Sparkling objects of desire

In the article Just Be Nice, which offers a critical reading of the media image and reception of transgender influencer Gwen McCullen in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, its author Dominika Moravčíková presents McCullen as a problematic celebrity. She primarily quotes her implied affinity for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump, which should not be taken lightly – although it mostly manifests in the form of ragebait and trolling. Moravčíková describes the pitfalls of uncritical and depoliticized acceptance of McCullen's stylization into the role of “Queen of Slovakia” by Slovak and Czech media and “liberal Slovakia”. She warns against perceiving McCullen as a salvific figure and bearer of emancipation for trans people. She emphasizes that McCullen’s activities – whether it’s her presence on social networks, the Bratislava-Prague tour, or charitable deeds, however “sweet” and “adorable” in the eyes of her admirers – are primarily part of a business strategy and centralize “individual visibility, media attention, and commodifiable ideas of power”. She stresses that the emancipatory effort towards improving the position of trans people in society should be primarily focused on “collective work and long-term solutions”.

So far, it’s hard to disagree with Moravčíková. I am somewhat skeptical of her framing of “liberal Slovakia” as a homogeneous monolith, which, due to its own pathological provincialism, believes in fairy tales and considers any action under the guise of humor to be strictly apolitical. At the same time, I am willing to accept this shorthand as part of the genre in which Moravčíková operates. However, some of her other intellectual approaches and theses show that she treats the phenomenon of McCullen inadequately.

What is particularly troubling is her disinterest in perceiving McCullen holistically and understanding the reasons why she captivated a specific sector of public imagination. It is definitely essential to view McCullen critically and to point out that she is not a modern saint of trans rights. But diagnosing any interest in her person solely as a symptom of petty bourgeoisie and naivety, completely ignoring the complex historical relationship of queer people to their queens, reducing trans representation to “good” and “bad”, and using McCullen as a trans subject solely as a means to achieve (argumentative and political) goals, I consider at best analytically insufficient and at worst outright harmful.

Are we queer enough?

Moravčíková compares McCullen’s gender performance, which undeniably has camp elements, to drag. However, she is convinced that it is a “bad drag,” as she does not see McCullen as a subversive actor in the field of gender. For Moravčíková, only drag that explicitly thematizes and depicts resistance to dominant notions of normative gender and sexuality performance is subversive. Verta Taylor, Leila J. Rupp, and Joshua Gamson, in their book Authority in Contention (chapter Performing Protest: Drag Shows as Tactical Repertoire of the Gay and Lesbian Movement), present a somewhat broader concept of subversion in drag, within which “performers (drag queens) appropriate dominant gender and sexual categories and practices, neither rejecting nor accepting them, but exploiting the fact that femininity and heterosexuality are portrayed by gay men in order to create a hybrid and more fluid model of gender and sexuality”.

Of course, McCullen is not a gay man in drag, and one might only debate to what extent the creation of a hybrid and more fluid model of gender and sexuality is part of her daily agenda. However, if I am to perceive her gender performance as drag, this model can also be applied to her. No matter how normative it may seem for a Texan blonde with a penchant for fashion and luxury, the fact that she proudly displays these traits as a trans woman (a bearer of a marginalized and sharply politicized identity, which many conservative voices claim does not belong to feminism and should not) is, in a way, subversive. It may be a chaotic, ambivalent, and unsatisfactory subversion – in its aesthetics or scope – but it cannot be said to be entirely absent.

Those who love the “bad” trans object

If I continue to adhere to Moravčíková’s idea of “good” and “bad” manifestations of drag or representations of transness, I must inevitably confront the fact that McCullen somehow falls into both categories. If I apply, for example, the May Test (the equivalent of the Bechdel Test, which determines whether a trans character is “good”), to her or rather to her fictionalized social media image, she mostly meets the criteria that a trans character should be portrayed as safe, stable, and happy, not involved in sex work, drug dealing, or theft. On the other hand, she does not meet the criteria that a trans character’s identity should not be a source of humor or central to the plot.

Cáel M. Keegan, in his article On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects, defines a “good” (in the sense of “obedient”) trans object as one “that employs the trans figure in a way that limits its deconstructive capacities, so that it primarily serves to extend the logic of the existing gender system – either through contrast with its assumptions or through their assimilation”. At first glance, it might seem that McCullen uses her trans figure on social media in this way, thus aligning with Moravčíková’s critique. However, a closer look shows that the trans character she constructs also exhibits signs of a “bad” (in the sense of “disobedient”) trans object, which, according to Keegan, “does not fit into the aesthetic system considered acceptable for representing reality. The ‘bad’ trans object threatens the stability of the gender difference system and must therefore be either ignored or erased. Careful examination of ‘bad’ trans objects can help reveal how current ‘model’ trans media may actually reflect new restrictions in trans imagination.”

Within Keegan’s taxonomy, McCullen can be considered a “bad” trans object, as she often refuses politeness – sometimes explicitly trying to be perceived as problematic, deviating from standards of traditional beauty, and playing with comedic tropes associated with trans identity. Her acceptance and hyperbolic performance of similarity to Robert Fico contain all these characteristics. Again, it can be stated that McCullen simultaneously meets the expectations placed on conventionally acceptable trans objects and, in her own way, resists them.

The “Incorrect” message of pop diva

This oscillation between “good” and “bad,” authentic and inauthentic, normative and subversive appears also in the reflections of Martin Zeller-Jacques. In his article Experimentation: Appropriation vs. Transgression – Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl: Carrier or Corrupter of Hegemony?, he analyzes the cultural impact of the popular song I Kissed a Girl. Zeller-Jacques publishes his initial positive reaction to I Kissed a Girl as a representation of queer desire, which turns into a negative reaction after a more careful reading of the lyrics, realizing that it is more about appropriation of queer desire by a heterosexual person, in which the observing and controlling eye of the lyricist’s male partner also figures.

The most fundamental shift in Zeller-Jacques’ thinking occurs when he realizes that his critique of Perry’s I Kissed a Girl is essentially identical to the critique of FOX News: “I already mentioned my initial objection to Perry’s song as a form of heteronormative commodification of behavior that should be ‘queer’. And suddenly, FOX News protests against the same thing and for the same reason. FOX may want to stigmatize queer behavior and I, on the contrary, want to highlight it, but ultimately both our reactions to the blending of queer behavior with heteronormativity are examples of ‘straight panic’.”

Unfortunately, Moravčíková did not arrive at a similar realization in her article about McCullen. Zeller-Jacques notes that Katy Perry’s song “commodifies lesbian experience, and it’s clear that it will not seriously threaten heteronormative hegemony”. Moravčíková, on the other hand, is capable of observing that McCullen commodifies her own trans experience and is also dangerously close to maintaining heteronormative hegemony. However, she does not seem to realize that the objection to mixing queer and heteronormative signs is the same objection – albeit mirrored – that her conservative opponents have towards McCullen.

Moravčíková also refuses to acknowledge the limits of personal experience and projects her own universalized interests onto McCullen. Ultimately, Zeller-Jacques must admit that “crossing boundaries is as much a matter of lived experience as it is of purely theoretical considerations; for many, Perry’s video will transcend boundaries, and for many, it will confirm their own feelings of queer desire”. Moravčíková does not accept the possibility that McCullen might be personally significant for someone on their journey to self-awareness or freer living.

The oldest fantasy of all: that we are on the side of angels

In this rigidity and insularity, the limits and shortcomings of Moravčíková’s argumentative and political project become apparent. Her reasoning, which implies that there are clearly defined “right” and “wrong” ways of being queer, smacks of a peculiar puritanism – it lacks kindness, imagination, and above all, contact with queer reality. One thing is to claim that it is inappropriate to see McCullen as an example of good practice in the emancipation of trans people. Another is to deliberately ignore the complexity of McCullen’s subjectivity and that of those who may have reasons to identify with her – despite her problematic nature or precisely because of it.

The author of the mentioned article vividly demonstrates the fundamental limitations of feminist and often also queer discourse that is uninformed by trans perspectives when criticizing trans media (especially when it involves media produced by trans people themselves), which uses trans subjects solely as analytical objects and evidence. Thomas J. Billard and Erique Zhang, in their article Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation, sharply oppose this approach. They criticize the oversimplified template that “trans representations are supposedly ‘bad’ if they confirm binary gender identity, and ‘good’ if they disrupt the binary gender system. However, trans identity disrupts this theoretical model because trans people relate to the binary gender system in various ways or resist it within a complex field of legitimate identities. Consequently, media representations of trans people cannot be simply interpreted through queer political fantasies of anti-normativity.”

Glory of the queen!

In discussions about any queer queen, it is impossible not to mention that queens (of Hollywood and other glittering provinces) were primarily in the pre-stonewall era one of the key means of shaping collective identity, language, and spaces of encounter for the queer community. The wonders of the cinematic screen and drag queens who admired and parodied them brought into queer consciousness – however naive it may seem – hope for a better world and the energy to fight for such a world.

From the perspective of a gay man, this phenomenon poetically describes Daniel Harriss in his article The Death of Camp: Gay Men and Hollywood Diva Worship, from Reverence to Ridicule: “Rough amazonesses in sequins, ermine, and lamé have become so inseparable from gay self-image that they helped draw from hidden sources of masculinity and perceive themselves as more than just eternal victims, as contemptible weaklings too feeble to defend themselves against police brutality. In this way, something as retrograde and conformist as popular culture with its uncritical celebration of materialism, success, and blissful heterosexual domestic relationships was actually used for radical purposes, enabling the marginalized subculture to defend itself against the very America that Hollywood celebrated.”

I certainly do not want to claim that there is a direct equivalence between Gwen McCullen and, for example, Judy Garland. McCullen is a celebrity who will probably fade from public consciousness again within a few cycles of news. Also, the media and political worlds of contemporary Central Europe are in some sense incomparable to the pre-stonewall United States. However, the continuity of queer admiration for their queens remains strong, merely undergoing transformations.

Moravčíková writes in her article: “I do not doubt the claim of trans women to activate ‘royal’ fantasies, although I consider them benign and superficial, just like feminist vernacular girl boss and SheEO.” I feel that the author’s disdain for queens and royal fantasies lies in her not understanding or not wanting to understand the queer essence of this fantasy. The queer icon of the queen is, in a certain sense, a symbol of (unattainable) power. Above all, it is a manifestation that gender itself is a fantasy. The queen works so intensely on her exaggerated femininity; her grace and tremble are hyperbolic, realized in such a broad gesture that looking at her, I experience not only awe and pleasure but also the realization that nothing about femininity (or masculinity) is “natural” or “given”. It is a grand performance. Wanting to resemble a queen in queer imagination is not about the desire to rule, to literally inhabit the image and status of a queen, but about the desire for transformation. A transformation that the queen illuminates with her shine, construction, courage, and determination to be frivolous, irrelevant, promiscuous…

As Gavin Lee writes in his book Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity (chapter Queer desire is not gay, gender is a fantasy – Ways of loving Britney): “The power of imagination leads us to question the stability of the ‘self’ within social order, transforming moral decline into a celebration of ‘shamelessness’ and ultimately revealing the illusory nature of reality – how do you know what is real and what is fantasy? By loosening the potential of desire to freely spread and fantasies to disintegrate, we enact queer politics.”