I've seen this video about two dozen times over the past year or so and if you want to know the truth, I still think its funny. I get a kick out of this clip for what I consider obvious reasons––the classic big hair and night gown, the perfection of the Long Island mother accent, the absurd one liners. But what really gets me time after time is the familiarity.
I can't help but feel like I know this woman. She's in Long Island, Boston, and everywhere in between. I've seen her at family functions, town meetings, in church and out at the bar. Shes my neighbor. Shes my great aunt. Shes my 6th grade teacher. And I think if you really think about it, she is yours too.
At one time or another, more often for some than others, we have all witnessed the attitude of this character in regards to homosexuality because its everywhere.
The satirical sketch comedy by John Roberts, writer and star of the video, makes the devastation and confusion of a mother discovering her son is "gay", a loaded label full of negative connotations, appear as realistic and ridiculous as it truly can be.
In Judith Butler's essay, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination", she discusses indentity politics and how assuming the identity of a lesbian can be liberating yet simultaneously perpetuate the oppression of the homosexuals by validating heterosexist thought.
Heterosexuality has gained advantage by claiming the dominant role of the "natural." Our society tends to view anything that contradicts the heterosexual lifestyle as strange and clashing. Butler argues that "gender is an imitation for which there is no original," meaning that the idea that heterosexuality is the norm is a falacy that lives on through repitition.
Saying "I am a lesbian" poses a problem for Butler. She cannot accept or reject the label because she feels "identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes" but also identifies with the meaning of "lesbian", at least in part. Butler does not refuse the sign of "lesbian" but she does refuse any stability of its definitive meaning. Any label can be restricting and all labels come with connotations both negative and otherwise.
Which brings me back to the video. "Gaaaahd!," wails the Long Island mother in a moment of pure anguish. She wants an explanation for her sons defiance of heteronormativity. She places blame in unreasonable places. "Gay," she says, "he moved to the city and now hes gay."
The word "gay" means something bad to this woman. It means different, unnatural and it comes with a feminine hand motion. It's breaking her feminine heart because, you know, women are naturally emotional. ...Right?
Wrong! Or so I've been told.
The meaning of woman (or man for that matter) is not concrete. This may not surprise you nearly as much as it did me but at the ripe age of 22, I'm learning. Before reading Butler and our class discussion, I hadn't given very much thought to gender roles or what comes with identifying as gay, straight or anything for that matter. I knew that as a woman, I could have a variety of "feminine" as well as "masculine" qualities, but I had never thought about what those terms really mean or where they came from.
I can see now how identity politics create a divide between all people. Language forces us to think in terms of wrong and right, natural and unnatural but none of it is authentic. Reading Butler and class discussion has been personally enlightening––I only hope I can someday share my new perspective with the distraught mother of a "gay" man.
Like the author of this post I have also seen this clip several times and I still find it to be humorous. However, considering the post from the viewpoint of the class discussion thus far and Butler’s article, there are new ways through which this clip can be read.
ReplyDeleteThis clip is challenging the essential nature of being “gay.” It is able to do this through being gay itself. When I write that the clip is gay, I do not mean to use the word in any negative sense, I simply wish to state that the clip is queer. It is outside of the heteronormative. Specifically the clip features a man playing, or performing, the role of the “essential mother.” As the author of this post states, this is the mother that we all know. However in achieving some essential mother, aunt or older female role the male doing this shows that motherly female performance does not have to be connected with anatomical sex.
Further this male/female mother then displays all the “essential” characteristics of being gay while lamenting over her son. For example she states her son turned gay when he moved to the city, thus showing that gay people must only live in the city. She also exclaims the essential gay battle cry “He’s here, He’s queer, get used to it.” In a witty and perhaps existential way, this clip calls to mind all the essential “queer” things to mind through an unessential, yet still queer source.
While this clip remains funny, I agree with the author of the post that the class discussion and Butler article give us a new way to see into the meaning of this clip.