engleski

Your Face Sounds Bigoted: Cross-dressing and Low Camp Narrative of Croatian Television Shows

Since December 2014, the Croatian commercial TV channel NOVA TV has aired local version of the Dutch music and dance show “Your Face Sounds Familiar” translated as “Tvoje lice zvuči poznato”. The main premise of the show is a performance contest, where famous actors, singers or just celebrities are being asked to transform into another singer and perform their song with all the stage paraphernalia, mannerisms and dance routines to match “the original”. The jury then picks the one who was the best, not only in singing, but in complete “transformation” and “believability”. Ratings of the show went sky-high, making it the single most popular “family entertainment” for the Saturday night viewership already three TV seasons in a row. The most popular “transformations” are by many, those with a gender switch, from male stars dressing into female singers and vice versa, women freely performing masculinity, simply because “the role requires it”. This freedom of gender performance (as opposed to gender being assigned by birth in older theories still perpetuated by right wing advocates) might be a welcoming twist in media programming. Or is it? Also, it probably eases the public discourse toward sex and alternative lifestyles, gender- bending and non-conformity. Or it actually increases the male-female stereotypes, feeds on it and puts it in the window of unrefined media grotesque, as would G.R. Tamarin define it in his 1962 definition of “tragic” plus “comic” minus “pathos”. This paper will analyze the television tropes of “family appropriate” gender bending, aimed at making it fun and safe, always with the purpose (to imitate or to be believable) and excluding sexual connotations as non-existent. Besides its “safe” PG-13 approach this practice also manages to promote subverted homophobia and transphobia, with contestants always trying to declare their “right sex”, even when they are still being in their “different role”. Attitude magazine columnist Mark Simpson and Judith Butler claimed long ago that gender is a continuing performance, but Croatian cross- dressing TV stars still can not wait to jump out of their “forced costume”. Did we regress into the world of cheap 1980’s film comedies, where in the first instance of man wearing a dress, audience went into laughter? And why still, the majority of the “most successful” performances in that shows are still men in high-heels, but more rarely women wearing moustaches? Can a woman make fun out of masculinity and play it safe as men continue to dominate the world of family entertainment? Why is it so acceptable in transitional societies as Croatian? And can it be considered a narrative in a need of change?

Narratology ; Television ; Arts ; Camp ; Cross-Dressing ; TV ; Media ; Performance

International conference Narratology and Its Discontents: Narrating beyond Narration Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb April 6th–8th 2017 Zagreb, Croatia