemplify Cvetkovich’s discussion of an affective common as not existing in fixed physical locations, but as a sensory experience that is shared by the people who gather around common affectivities.[44] Therefore, the ‘at home’ feeling as mentioned by Ahmed, does not equal a specific territory but is instead a metaphor for a place that supports gatherings.[45] In this context, a besideness attitude is about the possibility of bringing someone close to allow them to inhabit a space beside us and make them comfortable even if sometimes at a distance, even if we do not completely embody their histories. This non-coincidence of experiences is an important element to review when approaching the establishment of besideness, an empathic attitude towards experiences that are not ours. I cannot embody experiences I have not lived but I can activate a besideness attitude by trusting the bodies that claim to have lived common, sometimes distant but proximate disorientating experiences.

In Swinguerra a proximity to the projection could only be established through disorientation, as an attempt to disturb and affect the bodies who do not live the experiences portrayed but who can move beside in parallel disorientating common grounds, to re-orientate similarly social experiences that are harmfully based on prejudices regarding class, race, sexuality or nationality. As mentioned before, by putting so many different bodies together in the same space, this moving image installation created gatherings that lead to the confrontation of the affects that travel around, affecting everyone mutually. Cvetkovich reminds us that understanding these relationalities through the point of view of queerness is to approach sensory politics, “a way of making space not only for different kinds of bodies but for different modes of perception, and ones that are fully embodied or material”.[46]

Through opening space for a besideness attitude to emerge, the case study explored in this article built spaces of conviviality through the gathering of different bodies in different circumstances, turning “physical gatherings meaningful as the ways people come together to form collectivities, especially against concerns that such gatherings are too small scale or atomized”.[47] Inhabiting the space of the gallery in Swinguerra allowed common queer affects to emerge as possible mechanisms to disorientate expectations and normative modes of relationalities within the gallery through the constant suspension and restatement of the freedom to move around. These commonalities, however, are crucially informed by conflict, particularities, “ambivalence, mixed feelings and negative affects”.[48] The specific process of empathising differently with the bodies in the films presented in Swinguerra exemplifies how these conflicts were created as a mode to destabilise my body through the establishment of affective distant proximities or proximate distances.

Consequently, in the process of moving around the gallery whilst distancing or approximating other bodies, the projections could become a peripheral element in the immediate spatial experience, as the bodies of the other people disturbed my freedom of movement in the space, highlighting the potentialities of projective moving image as a magnetising element that elicits gatherings through either proximate collectivities or intimate distances. In this context, distance and proximity might imply a level of physical movement, wandering around by leaving a location of the gallery to get physically close to the projection. However, distance and proximity can be understood as a level of absorption, since distancing from one place in the gallery means establishing a sustained proximity with the content of the moving images that will still make you move viscerally. They co-exist as a fluid endeavour.

Through employing a besideness attitude in this context, the experience within projective moving image installations changes what seems far away from our histories into something considerably close to our affective experiences. Besideness undermines the binarism of wandering and absorption in projective moving image installations by establishing distant proximities and proximate distances. In the artwork analysed, we affectively move the bodies in the gallery or the films that seem distant from us to our side to move beside and along with them. In establishing this attitude, small-scale collectivities can be built based on the queer affects that emerge from socially disorientated commonalities concerning sexuality, race, gender, and nationality.

 

---

Notes

[1] This article partially results from my PhD research titled ‘Projective Moving Image Installation as Disorientation Device: a Phenomenology of Queer Encounters’, fully funded by the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) – Ministry of Education of Brazil (Process number 88881.128292/2016-01) , and developed at The Glasgow School of Art.

[2] For instance, Chrissie Iles (2002), Malcolm Turvey et al. (2003), Sean Cubitt (2007), Mary Ann Doanne (2009), Maeve Connolly (2009), Kate Mondloch (2010), Tamara Trodd (2011), Erika Balsom (2013), Giuliana Bruno (2014), Catherine Elwes (2015), and Alison Butler (2019).

[3] For instance, these two approaches appear in the works of Chrissie Iles (2002), Malcom Turvey et al. (2003), Dominique Païni (2004), Sean Cubitt (2007), Liz Kotz (2008), Gregor Stenmrich (2009), Mary Ann Doanne (2009), Tamara Trodd (2011), Maria Wlash (2011).

[4] For instance, Kate Mondloch (2010), Christine Ross (2011), Erika Balsom (2013),  Giuliana Bruno (2014), Catherine Elwes (2015), and Alison Butler (2019).

[5] Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, Long term: essays on queer commitment (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021), p. 18.

[6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Teaching ‘Experimental Critical Writing’”, in The ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[7] Tony E. Adams and Derek M. Bolen, “Tragic Queer at the Urinal Stall, Who, Now, Is the Queerest One of All? Queer Theory | Autoethnography | Doing Queer Autoethnography”, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Volume 4, Issue Number 1 (2017): p. 104.

[8] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p.  157-158.

[9] Ibid, p. 157.

[10] Ibid, p. 151-152.

[11] Ibid, p. 152-153.

[12] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8.

[13] Ibid, p. 8.

[14] Katharina Lindner, Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema (London: I.B. Taurus, 2018), p. 5.

[15] Ibid, p. 5.

[16] Trinh T. Min-Ha, “”Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha”, Visual Anthropology Review Volume 8, Issue Number 1 (1992): p. 85.

[17] Sara Ahmed, Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 6; Lindner, Film bodies.

[18] Ahmed, Strange encounters, p. 6.

[19] Heather Love, “Queer Messes”. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3 & 4 (2016): 345-349.

[20] Sedgwick, Tendencies. p. 7.

[21] Jenny Chamarette, “ Embodying Spectatorship: From Phenomenology to Sensation,”   The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), p. 315.

[22] Swinguerra (2019) was installed in the Brazilian National Pavilion located in the Giardini, one of the main exhibition spaces of the International Exhibition La Bienalle di Venezia in the city of Venice Italy. The work occupied the two galleries of the pavilion. In the first gallery a series of photographies were installed on the walls. In the second gallery, the films were projected onto two screens located on opposite walls of the long space.

[23] Anne Cvetkovich, “”It Feels Right to Me”: Queer Feminist Art Installations and the Sovereignty of the Senses”, Feminist Media Histories, Volume 7, Issue Number 2 (2021): p. 44.

[24] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 165-166.

[25] Ibid, p. 114.

[26] Alison Butler, Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations, (Switzerland: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019), p. 116.

[27] Ibid, p. 137.

[28] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology,  p. 114-115

[29] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 128.

[30] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 128.

[31] Ibid, p. 166.

[32] Ibid, p. 126.

[33] Ibid, p. 166.

[34] Some authors in the literature about projection in contemporary art, such as Maeve Connoly (2009), Sven Lütticken (2009), Giuliana Bruno (2014), and Matthew Noble-Olson (2016), Alison Butler (2019), discuss projective moving images’ ability to create areas of conviviality in the art gallery.

[35] Giuliana Bruno, Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 145.

[36] Jonathan Bollen, “Queer Kinesthesia: performativity on the dancefloor”, in Dancing desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

[37] Lindner, Film Bodies, p. 81.

[38] Ami Harbin, Disorientation and Moral Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 110.

[39] Ibid., p. 66.

[40] Lindner, Film Bodies, p.  79.

[41] Ibid, p. 81.

[42] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 33.

[43] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 126-127.

[44] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 34.

[45] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 126.

[46] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 46.

[47] Ibid, p. 47.

[48] Ibid, p. 34.

 

Bibliography

Adams, Tony E., and Bolen, Derek M., “Tragic Queer at the Urinal Stall, Who, Now, Is the   Queerest One of All? Queer Theory | Autoethnography | Doing Queer Autoethnography” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Volume 4, Issue Number 1 (2017): p. 100-113.

Ahmed, Sara. Strange  Encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

Bollen, Jonathan, “Queer Kinesthesia: performativity on the dancefloor, in Dancing desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Butler, Alison. Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations. Switzerland: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019.

Chamarette, Jenny. “Embodying Spectatorship: From Phenomenology to Sensation”, in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2017.

Connoly, Mave. The Place of Artists’ Cinema. Bristol: Intellect and Chicago University Press, 2009.

Cubitt, S. “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming”, in Media Art Histories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Anne, “”It Feels Right to Me”: Queer Feminist Art Installations and the Sovereignty of the Senses”, Feminist Media Histories, Volume 7, Issue Number 2 (2021): p. 30-64.

Doanne, Mary Ann. “The location of the image: cinematic projection and scale in modernity”, in Art of Projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Elwes, Catherine. Installation and the moving image. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2015.

Harbin, Amin. Disorientation and Moral Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Herring, Scott, and Wallace, Lee, ed. Long term: essays on queer commitment. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021.

Iles, Chrissie. Into the Light: the projected image in American Art, 1964-1977. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002.

Kotz, Liz. “Video projection: the space between screens”. in Art and the moving image: a critical reader. London: Tate Pub. in association with Afterall, 2008.

Lindner, Katharina. Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema. London: I.B. Taurus, 2018.

Love, Heather. “Queer messes”, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3 & 4 (2016): p. 345-349.

Lütticken, Sven. “Liberating Time”, in Art of Projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Mi-Ha, Trinh T. “”Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha”, Visual Anthropology Review Volume 8, Issue Number 1 (1992): p. 82-91.

Mondloch, Kate. Screens: viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Noble-Olson, Matthew, “Melancholy Projection”, Discourse, Volume 38, Issue Number 3 (2016): p. 390-413.

Païni, Dominique. “Should we put an end to projection?”, October, 110 (2004), p. 23-48

Ross, Christine. “The projective shift between installation art and new media art: from distantiation to connectivity”, in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. 2 ed. United States of America: Duke University Press, 1994.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Teaching Experimental Critical Writing”, in The ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

Stenmrich, Gregor. Dam Graham’s Cinema and Film Theory. in Art of projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Trodd, Tamara. “Introduction: theorising the projected image”. in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Turvey, Malcom et al. “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”. October, Volume 104 (2003): p. 71-96.

Walsh, Maria. “‘You’ve got me under your spell’: the entranced spectator”. in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

 

Author biography

Danilo Baraúna is a PhD candidate at The Glasgow School of Art, funded by CAPES (Brazilian Ministry of Education). His thesis is titled ‘Projective moving image installation as disorientation device: a phenomenology of queer encounters’, submitted for examination in February 2022. Research interests are in the fields of Moving Image Art, Queer Studies, and Affect Theory. Danilo has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as GEMInIS, TECCOGS – Digital Journal of Cognitive Technologies, Visualidades, and Agenda Politica, as well as book chapters and articles in conference proceedings, and is currently editing a book about the history of moving image art in the Brazilian Amazon to be published in 2022.  Danilo previously worked as a graduate teaching assistant for the Glasgow School of Art’s Fine Art Critical Studies Department, a cultural programmer of Film and Video for the Social Service of Commerce (Brazil), and visiting lecturer at the Federal University of Para (Brazil).

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2509

 

Introduction

In her 2001 work, ‘Studying Reality TV,’ Annette Hill asserts “… [R]eality TV is a powerful genre in that it has an ability to make and remake itself within the contemporary entertainment industry.”[1] Indeed, reality shows have been staple entertainment for diverse audience groups, and their steadily successful course in the history of the medium points to the ways in which the genre undergoes continuous transformations, embedding different themes, forms, and types of reality shows in its desire to garner new audiences. Yet, despite such permutations, reality television has largely been cast in an unfavorable light. The genre’s ostensibly dubious aesthetics and emphasis on superficial topics pertaining to the private domain often place reality programs and their viewers at the bottom of a “moral hierarchy.”[2] Furthermore, research conducted across a wide range of disciplines has accused the genre of conveying racist, misogynistic, and homophobic messages while reinforcing heteronormativity, often together with other relationships of domination.[3]

Nevertheless, how power structures in media are perceived at the moment of reception can be subjective. Several scholars working in queer studies postulate that the reality television genre can not only reify heteronormativity but also expose and sabotage its omnipresent institutions. Phillipa Orme, for instance, who has used the eighth season of MTV’s reality show Are you the one? (2014-) as a case study, has explored how gender- and sexually fluid contestants are represented onscreen. While highlighting reality television’s adherence to homonormative and couple-centered logics, Orme’s article acknowledges “its potential as a documentary form that equally holds the complexity for queer identity.”[4]

Similarly, Ava Laura Parsemain employ a queer theory framework to discuss the seemingly incompatible coexistence of queerness and pedagogy in entertainment television. Their monograph, traversing various television program genres, reveals how reality shows can accommodate queerness and allow their audiences to learn about the queer self and the queer other.[5]

Both works, continuing the cultural studies tradition of studying the polysemous qualities of media texts and the meanings made of their content by active audiences, offer exciting insights into the field of gender and sexually diverse television representation.[6] What is worth mentioning, however, is that the concept of reception, as used within this strand of scholarship, is primarily based on researchers’ practices of watching and interpreting the texts and not on real audiences.[7] Of course, some notable works take an explicitly queer approach in empirical media research and study the interactions of actual entities with reality programs, but they are limited in number.[8] Even scarcer from this literature is the examination of the affective power of media and the emotional responses in which audiences engage while consuming such texts. Recognising the ideological dimensions of media yet wishing to look beyond them, I probe how audiences interact with texts’ content and messages in embodied and affective ways.

The issue of “affective experience” has been studied in a plethora of areas and fields, including cultural studies, psychology, audience, and feminist studies, and generated rich literature that encompasses different aims, approaches, and frameworks.[9] Still, their shared interest in audience engagement with media constructs the latter as “repositories of feelings and emotions.”[10] Misha Kavka suggests that reality television, in particular, constitutes a genre able to foreground “a technology of immediacy, which in turn is experienced as an affect of intimacy.”[11] Indeed, various works preceding Kavka’s have long concentrated on the television genre highlighting the gratifications and pleasures that different reality programs offer their audiences. For example, Charles McCoy and Roscoe Scarborough’s analysis showcases how exposure to reality shows leads viewers to come up with a variety of readings and emotional responses, which may range from expressing complete disapproval and irony to camp and guilty pleasure.[12] Distilling a similar argument, yet within the context of queer audience reception, Andre Cavalcante’s findings demonstrate “the tremendous authority of media and their ability to generate emotional turmoil and affective disruption” while underlining audiences’ ability to manage and cope these images in agentful ways.[13]

Drawing on the above examples, this article uses the Greek version of the reality show The Bachelor as a case study to explore how queer viewers who consume Greek television make sense of the text. The employment of qualitative audience research and the selection of The Bachelor have been made based on specific criteria. Firstly, the available scholarly work on Greek reality television is very little and limited to a small number of edited volumes employing genealogical and theoretical approaches, and studies devoted to interpretations of the reality phenomenon through sociological and cultural perspectives.[14] Although the aforementioned body of work, mainly Ioanna Vovou’s edited volume and articles, have been crucial for understanding the history, ideology, and impact of reality television, there is a marked prioritising of text-centric approaches.[15] Despina Chronaki’s work is an exception to the rule; her chapter, employing semi-structured interviews with Greek audiences and fans of the American RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-), fills a gap in Greek media reception studies, yet does so in an attempt to capture the transnational reach of foreign television reality shows alone. Thus, the case of The Bachelor, studied in the context of this article, aims to explore that under-researched area where audiences and Greek reality television meet. Secondly, the popular romance and relationship multimedia franchise I have chosen to study has received negative feedback from journalists and television critics who denounce the show for its trashy aesthetics and perpetuation of gender stereotypes.[16] Additionally, it is important to note that while The Bachelor was punished by the National Radio-Television Consulate—the Greek independent administrative authority which supervises and regulates the broadcasting sector—with a 180.000 euros fine for showing scenes that contribute to gender equality, several journalists and audience members on social media found the show to be a cultural threat for its viewers and asked for its cancellation via online campaigns.[17] Thus, a second intention of this article is to take part in the ongoing discussion about The Bachelor and shed light on the reception of the show outside the anglophone context.[18]

Following the lead of queer scholars who apply phenomenological thinking to media studies research, I place “the body, and questions of embodiment, at the center of inquiry” to interrogate “where we stand” when we consume media texts.[19] According to Andre Cavalcante, the experiences and feelings of the body are of pivotal significance in qualitative research and can “complement ideological understandings of media audiences by offering a more embodied and dynamic optic.”[20] Thus, an emphasis on those (in)appropriate emotional and bodily responses triggered when consuming culturally inferior television programs from the private sphere of the house may offer fruitful ground for making sense of the audience’s kaleidoscopic responses to the sociopolitical world they inhabit.

Ahmed’s queer phenomenology provides a useful theoretical foundation for understanding how sexual orientations and orientations as ways of residing the world “leave their impressions on the skin.”[21] Ahmed unfolds her argument by exposing how vertical and horizontal lines are extended around us and serve as “straightening devices that keep things in line” and thus ensure that collectives remain with their heads facing heterosexuality.[22] Objects—such as the familial/familiar television device, as I argue here—make “visible a fantasy of the good life” and promise access to this life in exchange for work done to take the well-trodden pathway of heteronormativity.[23] Yet, at the same time, queer phenomenology also promises the joy to explore “other paths and even go astray.”[24] Such queer moments and practices have the potential to form new directions, thus generating “a diagonal line, which cut[s] across ‘slantwise’ the vertical and horizontal lines, . . . perhaps even challenging the ‘becoming vertical’ of ordinary perception.”[25]

Against this backdrop, the Greek version of The Bachelor is discussed; yet the article is not about the reality show per se. The show’s narratives and scripts serve as an impetus for investigating how queer bodies that live outside the majority culture position themselves in relation to The Bachelor and the extent to which they “rework” dominant discourses and ideologies endemic within the reality show. While acknowledging that positive and diverse media representations matter not only for broader sociopolitical change but also for the well-being of gender and sexually diverse groups of people who wish to see themselves represented onscreen, I argue that even strictly heterosexual and heteronormative texts—such as in the case of The Bachelor—can enable queer and pedagogical pleasures for viewers, thus blurring the unfounded dichotomies between high/low culture and heterosexual/queer television.

Method

This study aims to provide empirical accounts of the viewing pleasures that audiences gain by watching reality television. The notion of audiences, as used in the context of this study, refers to individuals who watch television on a regular basis and consider themselves members of the queer community. Queer here is used as a word that encompasses a wide variety of people across a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities.  However, despite the research subjects’ positioning under the above umbrella, they are of different ages, physical features, and ethnicity. This intersectionality of identities is of particular interest and should be considered during the analysis of their responses. Another element defining this study is the degree of familiarity that the research subjects share among each other as well as with the researcher. In particular, all individuals included in this study belong to the wider circle of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom I met during the COVID-19 pandemic. From November 7, 2020, up until November 30, Greece entered a second national lockdown and night curfews were among the preventive measures implemented by the government to slow down COVID-19 spread. At that time, Evi, one of the participants of this study, returned to Greece and used her empty family house as a meeting point for her friends. It was during these encounters at Evi’s house that the participants and I started to watch the first and later, the second season of The Bachelor. Unlike other television shows such as comedies and dramas, the story of the Greek bachelor and his love adventures with the twenty women who lived together in a mansion was the only one to spark intense conversations and comments during its broadcast, thus supporting McCoy and Scarborough’s finding that, “part of the enjoyment of watching “bad” television comes from talking about the show, as it is occurring.”[26] The intense emotional reactions generated while consuming The Bachelor prompted me to share with my friends the intention to conduct a study based on their/our responses to the second season of The Bachelor and they gave me their consent. Consequently, what started as a friend gathering evolved into ethnographic research, which led me to encounter some ethical challenges. Nevertheless, my prior engagement with academic scholarship on reflexive research helped me to comprehend my dual and conflicting role as a researcher and friend and make informed choices in all stages of the study.[27]

Taking the form of our relationship into account, I follow what Lisa Tillmann-Healey has named friendship as method.[28] Drawing on feminist and queer research, and building on the idea of friendship as a useful site of inquiry, friendship as method “rejects scientific neutrality, universal truths, and dispassionate inquiry and works towards social justice, relational truths, and passionate inquiry.”[29] Due to its deviation from traditional ethnographic work, friendship ethnography has the potential to reduce power relations (without nullifying them) and does not necessarily require outright planning; instead, it develops over months and is based on dialogue, compassion, and an ethics of care.[30] At the same time, some of its potential drawbacks as a data collection method are related to its small sample size, which renders findings non-generalisable. Another consideration involved blurring boundaries between researcher and participants, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, research conducted with friends and established acquaintances offers “reciprocity of disclosure” and can thus reach great depth and a high degree of comfortableness.[31] On the other hand, the very involvement of the researcher with the study participants in different contexts obligates the latter to make ethical choices as to what can be shared and to what end from their in-between discussions.

With the above in mind, the study took place between September 7 and December 17, 2021. During this period, I kept notes of the dialogues and comments uttered while watching the episodes of The Bachelor together with the participants. I also phone-called some participants-friends after the reality show’s finale and asked them if they would like to answer a few additional questions. These questions and answers were transcribed verbatim and translated from Greek to English. When I completed the first version of the article, I shared the document with all participants to obtain comments, corrections, and/or clarifications and then integrated their feedback and suggestions. When I completed the article’s final version, I received the participants’ informed consent and asked them how they wanted to see their names appear in the article. Depending on their decisions, I kept real names and personal information intact or used nicknames and non-identifiable data for those participants who did not wish to share their personal information publicly.

Heterosexual lines, ambivalent feelings, and the reality of reality television

Before proceeding with the ways in which queer viewers decode the reality show, it is important to highlight a few points relevant to the study. Although The Bachelor’s episodes were broadcast many times throughout the week by ALPHA TV channel, the participants adopted the habit of meeting towards the end of the week to consume the show together. Indeed, visiting Evi’s family house on Fridays—while her parents were temporarily residing at their village house in northern Greece—turned out to be a regular routine for all participants. Fridays had also been associated with the day of “the rose ceremony,” during which the bachelor presented a red flower to those female contestants he wished to have stay on the show for another week. All participants were interested in watching the ceremony live and finding out who would remain in the mansion but mainly, the responses of the contestants who would be eliminated.

Rafael (NB, G, 25) remembers Sia (figure 1), a female contestant from the first season of the show, whose elimination announcement from the bachelor, Panagiotis Vasilakos, led her to come up with a goodbye speech that would go viral on social media: “you are super handsome, you have a wonderful personality, but you have a huge flaw, and that is your lack of taste (in women).”[32] Rafael has repeatedly expressed their fascination for those female contestants who are not afraid to be “glamorous, sassy, and pugnacious” and is often very much inclined to imitate some of their most memorable reactions. Such aspects of the show, particularly the ways through which the reality show portrays its contestants, have often incited lively discussion from the participants. According to Dana Heller, dating, wife-, and wedding-themed reality television shows are replete with reductive stereotypes, therefore, presenting certain women as “sexually licentious, emotionally manipulative . . . and fiercely competitive with other women for men, wealth, and status” is not uncommon.[33] However, participants expressed their concerns about the ways through which The Bachelor reifies cultural conceptions of gender identity. For instance, while watching a scene from the show where a female contestant rudely interrupts a dialogue exchanged between Alexis Pappas and another contestant, Chrysanthi (F, L, 30) reacts as follows:

Chrysanthi: Now look at that . . . look how much it (The Bachelor) instrumentalises women . . . the harem stays in the house . . . they wear their best dresses and fight for the heart of the maharajah . . . I can’t imagine myself as passive and confined inside a house setting for none!

In this quote, Chrysanthi’s account of the rose ceremony speaks to the promotion of heteronormative beliefs and sheds light on the show’s regressive cultural politics. Most importantly, however, she offers a nuanced understanding of how “the bodies” in/of The Bachelor “become orientated by how they take up time and space.”[34] While detecting the show’s polyamorous leanings, Chrysanthi’s words reveal that the orientation of The Bachelor is actually based on a very particular relation to, and perception of, space, bodies, and objects within it, all of which help to sustain gender binaries in place and render the heterosexual couple a “point” along a horizontal line. Nevertheless, for a body to appear “in line,” to use Ahmed’s vocabulary, intense and repetitive work is required.[35] Thus, the repetitive gendered bodily movements and gestures enacted within The Bachelor can be read as a work of this kind and “an orientation toward the future, insofar as” the contestants’ “actions are also the expression of . . . an intention” for adhering to the heterosexual line.[36]  At the same time, however, for Chrysanthi and other participants, accumulating different “points” of the line might actually have a disorientating and not an orientating effect.

Aside from those gender aspects in the show that “stand out” and are often mentioned during the broadcast of the episodes, a few participants were equally interested in understanding how The Bachelor makes, as Ahmed might have stated, “certain things, not others available.”[37] Among the most cited omissions in the show has been the lack of non-white bodies and bodies residing within the spectrum of fatness. For Evi (F, L, 42), who self-defines herself as a white fat lesbian, the omnipresence of bodies that conform to an ideal of thinness causes bodies like hers, which do not “line up,” “to inherit their own disappearance” on the basis that fat bodies have “made the wrong turn.”[38]

Evi: I am 100% sure that if I watched it with my mother, she would be enchanted with those skinny bitches, and then she would get back to me only to tell me that I need to go on a diet if I want to find more womanly clothes and not stay on the shelf.

Evi’s narrative contains several aspects of her mother’s verbal and non-verbal communication, which work towards “controlling or correcting the operations of [her] body.”[39] Such disciplinary mechanisms reverberate in Dimitris Papanikolaou’s research on the Greek family and bring to mind a particular family constellation he defines as biopolitical. Inspired by Foucault’s thought, Papanikolaou conceptualises the biopolitical family as a functioning agent of the society committed to the project of sculpting normative and ‘proper’ bodies. As he explains, this type of family “works intensely on the bodies of its members…undertaking,” among others, “surveillance over their ‘natural’ gender and their ‘normal’ development.”[40] This means that while subjects who follow gender and body expectations may remain untouched by “the net of Greek kinship,” others, like Evi, who are different, are more likely to accumulate “stress or stress points.”[41]

Other participants, not only advanced critical readings of specific topics (or lack thereof) from the show, but they also shared how particular players triggered diverse emotional reactions for them. Borrowing from the writing of Ahmed, emotion must be understood as “a form of action” which “makes” and “shapes” bodies.[42] For Niki (F, B, 38), the mere appearance of a particular contestant onscreen made her hide herself behind the cushions of the sofa in embarrassment before turning her attention to her phone for distraction. Niki repeats what the contestant in question said on her romantic date with the bachelor and shared her thoughts:

Niki: “Ice is melting, the ozone hole has opened up . . . and all this is bothering me a lot.” Who says that on a date? And with this specific word choice? I wouldn’t dare tell my colleagues that I watch The Bachelor, but honestly, it is tragic and hilarious at the same time.

Niki’s condemnation of The Bachelor does not impede her from viewing it. In fact, her guilty viewing pleasure involves, as Melinda Reid has argued, “the positive direct response of pleasure . . . and the negative meta-response of guilt.”[43] Much like Niki, Chrysanthi felt torn between enjoying and dismissing “objects [that] are all somewhat embarrassing to desire and yet desired anyway.”[44] Such conflicting feelings were activated in those cases where the contestants’ “absurd” performances and “dimwitted” dialogues compromised Chrysanthi’s feminist beliefs. Interestingly enough, however, for Rafael, The Bachelor’s anti-feminist perspective did not clash with his feminist worldview and explained their relationship with the reality show using their age as a defining lens:

Rafael: The Bachelor is a genuinely cringey show. Gen Z consumes pop culture in ways different from previous generations. Far from demure, we (Gen Z) have reclaimed stupidity. So these cringe jokes are funny because we are aware of the intentional stupidity and we make fun of it. . . . It is like reclaiming the word faggot.

While viewing gender as a dimension of inequality in The Bachelor, Rafael employs a reading mode of the text which can be best described through the politics of camp. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s classic Notes on Camp, camp constitutes -among many other things—“a seriousness that fails,” and a type of reception incarnating “a victory of “style” over “content”, “aesthetics” over “morality”, of irony over tragedy.”[45] In short, when consuming texts through a camp sensibility it is possible to step beyond evaluative criteria and admire shows like The Bachelor for their unabashedly failed content. Thus, returning to Ahmed, viewers such as Rafael who read television through camp lenses “follow a diagonal line,” in that they see “the world “slantwise” and allow other objects to come into view.”[46]

On the other hand, there is still the tendency of participants to examine The Bachelor with reference to the genre to which it belongs. Evi has been attentive to the reality aspect of reality television and highlighted how The Bachelor’s contestants’ presence and interaction often take place in ways that appear forced and strange. Several times, Evi has searched videos on YouTube via her phone to check for similarities between the Greek Bachelor and its American counterpart or even brought our attention to particular scenes from the Greek version of the show which she finds suspicious.

Evi: Ours [The Greek Bachelor] is scripted as fuck. Look at some scenes very carefully, you will notice from the players’ expressions that they themselves can’t help but laugh with the absurd things they are expected to say. They are performing roles which are meant to get us hooked. And it works.

This quote echoes Annette Hill’s finding that “the performance becomes a powerful framing device for judging reality TV’s claims to the real”.[47] Given that the pleasure of reality television partly derives from “the belief that the ‘characters’ are sincere,” challenging reality players’ ostensibly transparent performances demonstrates how the pseudo-promise of the real in shows like The Bachelor is bound up with audiences’ willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of their viewing experience and pleasure.[48] Thus, in a very real sense, any attempt to determine which bodies—be they the ones behind, in front of, or inside The Bachelor—laugh at whose expense becomes futile in the face of reality television’s slippery terrain.

New lines and moments of resistance

The previous analysis showcases how study participants decoded The Bachelor and the kinds of pleasures they experienced while viewing it. Although their answers vary, they all respond to the question of how we face objects that lie ahead of us, as it is in the case of (reality) television. In the part that follows, I explore orientation as a matter of “how we inhabit spaces.”[49] I consider the possibility to turn around, face familiar objects and bodies from a different angle and face new, unfamiliar objects and other people—those that might have been in the background or behind us. Thus, the question I examine here is what participants can extract from The Bachelor and to what extent, if any, they can rework the compulsory orientation of heterosexuality and its social gifts as broadcast onscreen.

Given queer phenomenology’s emphasis on spatiotemporal parameters, the setting where participants consumed the show will be considered. The apartment of Evi’s parents in which the study took place constitutes a typical home space that is inextricably linked to the idea of biological family, marriage, and reproduction. With the advent of the coronavirus epidemic, however, these idea(l)s were seriously compromised. Indeed, the departure of Evi’s parents, together with the temporal occupation of the apartment by Evi and her friends, modified the composition as well as the number of the bodies residing the apartment. Its new temporary residents, although circulating in a space that is not necessarily theirs, spent time together beyond television viewing, engaged themselves in common activities and eventually established a kinship network different from the one that Evi had once experienced when she lived in the apartment with her parents. In a similar way, Evi’s house stopped carrying “the memory of defeat […] and trauma” and served as a safe space that enabled the rest of the participants to feel comfortable.[50] According to Ahmed, “to be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends, and the world begins.”[51] Although the feeling of comfortableness is typically associated with forms of privilege granted to white heterosexual bodies in public spaces, here I focus on specific moments of The Bachelor and relevant conversations from the participants, which construct Evi’s house as a space that allows queer bodies to “fit in.”[52]

Particular characters from The Bachelor and scenes involving them have been frequent objects of discussion within the group of participants. Among the characters which have attracted intense attention is Athina (figure 2). Commonly known as “Athina New York,” Athina is a Greco-American fitness instructor, who is memorable for her broken Greek and funny miscommunications with the other contestants in the show. Since appearing on The Bachelor, Athina has gained popularity, leading to numerous talk shows concentrating on her appearance and cheerful character. For the participants, Athina diverged significantly from the rest of the female contestants in that she never found herself involved into catfights. Evi considers Athina to be “genuine” and attributes her distancing from quarrels to language barriers. Chrysanthi, more than any other participant, has consistently expressed her admiration for—and attraction to—Athina, as exemplified by the following quote:

Chrysanthi: she is carefree, smiley and above all hot. If I were the bachelor, I would have no second thoughts. I would take her from the mansion straight away and move with her back to New York.

Cognisant of Chrysanthi’s crush on Athina, Evi and Rafael enjoy teasing Chrysanthi. Yet Chrysanthi is never discouraged by their comments; every time Athina is shown on television, Chrysanthi does not miss a chance to praise her external appearance and character. Such actions are “out of line” and disrupt the pervasive assumption of heterosexuality by exposing and sharing some of the perverse pleasures that one may gain when consuming a heterosexually themed text “in a familiar room.”[53]

Another aspect of watching The Bachelor is the engagement of the participants in ways that escape the active/passive dichotomy. Overall, instead of sitting back, all participants combined the act of consuming the reality show with other activities such as texting, surfing on the internet, talking to each other and other friends through tablets, and playing board games on laptops. Their media engagement, thus, challenged a preferred viewing position in which viewers should be absorbed in watching television and allowed a multiscreen viewing. For some participants, The Bachelor’s content even served as a source of inspiration for the shaping of DIY performances and small acts. Sofi (F, Q, 33), an Albanian woman with many years of experience in acting and singing, was often asked by the rest of the group to copy the behaviors of The Bachelors’ players and she usually accepted the challenge with joy. Other times, Sofi went as far as to deliver her own shows and include the other participants as active agents in her performances. The show titled “I want them all 18 although it’s a sin” is an indicative example. Sofi began this performance by picking a romantic tune on Spotify and placing candles on the table. Then she disappeared for a few minutes only to come back wearing a bra, the bottom of her pajamas, silver heels and with a mustache drawn on her face. Following the style of a romantic date similar to the ones shown on The Bachelor, Sofi approached Evi, Rafaelos, Niki and myself, ensuring physical intimacy. She was talking to each one of us passionately and gently asked each of us in turn to dance with her to the rhythm of the song. The show finished with her saying “it is too hard to choose because I want you all” and brought us all together in a cluster resembling a communal orgy, in which we laughed while she was pretending to be writhing in sensual desire. Right after that, she landed on an armchair and mimicked the pains of labour, pulling out of her pajamas a stuffed elephant which was her new-born baby.

Sofi’s improvised performance, instead of reifying the heteronormative structure of Τhe Bachelor, exposes and parodies its very mechanisms and “creates new angles,” to speak with Ahmed. When I called her to ask about that performance, Sofi answered as follows:

I enjoy making my friends happy, that’s why I do these performances. It is so liberating to take the very stereotypes you hate and turn them upside down. To me, it feels as if the show itself is begging for such parodic enactments.

Humour, hyperbole, naivete, and a sarcastic mood—these are some of the tools that Sofi uses to critique The Bachelor’s conventions. For Hongwei Bai, reading Muñoz, “humour constitutes a valuable pedagogical and political tool for queer minoritarian subjects; through humour, queer performers find strength and solidarity in subverting the assumed seriousness of the dominant discourse.”[54] Far from a passive viewer, Sofi adopts a more proactive and even activist approach which extends beyond her friendship network and the familial space of the house. Aside from delivering such performances, Sofi, along with Evi, is active on social media. Together they take lines from The Bachelor that they find absurd and make memes, exerting their own critique in creative yet uncompromising ways. For Evi, watching the show and posting on twitter (while sharing with us) those aspects she considered problematic in real time turned out to be part of her routine during our gatherings.

I post these tweets in case there is even one person who buys what they see. At the beginning I felt bad for myself but I came to the conclusion that I can be feminist and watch such shows. That I can laugh with what I see and criticise the over-the-topness of such performances. It is empowering to watch what is wrong and judge it and make an impact through your posts.

What is essential in Evi’s words is the sense of being orientated towards and away from The Bachelor. Like other participants, her initial ambivalence about the show reveals how contradictory emotions make bodies move in different directions. However, instead of contemplating this clash of emotions, Evi shared them online. Such actions, departing from negative and inappropriate feelings, turn into productive processes in that they mitigate the private-public divide and have the potential to address different communities of spectators online.

Conclusion

How do people watch television that is labeled as “trash, “problematic,” and “humiliating,” and what do they make out of these programs? These questions served as a starting point to conduct a reception study and explore how the Greek version of the reality show, The Bachelor, which has attracted intensely negative criticism, may be decoded by particular communities of spectators. Investing in cultural studies’ engagement with queer audience research and building on the idea of friendship as method, the study shed light on the diverse readings that queer viewers employ to converse with the genre of reality. It showcased that all the participants who watched The Bachelor comprehended and disagreed with the heteronormative structure of the show. For the overriding majority, the consumption of the text elicits conflicting feelings of pleasure and guilt, yet several participants agreed that the show actually provides them with empowerment and pure amusement. The above emotional responses demonstrated variations in the way viewers decode the text. Many viewpoints expressed by the participants revealed their interest in invisible aspects of the show, such as the omnipresence of white and thin bodies to the exclusion of bodily diverse individuals. Furthermore, another important dimension that emerged from the study was the pervasive culture of heterosexuality, which is manifested in the show through the circulation of heteronormative ideals and traditional gender stereotypes about femininities and masculinities alike.

Although the participants of this study never justified their preference for The Bachelor or compared it to LGBTQI+-related programs, their responses about the reality show, as complemented by Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, unravel the multifaceted process of emotionally engaging with and consuming media texts and showcase that one’s orientation is not only determined by the direction one faces. The voices of the study participants and their experience of/from/in front of The Batchelor reveals that the space we inhabit, the bodies with which we inhabit spaces, and the objects we choose to leave behind, see, and rework, open up habitable worlds where queer politics and spaces are possible.

With this in mind, totalising understandings of the role and functions of media products entail the risk of losing sight of their actual societal impact at a micro level. Consequently, by turning our attention to low culture products and exploring the responses they elicit in diverse groups of viewers, we might start perceiving these programmes in ways that prevent facile criticisms of quality and morality, and perhaps permit different kinds of viewing pleasures to emerge. This study, placed in the context of Greece, served as the first exploration of queer audience studies and, hopefully, an invitation for other researchers interested in exploring this fertile yet largely untouched field.

Acknowledgements

This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the “2nd Greek Studies Now Conference: Local Cases, Global Debates,” 15-17 June 2022, held at the University of Amsterdam. I want to thank Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford, UK) and Professor Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) because their comments prodded me to flesh out my ideas about “queer reading practices.” This essay owes its appearance to the extremely useful comments offered by the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful for the valuable feedback and practical support that the special editors, Philippa Orme and Isaac Pletcher provided me with during each step of the production process. My sincerest thanks go to my research subjects-friends who permitted me to share part of their / our private television viewing experiences in public.

 

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Notes

[1] Annette Hill, “Studying Reality TV,” in The Television Genre Book, edited by Glen Creeber (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 161-162.

[2] June Deery, Reality TV (Cambridge: Wiley, 2015); Catharine Lumby, “Real appeal: The ethics of reality TV,” in Remote Control: New Media New Ethics, edited by Catharine Lumby and Elspeth Probyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11-24; on ‘moral hierarchy’, see Pertti Alasuutari, “‘I’m ashamed to admit it but I have watched Dallas’: the moral hierarchy of television programmes,” Media Culture, and Society 14, no. 1 (1992): 561-582.

[3] Alicia Denby, “Toxicity and Femininity in Love Island: How Reality Dating Shows Perpetuate Sexist Attitudes Towards Women,” Frontiers in sociology, June 2, 2021, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2021.641216/full; MacKenzie Peltier and Lauren Mizock, “Fox’s More to Love: Pseudo-Fat Acceptance in Reality Television,” Somatechnics 2 no. 1 (2012): 93-106; Melusi Mntungwa and Luyanda Ngema, “‘He mustn’t be too much’: Exploring notions of internalised homophobia in Date My Family,” Agenda 32, no. 3 (2018): 62-73; Rebecca Pardo, “Reality Television and the Metapragmatics of Racism,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2013): 65-81; Susan Vertoont, “Would you date ‘the undateables?’ An analysis of the mediated public debate on the reality television show ‘The Undateables,’” Sexualities 21, no. 5-6 (2017): 1-15.

[4] Philippa Orme, “Are you my perfect match? Reality TV as a stage for queer identity in MTV’s Are You the One?,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 60 (2021), https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Orme-AreYouTheOne/index.html

[5] Ava Laure Parsemain, The Pedagogy of Queer TV (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

[6] For an introduction to the interplay between media text and the reader/audience, see John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’,” in Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage, 2005), p. 65. Here I propose an indicative list of works which have engaged in queer readings of popular texts in screen studies: Spyridon Chairetis, “Negotiating heteronormativity in the family melodrama: A case study of Giorgos Katakouzinos’s Angelos/ Angel (1982),” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, 4, no. 1 (2017): 7-28; Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

[7] Rafal Zaborowski and Frederik Dhaenens, “Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 13, no. 1 (2016): 446-461.

[8] Riina Rautiainen, “Portraying Gays on Reality TV Case Gay Army and its Reception,” SQS: Suomen Queer-tutkimuksen Seuran Lehti, 3, no. 1 (2008): 67-74, https://journal.fi/sqs/article/view/53651

[9] For a brief overview of the literature, see Dorothy Hobson, “Housewives and the mass media,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-1979, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchison, 1980): 105-116; Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall, and Maik Rossman, “Coping or Escaping?: Effects of Life Dissatisfaction on Selective Exposure,” Communication Research, 36, no. 2 (2009): 207-228; Eric Shouse, “Feeling, emotion, affect,” M/C Journal, 8, no. 6 (2005): 1-25.

[10] Anne Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 7.

[11] Misha Kavka, Reality television, affect and intimacy: Reality matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 19-20.

[12] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television: Ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures,” Poetics 47 (2014): 41-59.

[13] Andre Cavalcante, “Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 8 (2018), p. 13.

[14] Ioanna Vovou, The World of Television: Theoretical Approaches, theory, analysis of programs and Greek reality (Athens: Herodotus, 2010); Evangelos Sorogkas, The Reality Phenomenon (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2004).

[15] Ioanna Vovou, “Injecting Actuality in TV Fiction: The Financial Crisis in Greek TV Comedy Series,” Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, 6, no. 1 (2019): 112-137, https://filmiconjournal.com/journal/article/pdf/2019/6/6.

[16] Christina Galanopoulou, “Are women in danger from The Bachelor and Alexis Papas? No duh,” Lifo, October 1, 2021, https://www.lifo.gr/stiles/optiki-gonia/kindyneyoyn-oi-gynaikes-apo-bachelor-kai-ton-alexi-pappa-e-ohi-da; Emilios Harbis, “The elimination ritual performed with flowers and the game of publicity in reality television,” Kathimerini newspaper, October 16, 2020, https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/561119401/i-teleti-ton-rodon-kai-to-paichnidi-tis-dimosiotitas-sta-rialiti/; Nefeli Rapsomaniki, “Reality shows and the realism sexism in society,” Sputnik magazine, October 24, 2020, http://mag.spoutnik.gr/prisma/kinonia/2298/ta-reality-shows-kai-o-pragmatikos-sexismos-tis-ko/.

[17] Avgi Newsroom, “The Bachelor: Thousands of signatures requesting to see Alpha’s reality show cancelled,” Avgi magazine, October 4, 2021, https://www.avgi.gr/koinonia/397400_hiliades-ypografes-me-aitima-na-kopei-rialiti-toy-alpha. For more information about the National Radio-Television Consulate, see Spyridon Chairetis, “Tracing the Ephemeral: ‘Lesbian’ Characters in Greek Television Comedies,” VIEW: Journal of European Television History & Culture, 10, no. 19 (2021): 1-10.

[18] Dana Cloud, “The irony bribe and reality television: Investment and detachment in The Bachelor,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27, no. 5 (2010): 413-437; Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “The Bachelor: Whiteness in the harem,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23, no. 1 (2006): 39-56; Scott Haden Church, Tom Robinson, Clark Callahan, Katherine Klotzer Barboza and Daniel Montez, “Savvy viewers and (simulated) reality TV: An analysis of The Bachelor’s appeal to viewers,” Journal of Popular Television, 8, no. 1 (2019): 23-43.

[19] Katharina Lindner, “Situated Bodies, Cinematic Orientations: Film and (Queer) Phenomenology,” In De-Westernizing Film Studies, edited by Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 152.

[20] Andre Cavalcante, “Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception,” 2.

[21] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 54.

[22] Ibid., p. 66.

[23] Ibid., p. 90.

[24] Ibid., p. 178.

[25] Ibid., p. 107.

[26] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television,” p. 49.

[27] Orit Karnieli-Miller, Roni Strier, and Liat Pessach, “Power Relations in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Health Research, 19, no. 2 (2008): 279–289; Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (London: Sage, 2002); Anna Pechurina, “Positionality and Ethics in the Qualitative Research of Migrants’ Homes,” Sociological Research Online, 19, no. 1 (2014): 1–9.

[28] Lisa Tillmann-Healy, “Friendship as Method,” Qualitative Inquiry 9, no. 5 (2013): 729–49.

[29] Ibid, p. 733. For examples of feminist/queer research, see Judith Cook and Mary Margaret Fonow, “Knowledge and women’s interests: Issues of epistemology and methodology in feminist sociological research,” Sociological Inquiry 56 (1986): 2-29; Helen Roberts, Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge, 1990); Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, “Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research,” 1-28, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000).

[30] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Andrew Stevenson and Rebecca Lawthom, “How We Know Each Other: Exploring the Bonds of Friendship Using Friendship Ethnography and Visual Ethnography,” Anthrovision: Vaneasa online journal 5, no. 1 (2017), https://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2525; Isabelle Rivoal and Noel Salazar, “Contemporary Ethnographic Practice and the Value of Serendipity,” Social Anthropology 21, no. 2 (2013): 178-185.

[31] Thomas, J. Berndt, “The Distinctive Features of Conversations between Friends: Theories, Research and Implications for Sociomoral Development,” 281-300, in Moral Development through Social Interaction, edited by William. M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1987); Jacquelin P. Wiseman, “Friendship: Bonds and Binds in a Voluntary Relationship,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 3 (1986): 191–211; James Youniss, “Social Construction and Moral Development: Update and Expansion of an Idea,” 131-148, in Moral Development through Social Interaction, edited by William. M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1987).

[32] Rafael is one of the five participants in the study. All names appearing in this article are accompanied with a set of acronyms. When referring to gender identities, F stands for female, and NB for non-binary. The acronyms L(esbian), B(isexual), G(ay) and Q(ueer/estioning) are used to describe the participants’ emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to other people. Their age is also mentioned.

[33] Dana Heller, “Wrecked: Programming Celesbian Reality,” in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality & Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, edited by Brenda R. Weber (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 127.

[34] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 5.

[35] Ibid., 66.

[36] Ibid., 109.

[37] Ibid., 14.

[38] Ibid., 76.

[39] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1995 [1975]), p. 136.

[40] Dimitris Papanikolaou, Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), p. 150.

[41] Dimitris Papanikolaou, There is something about the family: Nation, desire and kinship at a time of crisis (Athens: Patakis, 2018), p. 427; Sarah Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 160.

[42] Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 4.

[43] Melinda Reid, “Guilty Pleasures Revisited,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 80 (2022): p. 191.

[44] Ibid., 191.

[45] Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (London: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 6 & 10.

[46] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, p. 107.

[47] Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 449.

[48] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television,” p. 52.

[49] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 160.

[50] Giorgos Kesisoglou, “Dimitris Papanikolaou in conversation with Giorgos Kesisoglou: Short-circuit-in-families, public truth telling, queer genealogies and archive troubles,” Metalogos Systemic Therapy Journal, 36, no. 1 (2020): p. 5.

[51] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 107.

[52] Ibid., p. 134.

[53] Ibid., p. 7.

[54] Hongwei Bao, “Queer Disidentification: Or How to Cook Chinese Noodles in a Global Pandemic,” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 17, no. 1-2 (2021): p. 8.

 

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Author biography

Spiros Chairetis holds a DPhil in media and cultural studies from the University of Oxford. He has published on Greek LGBTQI+ cinema and television, genre studies, and auto-ethnography. His monograph, Greek Television Comedy: Resilient Texts, Queer Readings, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His research interests revolve around media and sexuality studies, television fiction, gender anthropology, and the relationship between media, culture, and society.