{ACADEMIC}
Anyone who was aware of popular cultural media and even slightly knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ issues in the 2000s can remember just how atrocious the representation of queerness across every form of popular cultural media was in the 2000s.
Anyone who was aware of popular cultural media and even slightly knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ issues in the 2000s can remember just how atrocious the representation of queerness across every form of popular cultural media was in the 2000s. From songs that supplied the heterosexual male’s fantasy of lesbianism like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (2008), movies that painted all gays as histrionic sidekicks to straight women like Damian in Mean Girls (2004) and shows that exploited the ‘shock/comedy factor’ of trans individuals like There’s Something About Miriam (2004), there was no corner of the pop culture landscape untouched by the misrepresentation of the LGBTQ+ community. Heterosexual producers, directors and artists alike were receiving mass profit from the unapologetic slandering or bad-faith mimicry of queer bodies and their experiences.
As a little girl who was fanatic about pop culture – more specifically the female contributions to pop culture – throughout a sizable portion of the decade and one relatively unaware of LGBTQ+ discourse; I came from a very liberal household, but was never officially introduced to the concept of queerness; I ate up their content without a conscience telling me not to. With the hysteria of 2000s nostalgia extant in the contemporary popular culture sphere, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit and deconstruct with the perspective of an adult Women and Gender Studies student, three infamous cases of dubious representations of queerness from that period: Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera’s performance at the 2003 VMAs; Season 1 Episode 1 of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” (2007); and the official 20th Century FOX trailer of Jennifer’s Body (2008). Two theories of gender and sexuality will form the lens of how these representations will be investigated – how established protocols govern reality but that new realities can be created (as re-discussed by Judith Butler in the Guardian article “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’” [2011]) and that the ‘pornographic’ is the “confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation (Lorde 4)” of sexuality (outlined by Audre Lorde in the Introduction to Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power [1978]).
In the summer of 2003, Madonna was needing intrigue to increase the sales of her widely-panned American Life, Britney Spears was attempting to evade the shadow of her ‘good, wholesome girl’ image with the anticipated In the Zone and Christina Aguilera was seeking to cement her novel persona of ‘sexually liberated adult’ after the success of Stripped. At the VMAs in August, Spears and Aguilera recreated Madonna’s 1984 performance of “Like A Virgin” by crawling seductively towards each other in coquettish wedding dresses, before she joined them on stage in a ringmaster-style tuxedo. Madonna twirled each young woman around while gesturing at their bodies and danced erotically alongside them, as she sang “Hollywood”, a song about the thingification and commodification of women in Hollywood. She removed Aguilera’s garter over a gratuitous length of time, and then she shared a kiss first, with Spears and then, with Aguilera. All of these women were self-confirmedly heterosexual.
Since the lesbian pulp novels of the late 1950s and 1960s, the ideology of dominant, masculine lesbians tricking or hypnotizing submissive, feminine heterosexual women into temporary lesbian relationships has been in the foreground of the hegemonic understanding of lesbianism. In the 1980s lesbian porn emerged, largely made by heterosexual male producers for a heterosexual male audience (to such an extent that this ‘lesbian porn’ became ‘mainstream lesbian porn’), and the performance of girl-on-girl erotic and sexual actions by – not necessarily homosexual – female actors proved to be lucrative and in-demand as a product. Britney and Christina’s slinking towards one another as they stare into each others’ eyes; the tight corsets and tiny skirt/shorts they rip their wedding dresses to reveal; their obedience to Madonna and the jealousy they feign when the other has her attention; the innocent, childlike and rebellious bad-girl personas they respectively act out; Madonna’s dominatrix character; all three’s movements emphasizing their chests and behinds or emulating their participation in a threesome, all exploit hegemonic girl-on-girl representation.
Lorde defines the ‘pornographic’ as “The erotic…misnamed by men and used against women”, adding that “pornography is a…denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling” (Lorde 4). The pornographic is the antithesis of the ‘erotic’ which in her ideology, is the sharing of the most profound feelings of pleasure one (female-identifying person) can experience. Invoking a term used earlier, the pornographic is a ‘plasticized’ form of the erotic; the erotic ravaged, and its parts glued sloppily and haphazardly together. This VMAs performance is the embodiment of this terming of the pornographic. The ‘pleasure’ experienced from the performance was not Madonna’s, Spears’ nor Aguilera’s, but the heterosexual male viewer mainstream lesbian porn is made for. The acts of intimacy were pure spectacle (or ‘sensation’) to effect each of the women’s careers. Driving the point that the erotic actions were ‘pornographic’, the choreography and costuming for the performance, as well as the camerawork employed to capture it and air in on MTV, were chosen according to Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’.
Madonna, Spears and Aguilera’s performance had created a new form of women’s sexualization in film, a new ‘reality’ for women’s representation in music – the ‘pornographic’ girl-on-girl music video. Erotic performance by heterosexual women atop music on film, became the premier tool for the successful commercialization of female artists. Thus, regardless of sexuality, the music videos of female artists in popular music became dominated by girl-on-girl pornography, in particular the kind of pornographic actions performed by Spears and Aguilera with each other. This kind of girl-on-girl pornography occurred as contemporarily as between Gwen Stefani and her background dancers in “Rich Girl” (2004), the members of Destiny’s Child in “Cater 2 U” (2004) and the members of the Pussycat Dolls in “Don’t Cha” (2005) and has sustained to as modernly as between Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in “WAP” (2020), Doja Cat and Saweetie in “Best Friend” (2021) and Billie Eilish and her background dancers in “Lost Cause” (2021).
This homosexual activity between heterosexual women for the primary purpose of the sexual gratification of heterosexual men – which consequently increases the desirability of the women to the men – has been termed ‘compulsory bisexuality’ by author Breanne Fahs. The popularity of mainstream lesbian porn, amplified by the accessibility to it through and the diversity of it on video-streaming websites like Pornhub, fetishized and made desirable the intimacy shared between women to heterosexual men. Compulsory bisexuality spilled over from porn and music videos by the mid-to-late 2000s into the burgeoning industry of reality television, with female stars of the period’s most prominent programs, such as Paris and Nicole of The Simple Life (2003-07), Holly, Bridget and Kendra of The Girls Next Door (2005-09) and the female cast members of Jersey Shore (2009-12) participating in some form of the practice on-screen. In October 2007 A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila premiered, its premise being that Tila Tequila, a former nude model for men’s magazines and a Myspace celebrity with a fledgling electronic music career (that included pornographic girl-on-girl music videos), was a bisexual and was searching to build a true, significant relationship with a man or a woman.
The history of Tila Tequila’s visibility in pop culture is not to construct a conception of her character a priori, but to intimate the demographic that A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was aimed at given her past work – heterosexual men wanting to view women being erotic (or ‘pornographic’, in Lorde’s terminology). The show’s first episode, “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” is bisected into two halves, the first which presents Tequila’s introductory interactions with the male contestants, and the second, her introductory interactions with the female contestants. The objective of the first half is to impress Tequila with a thoughtful gift, while the objective of the second half is to impress her with a “sexy costume (33:48)”. Each female contestant must present herself in a revealing outfit themed to a pornographic archetype; among the highest-ranked contestants, there was a schoolgirl, a nurse, a maid, a girl scout, a dominatrix and a firefighter; and strut down a runway in front of Tequila. The men being tasked to present a physical object, and the women being tasked to present themselves as a physical object, speaks volumes.
The credits of the show’s first episode reveal a collection of producers – in addition to supervising producers and producers, there are line producers, story producers and segment producers – which explains its highly controlled and palpably fictionalized and sensationalized feel. As opposed to a reality show about a bisexual woman ‘finding love’, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was a commercialization of bisexuality on display. When it comes to the segments presenting Tequila; who confirmed in an interview after the show’s second season that she was at the time of filming, a heterosexual; ‘attempting to discover her soulmate’ amongst the women, the interactions on-screen register as mainstream lesbian porn.
Butler describes the act of performance as, “Or is (one) citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then (they are) invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority (Gleeson).” As a bisexual woman, observing Tequila’s romantic and intimate engagement with women appears to resemble the mannerisms of a heterosexual man engaging with heterosexual women. As two primary examples, one of physical interaction and one of dialogue, she interrupts two of the contestants talking and proceeds to passionately kiss one of them while overtly ignoring the other, and in the next scene complains about a contestant for talking too much about her feelings and being “overemotional (32:00)”. The intended audience, Tequila’s heterosexuality and the network of producers responsible for the show’s text, builds the likelihood that her actions around and attitudes towards women, were conceived by an external entity that sought to present female bisexuality in a particular way – that of how a heterosexual man imagines it. Phrased another way, Tequila was performing a heterosexual man’s conception of a bisexual woman, his conception of how women behave romantically and sexually with each other.
Tequila’s (inter)actions and her dialogue are chosen from a heterosexual man’s perspective (hence their disconnection from how women-loving-women women autonomously act with one another), and are constructed to acquiesce to the principles of mainstream lesbian porn. She is behaving according to its “set of conventions”: acting traditionally feminine, objectifying her partners’ bodies, voicing desire in experimentation and kink. She is “invoking the power” of heterosexual male lesbian porn producers, and in being granted the title of “designated authority” on female bisexuality by the show, is disseminating a conception of female bisexuality that contributes data to the zeitgeist’s understanding of female bisexuality. While this representation of female bisexuality that Tequila exhibited did not originate any new reality, it did reinforce the (mis)conception of bisexual women in the pop culture and society of the mid-to-late 2000s – that they are, as the LGBTQ+ NGO GLAAD phrased it, “untrustworthy, prone to infidelity, and/or lacking a sense of morality; use sex as a means of manipulation or are lacking the ability to form genuine relationships; associated with self-destructive behaviour; and whose attraction to more than one gender is temporary, and will rarely be addressed after this period is over (Kornhaber).”
Jennifer’s Body is unlike either the performance by Madonna, Aguilera and Spears at the 2003 VMAs nor “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” from Season 1 of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, as it was not produced for heterosexual male viewership (and gratification) nor through the lens of heterosexual male thinking. Created by idiosyncratic screenwriter Diablo Cody and auteur director Karyn Kusama, and starring two of the decade’s sought-after ‘It-girls’, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, the film was an exploration of adolescent female friendship and sexuality, and the trauma caused by sexual assault. The friendship between Fox’s “Jennifer” and Seyfried’s “Needy” is intimate, lustful and near the film’s climax, sexual, but it is also cruel, vengeful and violent. The relationship between these two teenage girls is complex, and when it is not antagonistic, it is ‘erotic’ in Lorde’s outlining of the concept.
By the late 2010s, Amanda Seyfried had become representational of wide-eyed innocence and inversely Megan Fox, of sex, due to both women’s prominent roles (the former in Mean Girls (2004) and Mamma Mia! (2008), and the latter in Transformers (2007)) and their celebrity personas. Fox’s symbolism in particular, affected the environment of the film as she was perceived in pop culture and society and thus in the film industry, as a severed body heterosexual men greatly desired to have sex with. Despite the female perspective Jennifer’s Body was conceived through and the female demographic it was constructed for, the perception of Megan Fox as an erotic (‘pornographic’ in Lorde’s terms), fetishized object detached from personhood and extant solely as a commodity for heterosexual men to use for their gratification, made the film, in the eyes of its heterosexual male marketing executives, a vessel for such.
A commentary on women’s power of the erotic being transformed into the male-desired pornographic provided by Lorde, summarizes the representation of queer female sexuality in the official trailer of Jennifer’s Body, “We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much... So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be…milked (Lorde 3)”. Jennifer’s Body was advertised to a young, heterosexual male audience as two separate pornography films: soft (domestic, wholesome) lesbian porn and hard (aggressive, violent) straight porn, both of which centred Fox as the dominant partner. The erotic aspects of Jennifer and Needy’s relationship that were constructed as a natural investigation of adolescent female friendships (whether the attraction is platonic or otherwise?), and the sexual autonomy of Jennifer conceived of as part of the film’s discussion of sexual assault (why does society think differently about a sexually liberated women’s assault than a less sexually active woman’s?), were refigured to fulfill heterosexual male desires.
In the film’s marketing, like in the trailer, Jennifer is presented as an untouchable beauty turned viperlike succubus whose inescapable magnetism and sexual perversion wreak havoc in the lives of both female and male teenagers. Pornographic sounding dialogue – as in dialogue that sounds like it could be in a porn production – dominates the trailer, with phrases including “We could play mommy and daddy (0:41)”, “We always share your bed when we have slumber parties (0:49-0:50)”, “How is he tasting these days? (1:06-1:08)” and “I go both ways (1:24)”. Shots of Needy and Jennifer staring longingly at each other tease the possibility of soft lesbian porn, and a close-up of their lips as they are about to kiss propel this (mis)perception of the film’s contents further. To suggest that the film is at the same time, hard straight porn, Jennifer is shown inviting a male student to ‘her’ house, then in an abandoned property she crushes some of his bones, mounts him and after growing monstrous teeth bites down on him, and in other shots is seen unzipping her top to reveal her naked chest in front of one male character, and kissing and then dragging by his feet another.
The advertising of Jennifer’s Body presents Jennifer at a distance; the audience is not invited to empathize with her as a being, but to observe her and imagine ourselves as one of the characters she engages physically or sexually with (in the case of her interactions with different teenage boys), or pretend to be an in-person witness to the physical and sexual interactions she is having (in the case of her and Needy’s). Relating this thingification of Jennifer’s body and the centrality that that practice has to 20th Century FOX’s perception of what the film is, to Butler’s theory that through individual occurrences new realities can be created, had Jennifer’s Body been marketed to the female audience it was developed for, a newfound form of female representation in film would have emerged. Horror films centred around female protagonists, portraying the particular experiences of women and discussing issues affecting women, that were made by predominantly female production teams, could have become a reality if Jennifer’s Body was advertised ‘correctly’. Throughout the genre’s history females suffering violence for artificial spectacle has been a dominant convention, and until the mid-to-late 2010s with the releases of the women-created Raw (2016), The Love Witch (2016), XX (2017) and Cam (2018), this convention had been invoked and profited upon by heterosexual male producers and directors like the largely unchallenged norm that it was. Had Jennifer’s Body been successful, had it been recognized by society and the industry alike instead of ridiculed like it had been, the representation of women and female suffering in horror would have been viewed as a ‘legitimate’ (profitable, ‘worthy’ to depict on film) practice and the reality of women-made, women-centred and for-women horror films, would have developed earlier.
The misperception of Jennifer’s Body, like the representation of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and the acting of Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera during their 2003 VMAs performance, embodies like a time capsule the popular understanding of and attitude towards female bisexuality in the 2000s. This thinking of the sexuality is present within the film’s official trailer, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila’s “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” and the Madonna, Spears and Aguilera performance – each of which were motivated by the theories of ‘female bisexuality is a sexual deviance women participate in to make themselves more desirable to heterosexual men’ and ‘displays of female bisexuality are spectacles that earn visibility and personal gain’.
While the representations of queerness in popular culture; like bisexuality in the three works re-explored in this retrospection; were predominantly not sympathetic to queer individuals’ wishes nor truthful about queer sexualities and genders, that did not necessitate that they are absolutely detached from queerness and the queer community. Like the Madonna, Britney and Christina performance, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Jennifer’s Body, many depictions of queer subjects and queer actions in 2000s pop culture have been reclaimed by certain queer individuals and communities. These moments are refashioned into moments of iconicity and which give nostalgia. They are cherished for their absurdity, campiness or purely for being an embodiment of the 2000s. Some of these moments are valued for being the experiences which allowed young people struggling with their sexuality or gender to finally recognize their true selves. Thus, while the primary critique of Jennifer’s Body when it premiered was “needs moar bewbs” (Nichols), it, like the Madonna, Aguilera and Spears’ performance and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila have been revitalized as genuinely valuable sites of queer discovery and joy and not solely of ‘atrocious’ representation.
Bibliography:
20th Century FOX. “Jennifer's Body | Official Trailer | 20th Century FOX.” YouTube, uploaded by 20th Century Studios, 11 Sep. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8azftM5puI.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Out & Out Books, 1978.
Gleeson, Jules. “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman.’” The Guardian, 7 Sep. 2021, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Kornhaber, Spencer. “The Trope of the Evil Television Bisexual.” The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/tvs-evil-bisexuals-still-live/412786/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.
Nichols, MacKenize. “‘Jennifer’s Body’ Turns 10: Megan Fox, Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama Reflect on Making the Cult Classic.” Variety, 11 Sep. 2019, variety.com/2019/film/news/jennifers-body-10th-anniversary-megan-fox-diablo-cody-1203323111/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2022.
“Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls.” A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, created by Riley McCormick, season 1, episode 1, 495 Productions, 2007.