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Sex, gender and heteronormativity: Seeing ‘Some Like It Hot’ as a heterosexual dystopia

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Billy Wilder's classic film ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959) prefigures Judith Butler's concept of performativity in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Butler introduced this in Gender Trouble (1990), demonstrating that sex, gender and sexuality are naturalized effects of citation and repetition. In that text she explains that denaturalization is visibly demonstrated by drag. Later in Bodies that Matter (1993) she argues that drag in ‘Some Like It Hot’ does not denaturalize heterosexuality, but rather fortifies it. What then for Butler divides denaturalizing drag from non-denaturalizing drag? Butler locates denaturalizing drag in the film ‘Female Trouble’ (dir. John Waters, 1974), where Divine's drag-queen persona satirizes gender in a hyperbolic performance. However, Butler misconstrues the cross-dressing performances in ‘Some Like It Hot’ as drag, which are better understood as instances of theatrical disguise. Narrative analysis reveals that all the characters in ‘Some Like It Hot’ function within a dystopian critique of heteronormativity. Because the film takes a performative view of sex, gender and sexuality, it can validate three queer couples who defy the strictures of heterosexual romance. Butler thus overlooks a discourse of critique and destabilization alternative to gay perspectives. Current developments in sexual politics, broadly conceived, track both Butlerian concepts of performativity and dystopian critiques of heteronormativity.

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Notes

  1. I am aware that writing about funny things kills them stone dead; apologies to Billy Wilder, the writer/director of ‘Some Like It Hot’. I refer any readers who have not yet seen the film to plot synopses and commentaries easily available on the internet, for example http://www.filmsite.org/some.html (accessed 12 December 2007). This paper draws on material previously published in a programme note (2005) for Verdi's ‘Rigoletto’ at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in which I began to link the two (see below, pp. 5, 14–19, 23). ‘Dystopia’ was probably coined by J.S. Mill in a Parliamentary speech, mentioning social conditions ‘too bad to be practicable’; later it became ‘an ‘inverted utopia’’ (Oxford English Dictionary on-line: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50071441?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=dystopia&first=1&max_to_show=10 (accessed 5 December 2007)).

  2. The TV comic Stephen Colbert's famously non-funny parody of Fox News in front of President George W. Bush at the National Press Club dinner on 1 May 2006 neatly illustrates this. Bush's presumption was that the performance would be humorous and therefore safely outside politics; gradually he became aware that the performance was a political attack and therefore not funny, so he took himself – unsmiling – safely outside. Colbert pretended to be a right-wing newscaster (in itself funny, given his left-liberal TV show) celebrating Bush's achievements (as a Fox News show would), whereas it became clear that he was using this device to attack Bush's stupidity and disgraceful actions, particularly in Iraq (which are not funny, and so very serious politically).

  3. Other strategies are anonymity and also parody, that is adopting an authorial persona that naively advocates the things one is against, such as Colbert's Fox News commentator. The ‘get out’ – that is merely acting ‘in character’ – was of course available to Colbert to ward off accusations of ‘being political’ rather than being funny.

  4. In his 2001 ‘Some Like It Hot’ DVD interview, Tony Curtis comments extensively on the limiting boundary lines of risqué behaviour at the time (both on screen and off), on the other side of which was repression and silence. The interview gives the impression that Curtis neither then nor now endorsed homophobic prejudice and suspicion, though he makes no overtly programmatic statements about sexual politics.

  5. Of course there could be other audiences and other readings, collectively and individually, for example mine; see the discussion in Hall (1980) where multiple interpretive positions and audiences for works of popular culture are established in relation to political theory and politics.

  6. Shapiro (1988) sets out this general view. For a discussion of the status of cinema within political theory, see Porter (2007), referring to Shapiro (2002), which addresses cinema in particular; see also Shapiro (1999).

  7. Subjects in non-democratic societies are often limited to popular cultural forms (rather than overtly political ones) in order to effect a coded political communication between themselves, and, so they hope, with their rulers, whom they address as supplicants or satirists.

  8. Given that characters played by these two actors have a number of male and female names and personae (three each) throughout the film, I stabilize my discussion with the actors’ very recognizable screen names; in the film Curtis is ‘Joe’, ‘Josephine’ and ‘Junior’; Lemmon is ‘Jerry’, ‘Geraldine’ (briefly) and ‘Daphne’.

  9. In his DVD interview Curtis acknowledges that some of his ‘female’ lines were dubbed (presumably by a female impersonator) because he couldn’t modulate his voice upwards consistently; he then explains that he consistently pursed his lips to create femininity.

  10. In the film, Monroe's character ‘Sugar Kane’ is using an assumed name; I stabilize my discussion of this character by using the actor's name, as she was – at least in terms of probable audience perception at the time – ‘playing herself’ anyway.

  11. This is duly noticed in the script when there is initial confusion about not having a bathing suit for the beach; Monroe explains that they can be rented.

  12. ‘Brand new!’ Lemmon says, as one would say of a manufactured or constructed object.

  13. Female sex symbol and symbol of ‘sex’ per se as constructed within the ‘male gaze’ (Mulvey, 1989); in Butler's terms Monroe is a hyperbolic version of femininity (Butler, 1993, p. 237), a point to which I return below.

  14. Which it is. Lemmon at one point says he is terrified of being taken to ‘the ladies morgue’.

  15. In the DVD interview Curtis recounts that he and Lemmon were coached on gestures by a female impersonator, and that they insisted on made-to-measure dresses (from the top costumier Orry Kelly) so that they could move comfortably.

  16. As the character in the film is consistently ‘Osgood’, I stabilize my discussion on this name, rather than Brown's.

  17. In the DVD interview Curtis explains that Lemmon's dancing antics with maracas – while delivering these amazing lines – were staged by Wilder so that the audience could really ‘hear it’ in that particular run of dialogue (whereas elsewhere, as Curtis says, with fast-talking dialogue you have to see the movie again and again in order to follow every word).

  18. Zivi (2008, pp. 164–165) makes a similar argument about drag, but in relation to repetition/replication and the politics of resignification.

  19. See Butler on the (controversial) concept of ‘the livable life’ (Butler, 2004, pp. 8, 12, 17, 29–30, 39, 225–227); on the UK legislation, see Chambers and Carver (2008, p. 44).

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Acknowledgements

For incisive and helpful comments I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and audiences at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2007) in Chicago, at Cardiff University and at Oxford University, with particular debts to David Boucher, Chris Brookes, Rebecca Brown, Samuel A. Chambers, Bill Chaloupka, Mary Dietz, Elizabeth Frazer, Larry George, Carole Pateman and Kam Shapiro.

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Carver, T. Sex, gender and heteronormativity: Seeing ‘Some Like It Hot’ as a heterosexual dystopia. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 125–151 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.38

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