Good Grief: <i>Normporn's</i> Fantasies of Closure

Just before being asked to review Karen Tongson's book on queer viewership of normie television, I finished a personal project in which I rewatched the 2006–2011 teen sports drama Friday Night Lights and diligently documented every time that I cried and why (ex. “S5E11: Vince hugs his mom”). The nature of this independent research cum art project would work well as another case study for Normporn, which opens with a close reading of Parenthood, another weepie from Friday Night Lights showrunner Jason Katims, in conversation with Joe Biden's 2020 election celebration. Tears are an important part of Tongson's location of normporn as genre: the affectual response to a play of fantasy and grief stemming from a realism in dialogue with reality but also eluding it.The norm in normporn refers to the realist mode these television programs work in, as well as the subjects they take up: “capacious ensembles of privileged, liberal, mostly white, but more often than not also mixed-race families” (12). This, along with generally low-stakes plotting, distinguishes it from other sentimental realist television genres like the workplace ensemble or the “singleton dramedy” (37). One of the central projects of Tongon's book is to understand the appeal of this marriage of style and subject for queer viewers against a political background that shifts from Don't Ask Don't Tell through Obergefell v. Hodges and the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the present—a stretch of time in which queer people received unprecedented levels of legal and social assimilation but also faced a powerful resurgence of conservative Christian legal/social backlash. In her introduction, Tongson confronts queer viewers’ relationship to neoliberal aesthetics: “what are queers to do—what is anyone to do, really—when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy and our own privilege, inherited or attained?” (12). In the epilogue, however, she notes that: “I was forced to return to the drawing board to account for the wiliness of norms and what we expect them to accomplish when the world lays bare to us its accelerated, chaotic unraveling” (153).The unstable mutating gulf between queerness and normalcy generates fantasy—the porn in normporn—and tension in equal parts, and their resonance is what comforts even as it causes ejaculative tears, a process Tongson compares to pornography as: “something that induces a powerful physical response we cannot control and an addictive, repetitive laying ourselves to waste in its presence” (126). This is a twinned desire: to achieve normality but also to embody the grief of that separation. Or, grieving an achieved normalcy you never thought you wanted. Neither of these desires is without the complication of shame. In this way—and this is perhaps Tongson's most useful observation of the way this genre functions—the habit of watch and release is a process of mourning, which “begets repetition, repeat viewing, nostalgia, escapism, and sentimentality” (23).The book is organized roughly chronologically by the air dates of the shows covered, which is helpful for following the political trajectory of the time period. The first chapter, “thirtysomething's ‘tiny little increments of life,’ ” uses the 1987 show to lay out the low-stakes, low-risk diversity of the genre and close reads the use of the mundane and quotidian as an effective vehicle for grief. “An Intermezzo on Alternatives: From the 1990s to Normaling and Normcore” mostly takes a break from close television analysis to dive into the origins and uses of normcore, a useful contextual predecessor to normporn. “Mainstreaming in True Blood” uses HBO's vampire drama as an example of a critique of normativity—set against the national arguments over gay marriage—that eventually neoliberalizes into the very thing it criticized. “The Stars Are Hollow: Gilmore Girls at the End of Roe” interrogates fantasies of apoliticism, especially towards sexual reproduction just following Trump's election. Finally, “This Is Us, This Is the End” wonders if NBC's 2016–2022 weepie—perhaps the most tear-soaked of all time—marks the end of normporn as a genre for how it uses a temporally complex structure to create catharsis for grief while still portraying trauma, especially political trauma, as an ongoing and perhaps irresolvable tension.All these case studies are useful to Tongson's argument both for the way they move the reader through time and for the ways in which they allow her to build out the necessary contradicting feelings involved in queer normporn viewership without contradicting herself rhetorically, although the inclusion of True Blood remains a puzzler despite Tungson's clearly articulated justifications. She does not try to claim the lurid, often tongue-in-cheek, supernatural soap as normporn, but the decision to include it as a control sample would work better for me if not for Six Feet Under, creator Alan Ball's previous show. Six Feet Under struggles with the same conflicting desires of normalcy, assimilation, and queerness as True Blood but uses the aesthetic language of normporn. It is perhaps poor criticism to dream-cast case studies, but I felt the absence, especially with True Blood being such a clear misfit in such a slim book and with such an apt and rich text just next door.Normporn as a genre is well articulated and defined in the text, and its usefulness as a tool for both affective and political analysis is clear, especially in the locus it identifies between fantasy and grief. To that end, my own desire at the end of the book was for more time spent with the emotional project of the text rather than the political one—especially as it specifically connected to queerness rather than a kind of generalized non-conservative viewership that it sometimes felt like the book defaulted to or failed to define more clearly. Especially in its discussion of shame and pleasure, I think there were threads teased out that could have been elaborated. Then again, one of the strengths of this books is that it is a study of strong but irresolvable feelings that can never find cohesion as long as they are subject to political inconsistency.