#oops it's almost 1am and i'm reading critical queer theory

[a-magical-evening]

Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression

Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Authorship in South Park and Beyond, Nick Marx

BASEketball might be seen to exhibit some of the characteristics Justin Wyatt identifies as accommodating queerness in purportedly “straight” comedies. Of Swingers (1996), Wyatt describes the film’s lack of a “strong male institutional bias” that directs the spectator to construct male bonding as straight. […] Amidst the success of films like There’s Something about Mary, critics identified a “farts and phalluses fixation” in the cycle of gross-out comedies during the summer of 1998. Parker and Stone indulge in much of the same carnivalesque humor throughout BASEketball, but ultimately use queerness as a way to undermine viewer expectations about this humor. That is to say, the film functions in a conventionally parodic way—hinting at homosexual bonds among its male characters—until its climactic scene, in which main characters Coop and Remer kiss and queerness becomes explicit. At this moment Parker and Stone connect their performances in BASEketball to publicity discourses that reinforce the duo’s oppositionality.

BASEketball also constructs queerness through the aforementioned idiosyncratic patter of Parker and Stone. In Swingers, Wyatt argues, “Queerness resides primarily in the forms of communication and interaction between the friends in the group,” noting that its protagonists speak in a highly coded conversation with repeated use of words like “baby” and “money.” A similar tendency manifests in Coop and Remer’s use of the word “dude,” a nod to the “dude-speak” carried over from their South Park authorial persona.

Another method that Wyatt identifies for reading the male bonding in Swingers as gay is that with women, “flirtation rather than seduction is most significant.” […] This dynamic plays out between Coop and Remer as well. […] Indeed, a queer reading of the relationship between Coop and Remer points to the larger, conventionally parodic project at work in BASEketball— suggesting that its professional-athlete protagonists can be read as gay, thus undermining the archetypal, hypermasculine image of athletes currently circulating in sports imagery.

But the film’s climactic scene, in which the characters share a sloppy open-mouthed kiss, subverts the queer coding that had up to that point been only connotative. In other words, if part of BASEketball’s goal is to lampoon hypermasculinity by providing gay subtexts, why make the gag explicit and take it over the top? That the moment was improvised only serves to muddle matters. […] To [Parker and Stone], the kiss seems to be no big deal, having just as much a place in mainstream comedy as the gay subtexts that have existed there for years. [X]

#oops it's almost 1am and i'm reading critical queer theory #(it's like my dissertation all over again) #this is fascinating though omfg i'm completely hooked #didn't want to lose this so it's going on my blog #sorry for the wall of text #baseketball