“He Needs to Face His Fears With These Five Queers!”

Abstract

This article examines the figure of the lifestyle expert on television through an analysis of a popular U.S. makeover show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It situates the popularity and significance of this program within the context of recent scholarship documenting a broader shift away from more traditional, educational modes of mediatized expertise toward revalued, “feminine” forms of “ordinary” knowledge. Despite the persuasive claims for this shift, the lifestyle expert nevertheless plays a strongly pedagogical role by authorizing certain models of social identity and “good” citizenship—lifestyle and makeover culture being associated with idealized images of the self as a reflexive and enterprising consumer—citizen. Using Queer Eye as a generative exemplar of this increasingly common mode of pedagogy, the article analyzes the way in which the show attempts to negotiate the potential disjuncture between a conception of the self as reflexive and “post-traditional” and more traditional classed and gendered models of selfhood.