This paper moves beyond a conventional critique of Bravo's popular makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that focuses on gay stereotyping to consider how the show puts gay cultural expertise to work to reform a heterosexual masculinity that is compatible with the neoliberal moment. By analyzing 40 episodes of the show, in addition to a number of related texts, the author considers the newly public acknowledgement of gay taste and consumer expertise; the "crisis of masculinity" that requires that heterosexual men must now attend to their relationships, image, and domestic habitus; and the remaking of the straight guy into not only an improved romantic partner -the metrosexual -but a more flexible, employable worker. The author concludes by considering how camp deconstructs some of Queer Eye's most heteronormative aims, even while leaving its class and consumption rationales intact.
KeywordsQueer Eye for the Straight Guy, metrosexual, neoliberal, neoliberalism, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, camp, reality television This paper moves beyond a conventional critique of Bravo's popular makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that focuses on gay stereotyping to consider how the show puts gay cultural expertise to work to reform a heterosexual masculinity that is compatible with the neoliberal moment. By analyzing 40 episodes of the show, in addition to a number of related texts, the author considers the newly public acknowledgement of gay taste and consumer expertise; the "crisis of masculinity" that requires that heterosexual men must now attend to their relationships, image, and domestic habitus; and the remaking of the straight guy into not only an improved romantic partner-the metrosexual-but a more flexible, employable worker. The author concludes by considering how camp deconstructs some of Queer Eye's most heteronormative aims, even while leaving its class and consumption rationales intact.
This artide addresses gay marketers' tardy and ambivalent attempts to imagine and organize lesbians as a viable target marketing niche. Practical considerations make lesbians less attractive as a market: They have a lower average household income than gay male and heterosexual couples and they are hard to reach for market research purposes and with advertising. But the lesbian market is also dogged by the popular image of lesbians as lacking both erotic and acquisitive desire, embodied in the stereotype of anticonsumption, parsimonious, unsexy feminists who resist marketers' interest in them as consumers.
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