“My job is to live my life, not save yours”: queer emotional labor, audiences, and Netflix’s <i>Queer Eye</i>

In this article, I argue that audience members of Netflix’s Queer Eye expect the Fab Five to perform emotional labor to access a genuine self. Specifically, audiences’ expectations of emotional labor come from their (self-)reflexive understandings of the Fab Five’s role as laborers responsible for helping the people they make over start and finish the process of self-actualization, a core tenet of the reality makeover genre. To accomplish this, I conducted in-depth interviews with 30 adults who had seen at least one episode of Netflix’s Queer Eye. From these interviews, I argue that audiences of Netflix’s Queer Eye engage with the Fab Five, and by extension queer men, as people who are expected to perform emotional labor. These reception practices reveal that queer folks are still burdened with unique pressures and expectations to perform a specific task to bolster a heterosexist culture.