Discuss how gay sexual identity in Shameless is represented in contrast to the spectres of other ‘excessive’ bodies in each episode of the series.
“Life is one big parrrrrrrrrrty!” — Frank Gallagher
A party signifies a deviation from the normal narratives of life, a state of disorder and a celebration of it. Shameless (Paul Abbott, 2004-) is a television series that self-consciously weaves its narrative through such a party dynamic, resulting in a multiplicity of excessive moments. Due to its distasteful and subversive nature, it becomes problematic to situate it within Adorno and Horkheimer’s conceptualisation of the Culture Industry, in which all mass mediated products “make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part” (2005, p. 32).
Rather, by pushing the boundaries of popular taste and “transform[ing] any notion of the standard,” Shameless can be viewed as an attempt at becoming-minortitarian (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxv). It offers complex representations of sexuality that decentralises the fixed notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. In this essay, I shall utilise Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming, “a complex process of transformation and a flux of multiple becomings,” to explore representations of gay sexual identity in Shameless (Braidotti, 2001, p. 177). Firstly, I shall discuss how heterosexuality is decentralised through an exploration of homosexuality as ‘other’. Secondly, I shall explain how gay identity is represented as a stable construction that is lacking in excess. Thirdly, I shall discuss how psychoanalysis is an inadequate and life-negating model for an analysis of sexual dynamics in Shameless. I shall conclude with the assertion that while homosexuality holds a certain subversive and revolutionary value in relation to the phallocentric construction of culture, it inevitably loses it when territorialised into a fixed identity. Thus, to affirm life in a Nietzschean sense, it becomes necessary to free sexual desire from structural patterns and approach it as a productive force.
Becoming-Woman: Lip’s Sexual Transgression
“A man who detaches himself from the phallic types inherent in all power formations will enter such a becoming-woman according to diverse possible modalities. It is only on this condition, moreover, that he will be able to become animal, cosmos, letter, color, music” (Guattari, 1996, p. 42).
Lip, one of the Frank Gallagher’s sons in Shameless, is an archetypical heterosexual. His daily actions and motivations are based on the phallocentric development of his masculinity, in which his exercise of desire has solidified into a particular model that arrests the multiple possibilities of becoming. An excessive heterosexual tendency is inherent in his character as the narrative trajectories that he engages in are primarily ritualistic actions that strengthen the certainty of his sexual orientation. For example, his courtship of Jack’s sister is represented via a repetition of the sequence in which he walks up to her doorstep to secure a date.
Furthermore, he ultimately subscribes to the psychoanalytical notion of identifying with the ‘universal father’ when he attempts claim his ‘responsibility’ of being ‘daddy’ to his son that is conceived by Mandy. With sexuality solidified into the routine of cultural logic, it resembles a cancerous Body-without-organs that is caught within a repetitive loop. In order to free himself from the structural hold of phallocentrism, Lip has to take the creative leap towards what Deleuze refers to as becoming-woman. This is “a key threshold for a line of flight that passes through and beyond the binary distinction” of sexuality via “molecular deterritorializations” (Sotirin, 2005, p. 102-103). He becomes woman through an exploration of homosexuality as an identifiable ‘other’.
Shameless constructs such a becoming in Season 4. Lip suffers from a bout of homosexual panic after finding out from Ian that a girl he was flirting with is transgendered. Because Ian felt insulted and betrayed due to his homophobic behaviour, Lip decides to make it up by understanding Ian’s sexuality. He does this by following Ian to a gay club. In the sequence that takes place in the club, the behavioural and performative patterns of its patrons are predictably represented via popular and stereotypical notions of gay identity. However, being tied down to a heterosexual norm, Lip’s experience becomes challenging and specific to his own psyche. Butler states that the identity of particular sexualities are “fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (1990, p. 416). By participating and mimicking homosexual behavior, Lip engages in surface play and self-reflexive performativity. This illuminates similar discursive methods within the construction of his heterosexuality. By letting loose, striping on a podium and dancing effeminately, he frees himself from essentialist notions of sexuality and playfully engages with its constructivism. Lip does not become homosexual by partaking in the construction of homosexual identity. Colebrook says that for Deleuze, “becoming-woman I not a transformation to a pre-given image of” a woman or homosexual but “to create what is other than man and fixity, or to become as such” (2002, p. 155). As signified through the euphoric composition of this scene, Lip’s sexual fluctuation that is moving away from the structure of heterosexuality via the referencing of gay identity is positive and revolutionary becoming. This opens up thresholds into new experiences and tolerance towards multiple sexualities.
Micro-Fascism: Ian’s Resistance Towards Becoming
In most parts, Ian is the archetypical homosexual in Shameless.
Guattari says, “Homosexuality, by the very nature of things, cannot be dissociated from a becoming-woman” (1996, p. 42). Ian’s queer value amounts to the process and marks the possibilities of engaging other bodies in the act of becoming woman via a communicative field. However, when such a deviant sexuality fixates itself into the category of gay identity and its particular set of societal rules and regulations, the deterritorialising possibilities of becoming-woman are reterritorialised back into a structural fold. Thus, while Ian resonates revolutionary becomings towards a societal field, he also desires repression within his sexuality by holding on to an identity. Within Ian’s own sexual development is a form of micro-fascism. His character highlights the danger that comes from engaging with a line of flight, that of “instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turn[s] to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition “ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 229)
Gay identity is not represented as an element of social excess in Shameless. Rather, through Ian’s narrative, we observe how his various encounters with other bodies threaten to destabilise his gay identity. For example, in Season 4, he had sex with a girl that he met via a chance encounter. The spontaneity of the event caught Ian off guard and he engages in heterosexual intercourse without much reference to his gay identity. This scene shares a similar euphoric mood as the gay club scene described earlier on. Prior to the girl’s exit from the narrative in that episode, she attempts to start a relationship with Ian by asking him to leave with her. However, Ian rejected her proposition by saying, “I’m gay!” Thus, in contrast to the euphoric naturalness of the sex scene, a cognitive and physiological becoming that frees Ian from the boundaries of homosexuality, is the moment of rationalism in which his inner fascist surfaces. Therefore, for Ian, excess only occurs when encounters are rationalised in reference to the rigidity of his gay identity. The representations of naturalness and euphoria of the sex scene allows us to view it, not as excess, but as a productive becoming that frees desire towards “discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 101).
Psychoanalysis < Schizoanalysis
To utilise the psychoanalysis as a model of analysis in quantifying and understanding the multiple sexual becomings relevant to Shameless would be a problematic and reductive process. Freud considers homosexuality “a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development” (1960, p. 423). Thus, deviant sexual behaviours are taken as neurotic differentiations via the reference of a phallocentric figuration of the heterosexual subject who develops his super-ego in relation to a universal father figure. A psychoanalytical analysis of Shameless would give a preferred reading to Lip’s narrative in reaffirming his masculinity and restoring his status as Mandy’s husband, in which a monumental becoming, such as the scene that takes place in the gay club, would be read as a disruptive break within his trajectory. Similarly, Ian would be conceptualised as a neurotic individual, in which the predictability of his gay identity reinforces the currency of Freud’s idea of normal development.
With the representation of an excessive family, Shameless makes it problematic for its spectators to easily quantify Lip’s and Ian’s within an Oedipal sexual development. It rejects the universality of the father figure with Frank Gallagher, the ‘patriarch’ of the family who is constantly decentred from his familial role.
He is a work/responsibility-evading, drug-taking machine that is not even Ian’s biological father. As Guattari states, the psychoanalysis has to be rejected for the benefit of multiplicity because “every family pattern is completely different, depending on its particular context,” in which he stresses, “there is no such thing as a universal structure of the human mind, or of the libido” (1984, p. 258).
In mapping out moments of plurality and desire-production, Guattari offers the flexible model of schizo-analysis that “would not set out the discover a general key” towards a Oedipal mechanism, “but will rather try to trace the strands of differentiation that develop from it, the proliferation of new intensities, development of new growths from the rhizome” (1984, p. 258).
To adopt such a model would be to reject a singular self and any totalising structure. Rather, it “disconnects and pulverises images to look at molecular intensities” (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxvii). Thus, moments such as Lip’s performative subversion in the gay club and Ian’s heterosexual encounter are illuminated, and viewed as moments of intensities that facilitate the movement of desire towards an ever becoming.
Conclusion
In the essay, I explained how gay identity is taken as a reference point that enables Lip to ‘become-woman’. Next, I discussed how Ian’s gay identity is represented as a structural pattern that is unstable due to his encounters with other excessive bodies. He obsessively participates in repression to maintain his gay identity. Lastly, I explained how psychoanalysis is an inherently reductive model that fails to account for differences in family structure. It also locates desire within a normal heterosexual development that neglects the significance of becoming. I presented the model of Schizo-analysis as a more affirmative model in mapping the development of Lip and Ian. The excessive construction of Shameless urges us to move away from the binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which are both presented as antagonising boundaries that prevent the detection and development of life affirming sexual becoming.
References
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. (2005). “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. in During, Simon. (ed.). The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. 31-41.
Butler, Judith. (1990). “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” in Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. 416-422.
Braidotti, Rosi. (2001). “How to Endure Intensity: Towards a Sustainable Nomadic Subject”. in Pisters, Patricia. (ed.). Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 177-201.
Colebrook, Claire. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. New South Wales: Allen & Unwin.
Deleuze, Giles. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Freud, S. (1960). Anonymous (Letter to an American mother). in Freud, E. (ed.). The Letters of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books. 423-424.
Guattari, Felix. (1984). “Molecular Revolution and Class Struggle”. in Sheed, R. (ed.). Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. London: Penguin. 253-261.
Guattari, Felix. (1996). “Becoming Woman”. in Lotringer, S. (ed.). Soft Subversions. New York: Semiotext(e). 40-44.
Sotirin, Patty. (2005). “Becoming Woman”. in Stivale, C. J. (ed.). Giles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen. 98-109.
Filmography
Shameless (TV series) (dir. Paul Abbot, 2004-, Company Pictures [UK])
