The most concerted effort to establish, within this convoluted terrain, the degree to which homosexual desire is encoded in television texts themselves (and not just in audience interpretations) is Alexander Doty’s book Making Things Perfectly Queer. The way that “the concept of connotation allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it” (xi) (the same strategy that Jones cites above) is a central preoccupation of his analysis, but he seems to raise more questions than he answers about the status of this queerness. On one hand, connotatively queer references can be understood as liberating for viewers and destabilizing for heteronormativity: coy narrative structures that “simultaneously suggest and deny culturally and erotically specific forms of lesbianism” (45) have, according to D.A. Miller, “the corresponding inconvenience of tending to raise this ghost all over the place” (xii). Moreover, Jones notes that “This ambiguity is itself a source of pleasure for many fans, who enjoy spotting ‘subtextual’ moments and filling in the gaps for themselves” (SLL 19). This openness necessitates, in Doty’s words, “all manner of heterosexual cover-ups that seek to contain, defuse, redefine, or render invisible what would come out as undeniable lesbian desire in characters and queer pleasures in audiences” (53). As such, “the narrative fact of straight romance and marriage does not necessarily heterosexualize lesbian sitcoms” (57) — rather, onscreen boyfriends can function as overdetermined markers of the places where lesbian desire most threatens to erupt. On the other hand, though, “It is possible to see these sitcoms as performing certain homophobic cultural work as they construct and encourage pleasures that seek to have fundamentally lesbian narratives and enjoyments pass as straight or as ‘just friends’ homosocial” (44). That is, the other side of the coin of being encouraged to see queer desires everywhere is authorization to see them nowhere. This criticism points to a politics of visibility: Doty goes so far as to call “the closet of connotation” “oppressive” (xii) — or, as Sally Forth puts it, “invisibility is a by-product of oppression. In order to be free, we must be seen.”
This tension between optimistic and pessimistic outlooks on the presence of queerness in polysemic television texts is symptomatic of what is ultimately an ambivalence on Doty’s part about whether mass culture is “perfectly queer” after all — one that mimics the coyness of connotation that he himself critiques. At times, he states unequivocally that queerness is “inside” mass media, writing that “Queer readings... result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along” (16, my emphasis), and denigrating “straight culture[‘s]... readings of texts” as “desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture” (xii). Only sentences before this declaration in his introduction, however, he preemptively backtracks, writing that “unless the text is about queers, it seems to me the queerness of most mass culture texts is less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception” (xi), and “As long as the analysis of mass culture remains dependent primarily upon texts... the queerness of and in mass culture will remain ‘essentially unsubstantial,’ as it will remain in the twilight zone of connotation” (xii) — in other words, it is in the interpretive practices of the audience that the real queerness is located. “I realize that at a number of points in this book I use language suggesting [in fact, explicitly stating] that the queerness I am discussing is incontrovertibly in the text” (xi), he confesses, but eventually lets us in on the fact that this is a sort of strategic little white lie in service of a noble political cause: “If mass culture remains by, for, and about straight culture, it will be so through our silences, or by our continued acquiescence to such cultural paradigms as connotation, subcultures, subcultural studies, subtexting, the closet, and other heterosexist ploys positioning straightness as the norm” (104). That is, by vocally asserting that mass culture is inherently queer — though this is in actuality stretching the truth a bit, since heterosexism ensures that mass culture’s queerness remains ultimately insubstantial — we help bring about a future utopia in which mass culture will at last truly be queer. To me, this reasoning seems hopelessly garbled.
