[1] In popular American television of the past thirty years, the workplace has evolved into the primary setting for the production of multi-plot serial narrative and ensemble character drama. While economic shifts within the television industry can partly account for this development, a genealogy of workplace television drama must also consider the long-standing tendency of American culture to recruit its most potent images and forms, to reproduce its foundational myths, and to resolve its most debilitating social contradictions through narrative studies of the unstable boundaries of industry and intimacy, the reproduction of wealth and the reproduction of life, the public performance of labor and the private performance of intimacy, domesticity, and sexuality. The social topography of the workplace in American popular culture thus describes an evolving fantasy of late twentieth-century American life, a fantasy embodied in what Ella Taylor calls the “television work-family.” Originating in the 1970s and reshaped by changing historical contexts, Taylor’s identifies the television work-family as an expression of “a cultural dilemma: on the one hand, the yearning for meaning and community in the workplace, and on the other, the fear of the power of corporations and of professionals in corporate settings” (14). The “familialized” workplace allows for the symbolic resolution of conflicts arising from competing social and cultural inducements. Whether the setting is a police station, law firm, crime lab, hospital, or high school, the television workplace naturalizes the disciplinary constraints of American capitalism, its administrative ethic of professionalism, and its management of productivity by staging these processes as emotionally gratifying extensions of the disciplinary constraints of the oedipal family, its administrative ethic of care, and its management of sexual desire.
[2] In other words, the American workplace in popular narrative television is one of the primary locations for the construction of public-personal crisis. The typical scripting of familial dynamics onto sites of labor has effectively transformed the American television workplace into a principle locus of intimacy, secrecy, revelation, desire, and rivalry. In fact, in early popular dramatic series such L.A. Law,Hillstreet Blues, and St. Elsewhere, as in contemporary shows such as NYPD Blue, The Practice, Law & Order, and ER, recurring characters often appear to have no interests or relationships, sexual or otherwise, beyond the incestuous web of professional affiliation, competition, loyalty and betrayal, that the demanding high-stress work environment compels. While it is possible to treat this as mimetic representation of a notoriously overworked, increasingly competitive American labor force, popular television drama’s apparent dissolution or blurring of the boundaries separating work and domestic life, private and public, and its more recent investments in the development of lesbian and gay characters and story lines, points towards a complicated critical examination of the social, occupational, and intimate spaces and practices that constitute us as citizens and as legible, desiring subjects of the American democratic family. In this essay, I want to sketch out some of the broader stakes involved in this process by analyzing the lesbian “coming-out” narrative in the popular medical drama ER. My purpose in doing so is to demonstrate how network television’s contradictory assertions and denials of lesbian desire signify a redefinition of national identification that promotes a healing universality–the therapeutic aims of liberal political culture–through the individual capacity to oversee crises and traumas which exist at the nation’s core.
[3] In its previous three seasons, and its most recent tenth season,ER has been developing—hesitatingly, in fits and starts– a story line that focuses on one character’s acknowledgment and acceptance of her lesbianism. For those who may be unfamiliar with the show, Kerry Weaver, (played by Laura Innes) first became involved in an affair with staff psychiatrist, Kim Legaspi, an out lesbian who agrees to keep their relationship a secret at the hospital (figure1). Despite this agreement, the ER staff soon detects their intimacy and rumors begin to circulate, causing Weaver to feel deeply ambivalent about her attraction to Legaspi and, at the same time, vulnerable in her authoritative role as Chief of Emergency Medicine. This situation is further complicated when Weaver unsuccessfully tries to defend Legaspi against a psychiatric patient’s bogus charge of sexual harassment, an incident that intensifies Weaver’s fears of being “outed” at work and compels her to respond purely in the interests of self-preservation even though her relationship with Legaspi is already an “open secret” among their co-workers. Legaspi is fired from County General but luckily manages to find a new position in San Francisco. Realizing that Weaver is unable to offer her any emotional or moral support, she ends their relationship and is written out of the series.
[4] In ER’s eighth season Weaver continues to struggle both with the personal knowledge that was awakened by the affair and the political knowledge that Legaspi’s firing, and her own complicity in it, forces her to confront: love’s knowledge, or the unleashing of the body’s cognitive powers comes into direct conflict with the corporate and medical management of bodies, a managerial structure that Weaver herself represents to the hilt. Indeed, since Kerry Weaver appeared as a regular character in ER’s second season she has been defined principally by her personal ambitiousness and steadfast dedication to administrative policy. Weaver first came to County General as chief resident, later becoming attending physician in the ER, then rising to Chief of Emergency Medicine, and finally gaining promotion to Chief of Staff. Through it all Weaver has remained as unfazed by her physical disability (which requires that she move about the crowded and chaotic ER with a cane) as by the fact of her controversial standing among co-workers and colleagues, many of whom regard her as abrasive and officious. At the same time, her professionalism and undeniable skill in emergency situations have earned her the respect, and at times even the sympathy, of some in the ER.
[5] However, it is precisely this conflict–the supremely competent, hyper-efficient Weaver reduced to denial, hypocrisy, and fear of exposure–that produces interest and speculation among Weaver’s staff and colleagues, whose reactions to the rumors of her relationship with Legaspi run the gamut from indifference to amusement and from supportiveness to outright contempt. Weaver’s character is marked during this period by a seemingly irreconcilable inner rift between her public function as hospital administrator and her lesbian private life. At work, she goes on an inexplicable rampage, becoming increasingly irresponsible, unreasonable, and, at the same time, excessively concerned about what the other doctors and hospital staff might be saying behind her back. In the eighth season opener, “Four Corners,” Weaver returns to the ER after what has ostensibly been a three-week leave of absence in Nairobi, where she once lived. But it is highly questionable whether Weaver has actually spent her leave in Africa. On her way back to work, we see her buy a bracelet from a street vendor who assures her that it came “direct from Kenya.” She slips on the bracelet and, as she pulls into the hospital parking lot, she listens to a radio talk show debate about homosexuals in the workplace. Her reception in the ER is decidedly cool. Nervously, she pulls Dr. Kovac aside and asks if people have been talking about her. “People always talk about their boss,” he reasons. For the next six episodes, Weaver remains volatile and directionless, as writers appear to put her story line on hold. Finally, in the episode titled “Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain” they advance Weaver’s sexual identity crisis by introducing Lieutenant Sandy Lopez, a Latina fire fighter for whom being out is a matter of professional integrity and personal honor (figure 2).
[6] Weaver and Lopez begin dating, however Weaver’s neatly compartmentalized, closeted life does not sit well with Lopez. Frustrated and irritated by Weaver’s fear of being seen with her in public, Lopez unravels Weaver’s professional composure in the episode aptly entitled, “A River in Egypt.” Lopez shows up unexpectedly at the ER in order to speak with Weaver, only to be met with more of her hesitancy and ambivalence. Tired of the same old run-around, Lopez sighs and says, “You know, forget it.” She begins to walk away. Weaver grabs her, unwilling to let her simply walk away, and as she does so something in Lopez snaps. She draws Weaver forward into a furious, theatrical kiss (figure 3). The kiss catches Weaver off guard, as she seems to lose herself in the moment. The camera swivels around them, so that when they break apart, we see the curious faces of staff, co-workers, and underlings Frank, Malik, Abby, and Chen staring from the reception desk. “Goodbye, Dr. Weaver,” Lopez says quietly, fleeing the ER and a dazed Dr. Weaver who silently returns to her work.
[7] Later, Weaver goes to the firehouse to confront Lopez. She rails at Lopez for outing her so flagrantly, especially when she had so closely guarded her privacy, while Lopez argues that Weaver was lying to her about who she is. “I never misrepresented myself!” insists Weaver. “No, you just pretend to be something you’re not,” Lopez shouts as she jumps aboard a fire truck, cautioning Weaver, “You can’t separate who you are from what you do.” Weaver reminds her that this is not her decision to make, and Lopez accuses Weaver of wanting the best of both worlds ‑‑ to be a lesbian but to escape the hardship that comes with it. “You don’t get one without the other,” she shouts, “at least not with me.” Weaver is unwilling to believe that Lopez would kiss her in public just to make a point on principle. As the fire truck pulls away, Lopez explains. “I did you a huge favor! You just don’t know it yet!”
[8] Finally, in the episode, “Bygones,” Weaver comes to understand this, as two seemingly disconnected Sapphic story lines converge to effect her reconciliation with Lopez and her newly acquired self-acceptance. First, two girls are discovered with deep, multiple stab wounds in their college dormitory. One of them has been mortally stabbed all over her body, including her hands. The other girl, her “best friend,” according to their classmate, has also suffered multiple stab wounds and her throat is cut. The dying girl is brought to the ER where Dr. Weaver and a team of doctors mobilize in an effort to save her life. However, just as it becomes evident to Weaver that their efforts are in vain, the young girl–drenched in gore and blood, lifts her head as if indicating a desire to speak. Weaver leans towards her and silences the physicians still working in a frenzy around them. “I loved her,” the girl says, and then dies. Her best friend remains unconscious with her mother at her bedside. Weaver, who already suspects that the “attack” was actually a lover’s murder/suicide, delicately tries to solicit information about the nature of girls’ relationship. “Were they close,” she asks? The mother, indignant at the implications of Weaver’s question, refuses to even entertain the possibility that there was anything peculiar about their friendship, or that her daughter’s wounds could have been self-inflicted. At the conclusion of the episode, the girl remains in a coma and the truth of her lover’s death remains locked within Weaver.
[9] In the same episode, the ER receives the victims of a three-alarm fire that has ripped through a local elementary school and Weaver flies into a state of alarm when she learns that her former flame, Sandy Lopez, was one of the firefighters who rushed into the inferno to save the children trapped inside the school. She later learns from a little boy who is brought to the ER, unharmed, that a lady firefighter–also unharmed–comforted him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, a piece of information which Weaver takes as proof of Lopez’s safe escape from the burning school. Nevertheless, she instructs Jerry to put in a call to ensure that all firefighters were accounted for, and, later that night, she tracks Lopez at a local lesbian bar and stands outside waiting for her at her car. Leaving the bar, Lopez spots her, and Weaver begins explaining that she was worried and wanted to thank her for what had done that day. At first hesitant to engage with her at first, Lopez begins to sense that Weaver has had a change of heart, and her suspicions are confirmed when Weaver—in a move signifying her preparedness to own her lesbianism—passionately and publicly kisses Lopez with the camera squarely framing their faces.
[10] Granted, this is not the first time that a major network has depicted a same-sex kiss between women, as increasingly such scenes are met with minimal opposition from audiences and advertisers. This has not always been the case: many television viewers will recall the highly controversial 1991 episode of the popular legal drama L.A. Law, in which female attorneys C.J. Lamb and Abby Perkins kissed in a decidedly non-platonic manner after successfully negotiating a raise for the latter. Subsequently, sitcoms such asRoseanne and Friends, television dramas such as Party of Five andOnce and Again, and most recently, the daytime soap opera All MyChildren have featured a “lesbian” kiss. However, unlike Lopez and Weaver, the characters involved in these scenes are “just friends” or they are contextualized within the storyline so as to emphasize that one or both of the women are merely experimenting and will ultimately remain committed to heterosexual relationship (Walters 70). What distinguishes the kiss in ER is that Weaver and Lopez are ostensibly falling in love. Viewers are invited to assume that their kiss will be part of an ongoing relationship and romantic narrative. Moreover, both characters mindfully embrace a lesbian sexual orientation, with all its social consequences. Indeed, as Stephen Tropiano has pointed out, given the fact that L.A. Law’s Abby Perkins was heterosexual and C.J. Lamb self-identified as “flexible” (so as to avoid future confusion, writers finished the season by locating her character securely in a relationship with a man), it is doubtful as to whether or not their kiss qualifies as “lesbian” at all (“When a kiss is not just a kiss”;Prime Time Closet 89).
[11] What I would like to do now is focus on this transformation of character, as well as some of the broader implications of the discursive juxtapositions that have shaped–at least through the ninth season–Kerry Weaver’s formation as a lesbian subject in a popular television narrative. The change that takes place here is significant: Previous to the moment in the parking lot, Weaver had not been portrayed as the active, initiating subject of lesbian desire. With Kim, she is ambivalent, manipulative, emotionally inaccessible, and ultimately not interested in a “lifestyle,” as she patronizingly informs Kim over dinner one evening. If this relationship is meant to signal her “coming out” as lesbian, it is a process that unfolds less in terms of emotional and sexual discovery than in terms of abjection, narcissism, and health-care mismanagement as Weaver’s advancing state of mental distraction and her total erosion of self-confidence produce a series of administrative blunders and medical misjudgment that she refuses to take responsibility for. In the meantime, she resumes her ultimately unsuccessful quest to discover the identity of her birth mother with the help of a private detective, a storyline all but forgotten from the fourth season until writers apparently sought through its resurrection a psychological motive for the sudden redirection of Weaver’s sexual energies. Lesbianism, the new twist in her character development, is scientifically rationalized as compensation for the lost and long-sought mother.
[12] The changing social contexts that have shaped the history of lesbian and gay representations on television have been well documented in recent years by media critics, the vast majority of whom acknowledge progress despite the on-going heterosexism and homophobia that constrain and condition the visibility of queer sexuality (Hantzis; Hubert; Keller; Moritz; Walters). While Weaver’s storyline aggressively disavows lesbian sexual activity, it affirms intrinsic lesbian identity in a manner not unlike the Clinton military’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy in which one is permitted to be gay or lesbian so long as one refrains from engaging in homosexual acts–a long-standing precondition for the presentation of lesbian and gay characters on major network television since ABC’s 1973 broadcast of the made-for-TV-movie,That Certain Summer, about a gay father (played by Hal Holbrooke) coming out to his son Thirty years later, Weaver’s workplace coming-out narrative continues to be constrained by the presumed limits of mainstream acceptability, although there is clearly willingness on the part of producers, directors, and writers to test these limits. On ER, such “tests” are measured by moments of public affirmation, moments that often take hospital staff, including Weaver herself, by surprise. In the episode entitled “Rampage,” after the notoriously sexist, homophobic, Dr. Romano fires Dr. Legaspi, Weaver delivers an ultimatum to him: “If she goes, I go.” “What?” Romano scoffs. “You had better choose your battles very carefully!” he warns. “You are chief of emergency medicine, not the County’s lesbian advocate!” Content with his outburst, he turns away, but Weaver continues, resolute in her outrage: “That’s where you’re wrong, Robert, because I am both. I am the chief of emergency medicine and I am a lesbian. And if you pursue this matter any further, I will take it to the county board of supervisors, the ACLU, the press, and anyone else who will listen. So I suggest you choose your battles very carefully!” Romano falls speechless as he watches Weaver exit the room. She makes for the elevator and angrily hits the “close” button. As the door shuts, she reaches out to steady herself against the wall and places a hand over her mouth, in disbelief of what she has just done.
[13] The cultural work that Weaver’s coming out narrative performs is well summed up in that singular image: in fact it could stand itself as a case study in network television’s shifting technologies of accommodation and containment for screening public queerness. Weaver’s eruption (which turns out to be an empty threat) and subsequent self-muzzling is an expression of the ambivalent pride and prejudice that gay and lesbian television characters are enjoined to sustain as networks assume, at best, inconsistent tolerance for homosexuality in the public sphere on the part of viewers and corporate sponsors. However, read in the context of a blockbuster primetime medical drama, replete with a cast of recurring characters whose personal crises provide the backdrop for non-stop medical emergencies, Weaver’s sexual identity crisis reflects cultural anxieties stemming from the question of lesbianism’s compatibility with the management of one’s own body, and by extension, the question of lesbianism’s compatibility with the care and well-being of the democratic body, the disciplined labor of the American body politic.
[14] In other words, in its on-going focus on the tumultuous intimate relationships of attending physicians, their marital discord, their backgrounds of wealth and economic disadvantage, their struggles against racism and ethnic dislocation, the overcoming of barriers based on gender and physical handicap, plus the kaleidoscopic, revolving-door demographics of the urban Emergency Room, the pattern of dramatic family trauma mapped over graphic images of bodily and health crisis, ER has managed nine successful network seasons by presenting narratives that simultaneously exploit and seek to resolve fears of social instability and mismanagement of the rapidly changing and vulnerable body of the nation. The pace of the show is “an acknowledgement of a medicalised public sphere that is increasingly concerned with the dramatic potency of the traumatized human body” (Jacobs, “Hospital Drama” 24). The swiftly-moving Steadicam that has become ER’s aesthetic signature naturalizes such routine chaos, the daily trafficking of wounded and diseased bodies, as the camera zips erratically around corners and dashes restlessly down hallways. As they race about, ER doctors and medics speak rapidly to one another in a highly specialized (and reportedly accurate) jargon that writers know most viewers will not understand. But it is precisely the mystification of their professional vocabulary that generates viewers’ faith in ER doctors’ abilities to wrest the truth from each newly delivered, inarticulate mass of flesh and make split-second life or death decisions based on that knowledge. In such an environment, doctors themselves become divine manifestations of a truth that our bodies conceal from us: the powers we grant them do not admit to shame and self-loathing.
[15] Weaver’s traumatic coming out process, and the shame and self-loathing that have accompanied that process, makes sense within this pattern. Part of the sense, at least, is that anxieties and insecurities about proper gendering and sexual behavior–particularly in relation to other markers of identity such as race, ethnicity, and class– have remained central to twentieth-century debates over the health of American society and culture. The truth of one’s sex and the symbolic manifestations of one’s relationship to that truth are measures of a mythical, much longed-for coherence that helps hold the nation (and its others) in place. This coherence has been manufactured through what Lauren Berlant calls a “nationalist politics of intimacy,” a conservative ideological agenda that has personalized the space of citizenship and national culture by making the private heterosexual family the foundation of our national survival (7). At the same time, as Andrea Slane has recently demonstrated, modern liberal democratic discourse is equally invested in the manufacturing of social coherence out of diversity, a unity assembled from different concepts of sexuality and nation. “On one hand,” she argues, “the concept of ‘sexuality’developed as a consequence of the formation of modern nations and might have been integral thereto, in that a focus on individual behaviors and bodies connected each citizen to the notion of the body politic. On the other hand, the late-twentieth century political focus on sexuality has unique features which speak to more recent global and national political changes” (7). The dissolution of Cold War tensions, new patterns of immigration, globalization’s weakening of the nation-state, as well as the international procession of social upheavals and movements of the 1960s–feminist, socialist, environmentalist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic–brought about a number of critical shifts in the political organization of cultural identities, knowledge, and institutions. The specific contours of these shifts are contextual, and within the United States they are very diverse because of the increasingly multi-cultural composition of American institutions, public and private. It has thus becomes all the more important for the United States to secure consensus around the fantasy of heterosexuality as an expression of our truthful nature. Through its repeated representation and performance, heterosexuality marks the truth that naturally binds the nation together.
[16] Thus, homosexuality remains, within the specifications of popular narrative contexts, a highly ambivalent discourse in the cultural imagining of American democracy and its other(s). The limited conventions that would allow for the absorption of lesbian sexuality into mainstream network narrative tend to be disciplinary conventions that operate within the legible structures of consensus that define woman, labor, and nation. Insofar as Weaver’s careerism, cantankerousness, and physical handicap have defined her largely in contrast to ER’s more traditionally feminine characters, romantic heroines such as Susan Lewis, Carol Hathaway, Jing-Mei (Deb) Chen, and Abby Lockhart, she is positioned on the margins of the dominant culture yet at the same time remains central to the professional managerial culture of the hospital. Weaver’s coming out is staged as an extension of the trope of medical “emergency” into national debates over workplace equity and the wisdom of allowing “out” lesbians and gays to perform in intimate, caring social roles and professions, in the home as well as the workplace, and particularly in those roles that serve as institutional extensions of the family (such as teaching, boy scouting, parenting, the priesthood, etc.). Weaver’s crisis of sexual identity and desire constitutes a “public personal crisis” within the realm of perpetual personal crises that are everyday made public by the mechanisms and operations of institutional care-giving, the life of the ER. Bodily trauma, the social and economic management of bodies in crisis, bodies cut open and made vulnerable to the operations of state agencies, corporate power structures and profit-driven bureaucracies have provided the foundation for narratives of revelation and confession, bodily spillage and transgression, all of which must ultimately be stitched back together and re-contained within the healing national body of myth generated and regenerated by ER since the show’s inception.
[17] In this sense, the bloody spectacle of the mortally stabbed co-ed in “Bygones,” the victim of a lesbian love affair gone awry or unable to sustain itself in an homophobic culture, provides the ideal punitive counterpart to Weaver’s sudden affirmation of desire, her determination to find and seduce the erstwhile cause of her public humiliation, openly on the streets of Chicago. Medical drama here meets slasher genre, as the open body– the body turned inside out–signals the attainment of sexual knowledge and the embrace of adult sexual agency, all of which Carol Clover’s designated “final girl” resists in the typical slasher narrative by dint of remaining a mobile, androgynous point of identification for young male viewers. The cut body, Clover reminds us, is a body that has met its demise through intimate contact, a crime of proximity (103). As Weaver recognizes her own complicity in this girl’s death, she is enlisted in the role of witness to a conspiracy of deadly silence, a conspiracy that she supports. The messy truth that lies beyond medical knowledge bleeds out uncontrollably. And then, as the girl utters her last words, Weaver is drawn into her confidence, a rapt participant in the spectacle of transformation that points to the transformative possibility of every emergency–the embrace of death and lesbian love.
[18] At the same time, the girl’s confession stages a visualizing ritual, the effects of which are broadly social as well as narrative. Understandably, the dying girl’s disclosure contributes to the episode’s emotional and dramatic appeal. But more importantly, the words, “I loved her,” thrust the lesbian body into a field of social knowledge, marking it as visible, conscious, and dangerously at risk. Weaver, whose function at the deathbed scene is a jumble of disciplinary roles–part physician, part surrogate parent, and part priest–appears uncharacteristically pained by the girl’s admission. This suggests a departure from Weaver’s customary stoicism, an unusual moment of voyeuristic absorption into her patient’s transgressions and pleasures. From the perspective of the dying girl, confession begs forgiveness. According to Steven Poole, this should come as no surprise when we consider that “hospitals to some degree are the churches of modernity…those places where individuals from all classes and walks of life gather together, united by fear of death and hope of salvation” (18). The medicalized scene of confession stages the urgency of revealing oneself and one’s body before the doctor to whom we look for hope or absolution. In this particular case, it blurs the boundaries between god and sinner, doctor and patient, murderer and victim. Nevertheless, as lesbian desire breathes its final breath, it submits itself to a “regime of scientific visibility” that sustains “biomedical relations of power and knowledge” (Mensah 140). Moreover, lesbian desire submits itself to the social body, or to a regime of therapeutic visibility that underwrites the liberal democratic rhetoric of inclusiveness by assuming that rights and legitimacy are granted only to those minoritized groups who make themselves distinguishable before the eyes and ears of the body politic. As the attending physician whose powers are insufficient to save the girl andas a closeted lesbian, Weaver is, so to speak, turned inside-out by the deathbed confession. This is what determines her subsequent return to Lopez, who has spent her day, not insignificantly, rescuing innocent children from hellfire. Weaver’s reunion with Lopez constitutes her confession, her assumption of the patient/sinner’s role. Her moral illness/sin, however, is not lesbian desire itself, but her earlier denial of its proper relation to the ethic of caring for others and for oneself. Perhaps even more to the point, it provides the scene for her avowalin the modern juridical sense that Foucault outlines, as “the effect of a power that constrains us” (60). And through her confession Weaver places herself safely under state surveillance and control, no threat to the stability of paternal order and normative heterosexuality.
[19] Feminist media critics have argued along similar lines, as in Bonnie J. Dow’s study of the highly publicized “coming-out” performance of Ellen DeGeneres/Ellen Morgan, the star and main character of the ABC sitcom, Ellen. Taking Foucault’s repressive hypothesis as her model, Dow considers that while DeGeneres appeared to liberate herself from the constraints of silence and oppression through the many magazine feature stories, television interviews, and confessional rituals surrounding Ellen’s coming-out episode, in fact she only repositioned herself within a different kind of regulatory regime, one that constrains the visibility of homosexuality on network television by channeling it through discourses of depoliticization and personalization. Moreover, and contrary to the widespread assumption that Ellen represented a milestone in the history of gay and lesbian visibility on television, Dow argues that the sitcom differed very little from earlier representations, particularly in its preoccupation with the effects of Ellen’s revelation on her personal relationships with heterosexuals (131-2). What this preoccupation suggests is that Ellen, like so many “progressive” visualizations of lesbians on television, was primarily concerned with ensuring the comfort of heterosexual viewers.
[20] In sketching out ER’s contradictory visualization of the lesbian, it is worth noting that Weaver’s coming out storyline is reminiscent of an earlier ER storyline in which physician’s assistant Jeanie Boulet (played by Gloria Ruben) discovers that she has been infected with HIV from her ex-husband. Although she tries to hide her HIV status from co-workers, even going so far as to lie about her condition, Mark Greene discovers the truth from reading Jeanie’s medical records. Rumors that someone on the staff is infected with HIV begin to fly. Jeanie is finally compelled to confess that she is a HIV carrier, a moment that becomes one of a series of self-disclosures through which Jeanie is increasingly seen and known as a healthy functional HIV positive African-American woman. Her confession also prompts hospital administrators to confront their own irrational prejudice and to devise a fair and compassionate policy for HIV-infected staff. As Maria Nengeh Mensah argues, ER often relies on confession as a narrative strategy that reinforces biomedical strategies that allow us to see, classify, and contain disease and pathology in women. However, in the case of Jeanie Boulet the question of “how to see HIV in women” remains tied to the question of “how to see women with HIV” (149). The same may be said of ER’s portrayal of Weaver’s coming out: while we await the biomedical breakthrough that may one day make it possible to see lesbianism in women, and while script writers flounder in their efforts to show the psychic and emotional origins of Weaver’s orientation, the more urgent question for ER, as for network television in general, is how heterosexual viewers see women who are lesbian.
[21] Undoubtedly, how viewers see lesbians has much to do with the historical contexts in which they are framed. And here I should note that in ER’s eighth season, which in the autumn of 2001, Lieutenant Sandy Lopez represented more than Weaver’s new love interest. She also represented a new breed of American hero that appeared in the mass media in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. At this time, firefighters, police, and emergency medical workers–ordinary working class people doing their ordinary jobs–emerged in American popular culture as extraordinary. By tapping into the post-9/11 exaltation of the nation’s emergency rescue workers, ER writers were able to deflect attention away from the “ick factor” of homosexuality. The courageous and stubborn Lopez could be seen as a living cross-reference to those who had recently lost their lives in the course of their routine labors; she embodied the tremendous degree of consensual equilibrium between American social and cultural groups that was momentarily created by the attacks. History itself would seem to have imbued Lieutenant Lopez with the right symbolic capital to market her across social, ethnic, and ideological boundaries.
[22] While it is tempting to situate Weaver and Lopez within this narrative, the post-9/11 working class hero represented–above all–a persevering, indefatigable American masculinity (Bloodgood). The firefighter in post-9/11 media and popular culture became an important figure through which the nation was encouraged to seek compensation for symbolic castration. From this perspective, Kaja Silverman’s notion of “historical trauma,” or a crisis of faith in the adequacy of masculinity, is useful in understanding the cultural and symbolic meanings that became attached to firefighters in the mass media wake of 9/11 as television dramas such as First Watch played a major role in reaffirming and sustaining collective faith in masculine adequacy and the coherence of the national body. However the firefighter also assumed a pervasive symbolic function as a cultural locus of ideological struggle and conflict, a crucial site for the questioning and renegotiation of gender and sexuality in a time of national crisis. Alongside photographic images of firefighters standing atop mountains of steel debris, gallantly hoisting the American flag, some of the most widely circulated images of 9/11 images depict firefighters emotionally embracing one another and fighting back tears during the memorial services following the attacks. These popular images challenged the category of classic American masculinity. For example, the photographs of Father Mychal Judge, the openly gay Franciscan chaplain of the New York City Fire department, as his ashen body was carried from the rubble of the World Trade Center after being killed by falling debris, was hailed as a modern pieta. His image, widely circulated on the Internet and included in popular commemorative photography books, came to symbolize the crucial ideological link between Christianity and nation, American godliness and American patriotism. The revelation that Father Mychal had been a leading public advocate for homosexual rights did little to undermine his popular status as national hero and martyr.
[23] As heroic abstraction, the urban firefighter, fortified by his comrades-in-arms, preserved an image of the nation intact not unlike classic American war photography from generation’s past. However, in the controversy surrounding the design of the $180,000 memorial sculpture based on Thomas E. Franklin’s image of three firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero (an image noted for its striking resemblance to the 1945 World War II image of six marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima) it became evident that images and myths of the nation’s past are inadequate to defining who we are today as a nation, or even more importantly, how we wish to see ourselves. When a clay model of the bronze sculpture was unveiled on December 21, 2001, the three white firefighters of Franklin’s photograph had been replaced with one white, one African-American, and one Hispanic firefighter. In this way, the ritual consumption of images consecrating the firefighter, heir to the American masculine ideal, became part of the collective process of re-imagining social relationships and relations across axes of national power, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
[24] What I would argue is that popular television dramas such as First Watch and ER played a part in this process of commemorating and re-imagining the heroic labors of “other” national subjects. Specifically, in appearing to consecrate both post-9/11 American heroism and a lesbian love affair that crosses lines of ethnicity as well as social class, ER writers placed the Lopez-Weaver story-line at center of a process of cultural and social remembering, a process by which myths of the past are being rewritten to accommodate new possibilities, new romances, new niche markets. In these new myths, talented hospital administrators such as Kerry Weaver and dedicated firefighters such as Sandy Lopez become potent defenders of our personal andnational security–champions of the endangered child within us all. Significantly, both women hold jobs that are traditionally coded as “men’s jobs,” labor requiring the institutional authority and physical strength associated with masculinity. However, their visibility as lesbians is still conditioned by narrative rituals of disclosure that contain homosexuality within structures of surveillance and accommodate it to an image of the democratic family and its proper alignment of sex and gender. It is important, therefore, that Weaver and Lopez perform their public duties on behalf of conventionally feminine interests, such as child-safety, sensitivity, and compassion. Accordingly, when Romano taunts Dr. Carter with the line, “I told Weaver to fire you, but you can’t trust a lesbian to do a man’s job,” he expresses not only the cliché that lesbians vainly aspire to be masculine but the threat that her “out” status at work poses to his privileging of managerial effectiveness and emotional detachment. (“Insurrection”)
[25] Additionally it is important to note that while Lopez’s character is multiply marked as firefighter, lesbian,and Latina, race and ethnicity have not figured significantly in her character’s limited development within the series, nor has the potentially rich interracial dimension of the romance between Weaver and Lopez informed their storyline. The omission, which would seem to suggest that Lopez is only incidentally Latina, positions her character within the dilemma experienced by many gay men and lesbians of color who, in certain social and political contexts, feel compelled to choose between their ethnic identities and their queer identities, as if one could be sacrificed without the other. Part of the problem is that viewers rarely see Lopez interacting with anyone other than Weaver: she appears to have no family, no friends, and no connection to a larger community of Latinos or lesbians. However, through Lopez’s embodiment of the devoted firefighter and Latin lover, viewers are positioned to read Latina lesbian sexuality as butch sexuality, a role only hinted at in fleeting remarks, such as when Lopez first meets Weaver and proudly informs her that she is just one of the “guys,” the only female firefighter in Company B (“Quo Vadis?”). Such coded invitations to view racial difference through the suggestion of butch identity correspond, on one hand, with the stereotypical representation of Latinos as hot-blooded and impetuous. At the same time, Lopez’s obvious intelligence, strength, self-possession, and physical attractiveness constitute a powerful mass cultural “disidentification” (to borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s useful term) with the history of butch stereotyping in the dominant media as well as with the history of Latina stereotyping. We can read the latter in the character of Rosario Salazar, the abused and much-ridiculed Salvadorian maid, (played by Shelley Morrison), who works for the wealthy socialite, Karen Walker (played by Megan Mullally), in the sitcom Will and Grace. Indeed, the extent to which Latina femininity remains fixed within the two-fold frame of sexual spitfire and abject domestic, even in scripts touted as socially progressive and queer-positive, is a reminder of the importance of disidentification, a concept that Muñoz posits as a powerful mode of scrambling and reconstructing “the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (31). To consider Lopez as an example of this process is to consider ways in which network television texts may intentionally or unintentionally perform such scrambling or make available such repositionings in the process of cross-marketing to diverse audiences.
[26] Almost halfway through ER’s ninth season, in the episode entitled “Walk Like a Man,” Weaver once again becomes the subject of rumor and critical scrutiny. Susan and Abby, engaged in private conversation, retreat into the women’s restroom and are soon distracted by the sound of an object hitting the floor. They turn to find a syringe on the floor of a stall that is occupied by Weaver, who behaves as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Perplexed as to what Weaver might be doing in the bathroom with a syringe, Susan later approaches her to ask if she’s all right. Weaver reluctantly admits that she is taking hormones. Her confession is juxtaposed, once again, with images of intense bitchiness, mental distraction, and medical mishap, a vivid example of which occurs when she appears on local television as “Dr. Kerry” in a news segment promoting flu shots. While demonstrating for the cameras how quick and painless the flu shot is, Weaver unthinkingly (and uncharacteristically) vaccinates her two interviewers using the same needle. In almost the same instant we see the mistake register on her face, as she looks straight into the news camera, horror-struck.
[27] In the following episode “Tell Me Where it Hurts,” Sandy Lopez reappears in the ER after a long period of absence from the script, as she and Weaver make public the news that they are pregnant. Their happy domesticity, indicated by a brief scene in the episode “A Little Help From My Friends,” in which Lopez prepares to paint the nursery while Weaver teases her about her “nesting” impulse, is soon shattered. At work later the same day, one of the nurses notices some blood on Weaver’s physician’s coat and assumes that it is from a wounded patient. Weaver, realizing that the blood is her own, calmly goes into an empty treatment room in order to use the Sonosight and is stunned when she cannot find the baby’s heartbeat. Abby enters the room and gently suggests that Weaver see an obstetrician and go home. Weaver declines, preferring to let the miscarriage occur “naturally.” Although she eventually does see the OB, who assures her that the miscarriage is proceeding normally, and although she finally breaks down and cries in the arms of a deaf patient (a scene in which we discover Weaver’s fluency in sign language), Weaver oddly refuses to leave the ER before her shift is over or allow anyone to contact Lopez at work to inform her about the miscarriage.
[28] I want to raise two points with respect to the contradictory development of the Weaver-Lopez story-line in ER’s ninth season. First, as Weaver grows increasingly more comfortable with being out at the hospital, writers seem to grow increasingly less so. Indeed, so long as Weaver remained in the closet, reluctant to be seen as openly lesbian, Lopez’s pride and refusal to separate who she is from what she does provided the ideal counterweight, a balancing act that positions the Latina as the righteous moral voice of social activism and progress. In other words, through Weaver and Lopez writers could reflect divided public opinion on the limits of gay and lesbian civil rights and, at the same time, advocate for greater acceptance of gay and lesbian visibility by channeling that struggle through the discourse of multiculturalism that Lopez implicitly stands in for. However, once Weaver ostensibly accepts her lesbianism and comes out to co-workers the ambivalence that had earlier registered in her character shifts to the plot, as every progressive image of lesbian intimacy and coupling seems to call forth an equal and opposite regressive image. Certainly, Weaver’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage make for dramatic television, but more than that her miscarriage suggests high ambivalence about whether mainstream America is prepared to accept a lesbian couple as both parents and as fully authorized participants in the political public sphere. In this way, Weaver’s miscarriage reflects much more than the reluctance ofER writers to offend so-called majority opinion, but additionally reflects the state’s reluctance to carry justice to full term for women and queers in this country, on one hand affirming gay and lesbian aspirations to participate in traditional family life, and on the other hand appeasing the homophobic elements of American culture by putting the lesbian couple back in their proper place by the end of the season. The long-running NBC sitcom Friends, which had already set a precedent for portraying lesbian childbirth (in the case of Ross’s ex-wife and her girlfriend), circumvented controversy by focusing principally on Ross’s conflicted personal feelings as he anticipates the birth of a child that he, in fact, fathered. In this way, Friends managed to promote urban liberal tolerance toward lesbian families, presenting such arrangements as acceptable to the extent that they obtain heterosexual approval and retain male heterosexual participation and presence at their emotional core.
[29] Moreover, as a situation comedy, Friends is able to contain potentially controversial subject matter within the “safe and familiar” comedic conventions of the genre, which include the feminization of male characters coded as intellectual (Ross is an academic, a paleontologist, and therefore unlikely to pose any masculine threat to his ex-wife or her new lover); sexual tension (viewers are invited to take greater interest in the possibility of romance between Ross and Rachel than in the lesbian ex-wife subplot); and the centrality of interpersonal relationships over characters’ struggles with society and institutions (Battles and Hilton-Morrow 87). Contemporary medical drama relies less on these conventions, instead emphasizing realism as well as the tensions and personal conflicts that result from the unrelenting demands of the workplace (Jacobs, Body Trauma 14). As physician and aspiring lesbian mother, Weaver’s “labor” in the ER takes on dual meaning here, referring not only to her managerial relationship to bodily trauma but to the traumatic and prolonged birth pangs of discursive elements new to the portrayal of lesbians on television. These elements must still be assimilated into the familiar televisual frames that advertisers and viewers are assumed to be comfortable with, and increasingly these frames correspond to American “family values.” Accordingly, Weaver and Lopez are framed within conventional gestures of attachment resonant of Berlant’s “nationalist politics of intimacy,” gestures that cross from private to public, from the nursery to the ER. In fact, they are portrayed as more family oriented than any of the heterosexual characters on the show, almost all of whom are single, (Susan annuls her marriage, the result of a drunken bender, and then becomes pregnant by the same man; Mark Green dies of a brain tumor, leaving Elizabeth free for future romantic entanglements), childless (Jing Mei gives her bi-racial illegitimate child up for adoption), and inclined to serial monogamy with other hospital employees.
[30] However, despite the ninth season revelation that Weaver and Lopez have moved in together and decided to make a baby, viewers are continually prompted to wonder where the couple’s deepest emotional commitments lie. Again and again, Weaver’s true family turns out to be her “work-family,” the assemblage of co-workers and patients, who week after week scrutinize her behavior, intrude on her privacy, talk behind her back, and offer her companionship and comfort in her moments of emotional need. Analee Newitz argues that the dissolution of public/private boundaries on ER presents “a synthesis of the most disturbing elements of work and family” (96). And yet, by comparison ER story-lines have failed to develop any emotional depth in Weaver’s non-work relationship with Lopez. They are shown together in fleeting instances, brief scenes of conflict or confession. When Weaver begins to miscarry, her reluctance to phone home or inform Lopez would certainly seem to bode poorly for the future of their story-line. Moreover, Lopez’s negative response to Weaver’s request that she try to carry a baby suggests that their desires may be fundamentally different: Lopez is first and foremost a firefighter, the “roof man,” and she is unwilling to sacrifice her hard-earned position to pregnancy (“A Boy Falling From the Sky”). The final image we see of the couple in season nine is Lopez confessing to Weaver that she feels no desire to carry a child inside her, even though she knows that she ought to want this.
[31] Imagine viewers’ surprise then, when halfway through ER’s tenth season Lopez and Weaver bring a child into the world, with Lopez as birth mother. This surprising turn of plot occurs with neither warning nor fanfare in the episode “NICU.” The narrative traces the day-by-day discoveries and challenges of Abby Lockhart (now an aspiring doctor) and Neela Rasgotra (a new British-Indian med student, played by Parminder K. Nagra) as they undergo their rotation in neonatology. How Weaver finally convinced Lopez to carry the fetus, how they obtained sperm, or how Lopez managed her responsibilities as a pregnant firefighter are all good questions, none of which are addressed in the storyline. Rather, the lesbian childbirth subplot is casually absorbed into the high-strung procession of infant births and deaths that direct the routine labors of the neonatal intensive care unit. Abby literally happens upon Weaver and Lopez in the delivery room, arriving just in time to assist with the birth of the baby boy whom they name Henry (figure 4). Later, she remarks that she had no idea Lopez was even pregnant. “Nobody did,” Weaver assures her, or rather assures the audience, who by this point must be wondering what they missed and when they missed it. But it would appear that ER writers made a last minute decision about the scene, perhaps the result of pressure to advance the Weaver-Lopez storyline without asking viewers to confront the obstacles that lesbian couples actually face in their efforts to become parents, obstacles humorously dealt with in the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk II, and sensitively portrayed in the Showtime series Queer As Folk and The “L” Word. Above all, however, “NICU” is an episode concerned with education. Abby and Neesa learn some challenging lessons about themselves, the fragility of neonatal life, and the compassion and tolerance that it takes to succeed in medicine. And, within that frame, it is certainly possible to read Weaver and Lopez’s ultimate triumph in childbirth as a stealth lesson in compassionate social inclusiveness, offhandedly delivered to network audiences.
[32] Accounting for the medical drama’s increase in popularity during the decade of the 1990s, Jason Jacobs observes that the period “represented an unprecedented intensification of the medicalisation of everyday life: regular health scares, the theorization of the ‘risk society,’ the state promotion of ‘healthy living’ as a moral as much as a medical imperative all contributed to a popular engagement with the fictional depiction of hospital life. At the same time, with the collapse of the old distinctions between Left and Right, and the narrowing of politics to a managerial role, any sense of social change became collapsed on to the body itself…” (“Hospital Drama” 26). As a drama of the body in various states of transformation, loss, and recovery, ERis a show deeply engaged with public debates about the possibility–indeed, even the desirability–of meaningful social change. It was probably only a matter a time before the drama of coming out, or the (re)presentation of the lesbian/gay body to the public as meaningfully itself, found its way into the ER script. However, it has done so at a time when coming-out narratives are generally viewed as relics of an earlier stage of gay and lesbian cultural expression, outmoded attempts to ground homosexual identity in a moment of revelatory becoming that ignores the fact that all sexuality involves a public performance that can be likened to a process of emergence. Perhaps the greatest emergency that network television shows such as ER will face in their increasing experimentation with queer character development is that coming out constitutes less of a crisis for the lesbian than it does for the society to which she presents herself. The knowledge that is engendered by the act of coming out precipitates an emergency in the normative health and stability of the familialized social sphere, particularly to the extent that institutions remain invested in the maintenance of a structural, political opposition between homo and hetero desires. The impulse to construct crisis around the coming-out narrative, the need to wring drama, and personal trauma out of a particular mode of self-knowledge is one of the more disingenuous covers for shoring up this fictional opposition. Perhaps a revival of critical interest in coming out stories is called for, specifically one that understands the genre as a manifestation of collective social trauma, an aesthetic labor of destabilization, and a strategic displacement of national emergency and transformative possibility onto the emerging subject of lesbian desire.
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- Figure 4, “Sandy, Kerry, and baby Henry.”