Consuming queerness: Jeffree Star and the paradox of profit and pleasure in the queer male beauty influencer
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Abstract
Shirley Xue Chen and Akane Kanai (2021) raise debates about a privileged subset of gay men occupying the beauty space as ‘equal, if not more compelling, in fulfilling contradictory postfeminist demands of authenticity, individuality and femininity’. The suggestion in their argument is that the queer beauty influencer can somehow embody idealistic postfeminist traits without the stigma a woman may face for doing the same. This paper explores a counterargument for this in-your-face performance of hybridised gender and sexuality, in that the repetition of gender performatives through the queer body is an attempt to ‘re-present’ the social media beauty sphere through a queer lens where wearing makeup is an act of resistance. Using the influencer and makeup brand owner Jeffree Star as a case study, I argue that the queer beauty influencer exists as a body for fantasy projection, with makeup and associated makeup collections acting as the mediator for affective transference to bestow the influenced party with the transformative effect of queer resistance. However, the influencer and audience ultimately become bound back to the neoliberal ideals from which they attempt to break free. In positioning their own brand of cosmetics as a conduit through which their audience can obtain a sense of queer resistance, it ties the influencers and their audiences back to a capitalist framework. Because of this, the act of queer resistance can never fully be embodied by the audience, and so these repeated attempts at embodiment sustains the cycle of production and consumption that capitalises on the queer body. The paper calls this cycle a ‘paradox’, in that there is pleasure in consuming queerness, but the act of attempting to embody this queerness to break with beauty norms is set up to fail, which in turn manages to create a source of profit for the queer influencer where every new product release represents a new opportunity for the consumer to renew the attempt of queer embodiment through the application of cosmetics.