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Television & New Media
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"He Needs to Face His Fears With These Five Queers!"

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV, and the Lifestyle Expert

Tania Lewis

Monash University

This article examines the figure of the lifestyle expert on television through an analysis of a popular U.S. makeover show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It situates the popularity and significance of this program within the context of recent scholarship documenting a broader shift away from more traditional, educational modes of mediatized expertise toward revalued, "feminine" forms of "ordinary" knowledge. Despite the persuasive claims for this shift, the lifestyle expert nevertheless plays a strongly pedagogical role by authorizing certain models of social identity and "good" citizenship—lifestyle and makeover culture being associated with idealized images of the self as a reflexive and enterprising consumer—citizen. Using Queer Eye as a generative exemplar of this increasingly common mode of pedagogy, the article analyzes the way in which the show attempts to negotiate the potential disjuncture between a conception of the self as reflexive and "post-traditional" and more traditional classed and gendered models of selfhood.

Key Words: lifestyle experts • television • makeover culture • reflexivity • class • gender • consumerism

Television & New Media, Vol. 8, No. 4, 285-311 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1527476407306639
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 Television New MediaHome page
J. Esposito
What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty?: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom
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[Abstract] [PDF]