Class and white masculinity in Supernatural
vee_fic's post on masculinity and social class as they've been articulated in various Supernatural fandom discussions has reminded me of some ideas about the series I wanted to work out. This isn't the long-discussed post on black men in Supernatural (which I hereby and in public swear I will get done for ibarw this year, damn it), but it's related to it.

I think that Season 1 is, mostly unconsciously, enacting a drama of class aspiration and anxiety. Dean does read as working class and Sam does read as middle class; a lot of Sam's struggle with his family has similarities to the struggle of kids from working class families to assimilate via education to a higher social class. Later in the season, a sense of regret--of class decline--suffuses the narrative: John explicitly identifies himself as middle class (college fund) and the hunting life style is identified with a lack of security, with the same sense of exile from middle-class normality as many of Sam's arguments.

This is a narrative about class, which makes it unusual in genre TV; that doesn't make it a a politically progressive narrative about class. In the universe of the show, working class existence is a site of struggle that requires violence and is associated with a loss of community, not the acquisition of a different community. Safety is middle-class, both scorned and desired. Class change is class decline: a tragedy. But what marks this as a middle-class fantasy is not just the idealization of the middle class but the peculiar fetishization of working-class markers and the obvious unconcern about money. One of the things about SPN that drives me crazy that the Winchesters never really worry about money. They worry about money less than the middle class does, let alone the working class! In the second or third episode, the one where they meet a satisfied customer from an earlier "job," they never ONCE talk about payment. Dean often talks about hunting as his job, as his work, and it provides a lot of his self-definition*; what it doesn't seem to offer is a paycheck.

* At one point I was planning a post comparing the role of "work" for Dean Winchester and for Buffy Summers as representative of the gendered nature of "work" in self-definition in the contemporary US.


Other ways you can tell this is a fantasy, a fetishization, of working-class "characteristics" rather than a real examination of working-class culture: It's not a culture. It's all the old lone-wolf, cowboy narratives transposed into the present day; in S1, though, hunter culture is male and made up, as far as we can tell, by isolated individuals who hide their work from the people around them. The Winchesters' entry into the hunting world, significantly, is propelled by the destruction of culture as represented by the destruction of women/home; notably, the Winchesters' family home and Sam's apartment are both destroyed by the fires that kill Mary Winchester and Jessica Moore and set the plots into motion.

Dean's treatment of women/attitudes towards gender play into a lot of prejudices about the working class, as vee_fic points out. I think what makes the series in general appeal to so many female fans--and one of the things that makes Dean appeal in particular--is that there's some conflicting subtext to this apparently conservative gender divide. Dean is the gender defender of the series in Season 1; he repeatedly criticizes Sam's behavior by calling him a girl, or girly, or bitchy. Strikingly, the only time he actually criticizes a woman in gendered terms is when she's a monster (the ghost Constance in the pilot, the possessed girl Meg near the season's end), and both the show and Dean himself express doubts and moral reservations about his actions with Meg. Even Dean's "gender defender" role is mitigated by his willingness to support Sam's decisions even as he criticizes them: in a typical example, he'll tease Sam for being "a high school drama dork" in a fond tone and then immediately recall the specifics of a high school show which he attended for Sam's performance; and Sam's smiling response indicates he sees the support as much or more than the criticism. (Dean's quite a bit more of a sexist jerk in the pilot than he is in later episodes; I can come up with an in-character reason for it, but in real world terms I suspect they deliberately softened him up for the series.) While Dean makes frequent horndog and flirtatious references, he also clearly respects by both word and deed the women he and Sam encounter: many of the women they encounter in the first season reflect some aspect of the Winchester family psychodrama and Dean always respects and indeed frequently enables their commitment to their loved ones' well-being.

Finally, as many of us have remarked, Dean's role in the Winchester family is one that's frequently perceived as feminine: he's the care-taker, the peace-maker, the emotional go-between for his stubborn and forceful brother and stubborn and forceful father. To judge by the fanfiction, part of the appeal of Dean for many women is the prospect of playing with gender identity and assuming his exaggerated masculine manners; and an equal part of the appeal is the opportunity to valorize and romanticize his caretaking feminine role, a role that for women is merely expectation and duty. I don't find this always empowering; it is, in fact, deeply frustrating to me that so many people seem to appreciate care-taking only when it's done by men, and to find it invisible when it's done by women. In terms of the show itself, I find it extremely problematic that gender role mutability essentially belongs only to men--Dean's "feminine" virtues are enabled by the death of the women in his family (counting Jessica somewhat prematurely as part of his family).

Another aspect of the show that's extremely problematic in the first season is the default whiteness. Masculinity is white because men of color either don't show up much or don't survive long when they do. The Middle America the Winchesters travel is ahistorically and improbably white-washed, which is all the more troubling because of show creator Eric Kripke's frequent declarations that he wanted to explore "American" mythology. (A couple of sockkpuppett's vids are fascinating in light of this: "Bricks," a mashup that features the eminently recognizable voice of Aretha Franklin, and "The Fifth Circle," which features a modern rendition of roots and blues, can be seen as restoring African American traditions to their deserved place of primacy in the show's American mythology; except that because of the different weights of visual and audio in fanvids, I'd argue that what they actual do is use the implications of African American culture for depth and texture, rather the way black backup singers are often used for vocal texture in mainstream rock: they become backup, and the primary representative of "America" is white men.)

I'm focusing on Dean here because a lot of the fannish controversy has focused on him and because he's my favorite character, but of course insofar as the series is offering a representation or even a model of white masculinity it's offering a double model: not Dean, but Dean-and-Sam. And Sam is depicted as, at least on the surface, more restrained, more "civilized," more assimilated, more middle-class. Prone to checking Dean, either verbally or nonverbally, when he makes his most offensive remarks. Or that's Sam in Season 1.

In Season 2, after the death of their father, the brothers switch care-taking roles: Dean descends into the funk of rage and violence that had characterized Sam's response to his girlfriend's death, and Sam desperately tries to reason him out of this. And this makes for some fascinating character drama, but it's troubling in that it pushes the class/gender roles into more stereotypical alignment: the working class guy becomes the violent, repressed, driven one, and the middle class guy becomes the thoughtful, pacifist, care-taking one. And the class/race aspects play into each other in ugly ways with the introduction of the first black hunter we meet, Gordon Walker, who hero-worshipped John Winchester and whom Dean initially latches onto as a possible John replacement. Gordon's relentless hatred of vampires, and his role as a mirror of what Dean could have been with less of a profound commitment to his family, has some really ugly undertones: Gordon plays out as too-violent, uncivilized black masculinity and Sam plays out as the gentle civilizing white middle-class influence and Dean is the working-class white guy caught in the middle. And when Sam becomes more like Dean, of course he executes the black man who's become too dangerous, whose excess marks the boundaries of acceptable (white) male violence.