AJ and the Queen: exploring ideas of gender

Warning: AJ and the Queen spoilers

GLAAD publish a report every year which forecasts the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) characters that are expected to be scripted on primetime programming in the television season. In 2019/20, 90 out of 879 (10.2%) series are expected to involve regular characters who identify as LGBTQ. GLAAD state that this is the highest percentage of LGBTQ regular characters they have counted since they started forecasting 24 years ago. Similarly, this is an increase from last years 8.8%. In fact, GLAAD called upon networks to ensure that 10% of characters in primetime series were LGBTQ by 2020 which shows that networks have achieved and slightly exceeded this. 

AJ and the Queen, a Netflix original, is one of these series in which the two protagonists AJ and Robert both demonstrate that they identify as LGBTQ. Robert, stage name Ruby Red, is a drag queen who states on the programme that he is a gay man but adopts she/her pronouns when in drag. Robert/Ruby’s genders are straightforward and binary. However, AJ seems to not fit into the binary view of gender. We begin the programme believing that AJ is a “little boy” who wears a hat, a white vest and hustles people for money to live. Later, AJ’s hat is knocked off and Robert is surprised by AJ’s long curly hair which leads him to exclaim that she is, in fact, a girl. AJ adamantly tells Robert that she is not a girl and does not want to be a girl. As a result, Robert assumes that AJ wants to identify as a boy. However, AJ later refutes this and claims that she never said she wanted to be a boy, but rather she just didn’t want to be a girl. Although Robert is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, this could have been used by the show’s writers to juxtapose the conflicting generational views of gender between Robert’s and AJ’s age group.  his binary ideas of gender display a juxtaposition between Robert’s generation and AJ’s age group.

Moving away from the main characters, the relationship between gender and body is explored within other side characters. For example, in one episode AJ and Robert meet a lady owns a garage with her husband: she keeps the books and the husband fixes the vehicles. We find out that when she was younger, she entered wet t-shirt contests and won every single one due to her “beautiful boobs”. However, she then reveals that she had a double mastectomy and no longer has these “beautiful boobs”. Later, AJ gives the lady Robert’s fake 'boobs' which he uses to win a wet t-shirt contest whilst in drag as Ruby and appears to be ‘passing’ [a term used to describe an individual looking fully like the gender they are dressed up as] as a woman. The lady rejects these boobs and says that she feels just as beautiful, as womanly and like herself without them. They are given to the lady’s husband as he appears to miss them more than she does.

Since finishing AJ and the Queen, and sadly having recently heard the news that they are not renewing the programme for a second series, I have started watching more programmes with LGBTQ main characters. I’m currently on episode 1 of Pose, set in the late 1980s, which already seems to centre around the repression of the LGBTQ community in New York, the ball culture, and the impact of HIV. Perhaps this will make for another blog post exploring gender, health and even cities.

Makeovers in film: The scientific superman and the prom queen

Make over films are my favourite type of film to watch when I am feeling like I need to organise my life. When at university, I would always leave my referencing until after I had finished the essay: usually the day before the hand in date. My favourite thing to do, whilst mindlessly Harvard referencing, was to watch Legally Blonde. However, only now do I realise the subliminal influence referencing had over me, watching a film set at the very institution whose referencing I was following: Harvard University. At the end of every essay I always felt like I was physically at my lowest, although intellectually at my highest. My hair was greasy, body hair overgrown, and my health was not at its best having eaten copious amounts of sharing bags of chocolate and crisps. I always felt a need that after I had finished my essays, now was the time to ‘pick myself up’ and makeover my body. Although legally blonde provided me with the girl power motivation to finish my essays and have an intellectual makeover, growing up with these types of films, I am partial to a physical makeover film.

Makeover films provide me with such inspiration and motivation to ‘sort’ my body out. However, just as Legally Blonde invokes making over my mind, it could be argued other ‘makeover’ films are more than skin deep. On the surface, She’s All That, a film in which a popular ‘Jock’ has a bet with his friend that he can make turn the ‘dorky art’ girl into the teen film beloved Prom Queen, appears to simply show the changing physical appearance of the ‘geeky’ protagonist. However, if one adopts a sociological view point, it could be argued that the subsequent ‘makeover’ of the Jock results in his openness and tolerance to go beyond the feminine beauty ideals when forming friendships.

When reflecting upon these films, it occurred to me that all films of this genre involve the smart female protagonist changing into the intelligent attractive ideal of a woman that emerged from the 1990s into the millennium. A quick Google search of male makeover films returns movies in which the male protagonist evolves into a super-human character: the Nutty Professor, Superman, Spiderman, Ironman etc. Often these makeovers are not a result of the protagonist actively changing their physical appearance for social acceptance, but rather the active result of science; the radioactive substance which turns the average man into these superheroes. Indeed, this is sociologically interesting. Men in these circumstances are given no choice with these makeovers, it is not society which decides their makeover but rather an accidental mutation generated by their contact with science (again, a male dominated field). If it was not for these mutations, the men would go about their day and would not be involved with this ‘makeover’.

Once again, a sociological look at some of my favourite viewing material has resulted in looking at my reality in a different, albeit, fractured way. Watching Clueless will never be the same again.