ABSTRACT
Picture this: you can almost smell the coffee served in the familiar diner interior glowing at you on the television screen. No, you actually do smell the coffee, because you needed to make yourself a cup to watch yet another episode of this particular television series where the protagonists are totally addicted to caffeine. Or, even better, you had to find some (junk) food to munch, while persistently watching how the generational gaps between three straight white women – daughter, mother and grandmother – continue to widen and narrow, mostly over food, either at the dinner table or at the diner counter. Regardless of your gender, you may find yourself passionately attached either to an obnoxious schoolgirl, who is an unbearable upper-class over-achiever, or to a grumpy male diner owner who does not like kids. You find yourself ranting and raving about the twists and turns of the heterosexual romances taking place in the series. You may feel shame for the arrogant characters and squirm uncomfortably on your sofa while watching adolescent love scenes. You may even shout out loud in frustration because the protagonists become emotionally attached to the ‘wrong’ people, but you still continue following Gilmore Girls (USA, 2001-7). If you recognized any of these emotions, reactions or positions, you are welcome to follow my case study on intense personal response to television. Gilmore Girls, a drama series created and largely written by Amy Sherman-
Palladino, tells a story of a somewhat unconventional family: Lorelai and Rory Gilmore (Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel), and a motley group of idiosyncratic inhabitants of a fictional New England small-town called Stars Hollow. Lorelai, the black sheep of the affluent white Gilmore family, is an unwed1 mother who got pregnant when she was 16, the age her daughter Rory is at the beginning of the series. The townspeople in Stars Hollow have become the chosen, and quite extended, family of the ‘Gilmore girls’, whose relationship to Lorelai’s parents is highly ambivalent, and forms a central tension within the series. Gilmore Girls has already been analyzed from different feminist angles by
many researchers and critics (see e.g. Calvin 2008), and both the pro-and not-so-feminist strands of the narrative have been scrutinized.2 However, a reading focusing on class,3 a queer analysis of the series, and a discussion on
both aspects especially from the perspective of affectivity, still remain as challenges. This article is an effort to think about affects brought about by a contact with an ambiguously normative product of popular culture. While queer studies have produced critique on the normativity of the mainstream popular culture, and substantial analysis on representations of gay men, lesbians and transgendered people, there have been relatively few efforts to ponder affective attachments to ostensibly straight representations. In this text I am going to lead my readers through some singular scenes of
Gilmore Girls, which have had an especially powerful effect on me, but I am also going to refer to some narrative threads in the series at large. It is my intention to fit together a discussion of affective response and emotions represented in the diegetic world of the series, in order to discover what touches, moves or repulses me as a viewer, and how these touching, moving or repulsive scenes have been represented. How is it possible, that a series with no explicitly queer4 characters keeps also a queerly looking viewer like me hooked? Why do I feel so protective5 of the show when explaining the plot – including its heteronormative twists and turns of boy-meets-girl-romances – to people around me? Why am I so highly emotional about this particular fiction, which parades in front of me the straight and narrow lives of wealthy white New Englanders? Why do I love watching the series, even though I cannot help feeling ironic frustration from time to time? What exactly is the quality of shame6 I feel as a viewer? By using the term ‘affect’ I aim to emphasize the intensity of feeling and
the strength of reactions, often bodily ones, effected by media experiences. Already the words used in the previous paragraphs – passion, shame, frustration and love – suggest strong feelings: emotions, which are able to influence action and behaviour. Elspeth Probyn has distinguished emotion from affect by stating that the former may be understood as social or cultural expressions of feeling, while the latter may be used to as referring to the bodily effects of psychological feelings (Probyn 2005: 9-10). Applied to my approach in this article this would mean that ‘emotion’ in my usage refers to the representations, while I reserve the notion of ‘affect’ for the bodily effects of these representations. This distinction is also in line with Eve Sedgwick’s clarification: ‘it is the responses, not the stimuli, that have affective qualities’ (2003: 25, emphasis in original). Affect takes the body in its grip and holds it; an affective representation
keeps you watching, even when you want to avert your gaze (Johnson 2004). But affect does not only hold the body, nor is it natural or a pre-discursive entity (Cvetkovich 1992: 24). As constructions, affects effected by cultural texts may be conceptualized as dynamic relationships between the texts and the readers (Paasonen 2007: 46). As a screwball comedy series based on dense, extremely fast-paced dialogue, Gilmore Girls may, of course, be positioned in the category of ‘body genres’, which aim to evoke in their viewers responses similar to those they depict (ibid.). In the case of this series the response in question would be the satisfaction largely produced by the
cultural competence: recognition of the plethora of the intertextual, or even interserial references constantly made in the dialogue. However, I am interested in more surprising and even contradictory responses brought about by the series, than just the overt comedy effects. To me much more gripping are the uncomfortable moments when I have to cover my eyes or otherwise shift my position out of embarrassment, or when I exclaim out of frustration or irritation. Or the intensely pleasurable moments when I have to laugh, but out of glee rather than malignant pleasure, which often is behind the comic effect. Methodologically it is also important to bear in mind that as a researcher
of cultural texts I only have access to my ‘own’ feelings and responses. Nevertheless, I think that by dissecting both my strangely affective responses to the series and the clusters of signs (such as the dialogue, or the habitus of certain characters) which, obviously not only for me, but for many other viewers as well, construct the affective grip of the narrative, I also take into account that ‘emotions are not simply located in the individual, but move between bodies’ (Ahmed 2004b: 10). As a television series marketed to a female audience, Gilmore Girls has created an ‘intimate public’ of its own: it is arguable that its public follows it exactly because it is situated in the intimate sphere, ‘a convenient register in which to debate and obscure larger knots of social attachment and antagonism’ (Berlant 2008: 7). However, by reading signs of class and queer out of the series, and my own responses to these signs, I suggest that Gilmore Girls may also have created a political ‘counterpublic’ (Berlant 2008: 7-8) resisting normatively heterosexual genders. One should of course not ‘too readily celebrate the subversive powers of affective expression’ (Cvetkovich 1992: 2), but it is important to pay critical attention to the possible politics of affect: in Ann Cvetkovich’s words: ‘to explore how meanings are given to the energy attached to particular events and representations’ (1992: 24). Eve Sedgwick has eloquently pointed out the freedom of affect to have any
object. She writes: ‘Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy’ (Sedgwick 2003: 19). For me, as a researcher of media culture, it is worthwhile to emphasize that this ‘any number of things’ may also include media(ted) representations: affectivity does not distinguish between representations and a ‘more real’ reality. On the contrary, like relationships and everyday situations in peoples’ lives, cultural texts may be conceptualized as ‘repositories of feelings and emotions’, which are encoded as well in the texts and their realm of signs, as in their audience’s practices of interpretation (Cvetkovich 2003: 7). In this text I focus on Gilmore Girls because, among a huge number of television series I have consumed as an academic tv-junkie, the show belongs to the few I have attached myself to with an extraordinary intensity. Among these shows, Gilmore Girls has interestingly been the only one with absolutely no out-queer characters, and
my qu(e)ery thus is directed to the strangely attractive breach between the ostensible straightness and possible (queerly or otherwise) critical undercurrents in the series. In the following, I am going to discuss three aspects which make the lives
and loves represented in Gilmore Girls so affectively attaching for a viewer like myself: firstly, the repetitious, parodic representation of gendered white upperclass privilege; secondly, sexually or genderwise ambiguously coded characters, puns referring to non-normative sexuality and awkward moments of ‘same-sex’ closeness, and thirdly, a convoluted stance towards futurity. Other writers have analyzed such affective factors as the ‘female soundspace’ of the show (Woods 2008) and the epic position of food in the narrative (Coleman 2008). The objects of affect I am trying to momentarily pin down rather emerge from encounters with a certain ‘anti-attitude’ – anti-class hierarchy, anti-normativity and anti-futurity – and with representations which can be read as (but not necessarily are intended as) signifiers of this attitude. Here I do somewhat echo the recent anti-social turn in queer studies (see e.g. Halberstam 2008), which emphasizes the anti-normalizing and anti-(re-)production in queer.
