Goin' Down to South Park

As a short preface to this post, I'm trying to decide what potential dangers are involved in blogging about something that I'm also currently writing about in a more official venue. I suppose people might accuse me of stealing my thoughts from the comments of my readers (which would be your cue to provide some comments, gentle readers), or else of being grossly unprofessional. Neither of these potential risks seems enough to keep me from writing this post though. If I'm going to be thinking in public, it might as well be about something I legitimately need to be thinking about, right?

Somewhere along the line, I tricked a group of people into thinking that I could say smart things about the great political satire of our time, South Park. This is something that remains to be seen. In particular, I want to focus on (surprise, surprise) the show's relationship to its gay characters and its position as cultural archive, knowledge producing tool, and irreverent object.

The first business that needs attending here though, is the question of whether or not South Park is a text worth reading at all, especially if we're hunting for potential queernesses. Lauren Berlant has a fantastic footnote in introduction to The Queen of America Goes To Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (which I finally got around to reading over spring break), part of which I've been thinking about with regards to this question:

"The backlash against cultural studies is frequently a euphemism for discomfort with work on contemporary culture around race, sexuality, class, and gender. It is sometimes a way of talking about the fear of losing what little standing intellectual work has gained through its studied irrelevance (and superiority) to capitalist culture. It expresses a fear of popular culture and popularized criticism. At the same time, it can express a kind of antielitism made in defense of narrow notions of what proper intellectual objects and intellectual postures should be" (Queen of America 265).

I love this footnote and its corresponding section of the text because I think Berlant points quite precisely to people's discomfort with this kind of "cheap" (quotes denote heavy sarcasm, obviously) cultural analysis. There seems to be the view that aiming any sort of critical thought at artifacts of popular culture (what Berlant calls "silly objects") undermines the validity of "proper" intellectual thought. 

But I think there's a little more to the anxiety over cultural studies than that. In working with a text like South Park, rather than a Dickens novel, or even in understanding something like South Park to be a text, we encounter a strange anxiety (at least, for an undergraduate English major): there might not be anything in such a text worth talking about. Very often, we are trained to extract meaning from a text without expecting that there might not be any. "Proper" intellectual objects have a kind of safety net to them. We will always have generative ways of reading a Dickens novel, and important things to glean from doing so. The same might not be true of South Park. Is this anxiety about cultural studies, partially, the fear of working without a safety net, that we might spend intellectual energies on something that turns out not to be worth it? 

In the interest of fairness, I want to share this recent academic spoof on the insta-viral Rebecca Black video. Though hopefully we can all agree that the article is hilarious, it makes me flinch a little, both because it invests in this pop cultural anxiety and is exactly what people might accuse my writing about South Park of being.

So, then, returning to the project at hand, what sort of knowledge about queerness does South  Park produce? Does the show's cultural and political presence, as well as its wide distribution establish it as a cultural archive, and finally, how does conceptualizing South Park as an archive reconfigure our understanding of the work that archives are capable of doing? 

So here's where I've reached an intellectual impasse. I'm having a hard time pinning down exactly what sort of arguments South Park makes about its gay characters. In many episodes (Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride, D'Yikes), South Park does affirm some of the dominant narratives regarding coming out, gay culture, and growing up gay. Other episodes (South Park is Gay, The F Word) disrupt some of the very narratives which it elsewhere affirms. What does South Park teach us about the gays, and how does this information intersect with the show's  disruptive and irreverent politics?

Seriously though. Blogging isn't a spectator's sport, dear readers. This time, these questions aren't rhetorical. For the South Park fans among us, peruse this list of episodes and tell me what you think. For those of you who aren't fans, what have you picked up in the cultural ether about the show's relationship to its gay characters? Really, I want to know. What does South Park teach us (or fail to teach us) about being gay?

Effie White's Big Fat Gay Wedding

Happy Wednesday, dear readers. If your Hump Day has been anything like mine, a deep breath and a short break is in order (If your Wednesday was awesome, frankly, the rest of us don't want to hear about it). Such a break seems like the perfect time to invoke some Effie White-style masochism (the real masochism/face-melting/jaw dislocating begins around 3:28). I considered doing an entire post as Effie White, but frankly, I just don't have the soul for it (or the lung capacity, for that matter).

And so, having enjoyed that short break, let us all take a Jennifer Holiday-sized deep breath and plunge onward.

As promised, I'm back for some long-overdue mouthing off. Gay marriage is something I've generally refrained from blogging about, for a number of reasons. For one, it has never struck me as a particularly complex issue: all we want to do is have some Big Gay Weddings (oh, and I guess maybe it'd be nice to have some state sanction and cultural capital invested in our relationships, too). Secondly, people always seem to have very clear ideas regarding where they stand on the issue of gay marriage, so that I'm not sure how much an only-moderately-informed blogging undergrad can hope to bring to the table. This South Park Clip seems to sum up the whole thing pretty nicely (Apologies for casual throwing around of the word "faggot," which is one of the few places where South Park and I diverge). Finally, and I am aware that this is a pretty stupid reason, but marriage has always felt like an issue that was pretty far removed from my own life and, as such, I have refrained from weighing in.

The current U.S. political landscape, however, is making it all but impossible to avoid talking about the M-word (which raises its own set of questions). On a national level, Barack and his administration have (finally) recalled their support of the Defense of Marriage Act (For all intents and purposes, they might have called it the Keep the Homos Out of Here Act. I think they went with DOMA for acronym purposes). Barack has always been downright infuriating in his continually delayed action regarding LGBT policies, so I'm borderline giddy to see him finally taking some action, even if that action seems like something that should have been undertaken ages ago. Barack, I'll be honest: I voted for you and now I'm thinking Hilary (who is just kicking ass and taking names as Secretary of State) might have been a better choice. On a more local level, Maryland is close to joining DC and the cadre of other smarter-than-average states in passing legislature that enables Big Gay Weddings.

I've tended to tell anyone who will stop and listen how problematic I find the "mainstream LGBT movement's" focus on marriage. Many organizations seem to focus on marriage, eschewing all else. Marriage is by no means the bottom line of LGBT rights, and it is far from the most pressing matter facing LGBT identified people (a lesson that people hopefully learned from the horrendously tragic events of this past fall).

But this still doesn't quite answer the question of how we are supposed to feel about marriage. Are we supposed to understand marriage as a simple celebration of love (I can barely get that sentence out without vomiting all over my keyboard)? Or is it an outdated and grossly sexist institution that should be quashed, and that we queers have no business further enabling? The truth is, it might be both, but I think marriage, in its current incarnation, is best understood as something that straight folks can do, but gay folks are not allowed. Marriage, for better or worse  is a right we are denied (Anyone mentioning the phrase "civil union" in response to this point is going to get the dirtiest look I can muster, by the way. And gay men are genetically predisposed to dirty look-giving). As such, I am firmly in favor of gay marriage, even if I might never get one myself.

Of course, there are all sorts of strange cultural implications to consider: If gays can get married, does this mean that when I am in my forties and own thirty-seven cats, all named Emily Dickinson, I will be a spinster? If I'm in my mid 30s and I've been divorced three times, is it time to pack it in and commit myself to a life of prostitutes and platonic friendships? And, of course, there are all the grotesque Romantic Comedies that are just begging to be written about the subject. While I mostly kid, I do think that this changing political tide with regard to gay marriage also gestures in the direction of shifting cultural scripts, though as to what form this shift might take, I haven't the slightest.

Have a good rest of the week folks.

Will Danger

(Jennifer Holiday screen cap courtesy of Vincent Allport)