What Queer Eye tells us about our care fantasies

Last night I cried watching Queer Eye. I’m sick, tired and need comfort. The show reminded me of the beautiful human capacity to mobilise around someone who is struggling. Sure, I could write a post critiquing the show: its capitalist ways, the respectability politics and its ethics. But today I’m curious to think on what it tells us about the dreams and fantasies we can hold, for better and for worse, around care.

In case you’ve not seen it, Queer Eye brings the Fab 5 - a group of skilled queer people - into the life of a person who needs some support.

May I offer a thought (and feeling) exercise?

Imagine that 5 people, each with a set of specific care skills, come into your life to help you out. There’s also a much larger crew researching and working to support you. Imagine you get time off work and the resources to sort out various things. Imagine you get bespoke cooking lessons and a therapeutic coaching session. Imagine all the things those annoying things in your house you’ve been meaning to sort get fixed, it gets deeply cleaned and you get lots of new furniture. Your most precious things get framed and celebrated. You get a fresh haircut, posh lotions. You get gently flirted with by gorgeous people. Most of all, you get attention, compassion, the time of others and resources. For a week, you get something a bit like friendship group, all focused on you. After all that, your life, achievements and relationships are celebrated with a carefully dreamed up ritual. Usually with a banging meal and good lighting.

Imagine you could call all that in. For yourself, for a loved one, for someone you know who is suffering. How does that feel? Would that be something you’d want? Do you long to be cared for like that? Is it overwhelming? A bit much? Not quite right? Impossible outside of reality TV? To borrow Zena Sharman’s phrase, is this the care we dream of?

In some ways, we can experience the show as an attempt at holistic community care. Something we perhaps didn’t even think possible. It’s almost a fantasy. Often the people in the show are moved to tears, saying they have never felt so seen or cared for. Overwhelmed that anyone, particularly men (and JVN who is non-binary, but often gets misgendered as ‘one of the guys’) can be so compassionate.

In some ways Queer Eye is a fairy godmother set-up. The Fab Five swoop in (albeit in a massive shiny black car, rather than in a glitzy bubble), and the character gets a storyline that, on the surface at least, looks like rags to riches.

It feeds into one of our core cultural fantasies about care which is that one day care will just arrive. And then everything will be fixed. I think this belief is central to the ‘drama triangle’ that people often find themselves in, positioned either as persecutor, rescuer or victim. Waiting passively to be saved, or imagining that other people need saving. An (ungenerous) interpretation would see the Fab 5 as rescuers, there is some truth in that but it isn’t the whole truth. More on that shortly.

Another part of the Fairy Godmother fantasy is the one-sided nature, you receive care but you don’t have to do care work. One rather flattened way to think about it is that the The Fab 5 come in, serve your needs, and then leave again. They’re not part of your community. This lines up with another fantasy about care, that it ought to happen outside of your normal life, out of sight. In ‘Western’ culture, generally we send our sick and dying to places outside of our homes, going to therapy is a private act, and we hide how much care we actually need. We make invisible all the daily, often gendered, care work of cooking, cleaning, childcare and emotional labour. In this fantasy, there is a comfort in strangers showing up, tending to our needs, and leaving before they get enmeshed in our lives. This model is less vulnerable, we ask for help from those whose sole role seems to be to care for us. We feel less like burdens. It is the Fab 5’s job to take care of us, after all. This isn’t straightforwardly wrong, of course there is sometimes a need and benefit to external support, but it does tells us something about a failure of local community care.

After the care has ‘arrived’ in the week of the show, I wonder what happens to people once the cast and crew leave. This isn’t an investigative ethics piece about their fates but rather a meditation on how care efforts often falter after the initial energy. I don’t think the short term fairy godmother/ rescuer dynamic is unique to TV. It maps onto some of my experiences of care.

Our health care system can (just about) mobilise in a crisis, but is less strong at both preventative and long term care. It was easier (though still took years) for me to schedule a single specialist surgery, for example, than to is to coordinate a range of different services to support all the varied aspects of my health. The surgeons are paid significantly more than the peer support volunteers who try to help me navigate a complex system, or than the nurses who supported my recovery. This maps onto cultural patterns, economically and politically we value short term and shiny interventions over long term maintenance work.

I often find it funny when health advice says ‘speak to your GP’ - as if I have one GP, rather than a rotation of whoever is available. I, like most, do not have a personalised ‘care team’ within health services. My experiences do not meet the threshold for a coordinated approach, and those I have known with extremely complicated health conditions also haven’t got any coordination other than their own efforts. There isn’t, to use TV terms, a producer who is looking at your overall story and making sure it makes sense.

Outside of medical settings, I find that people can mobilise quite well for someone who needs care for a short period, but afterwards struggle to maintain ongoing support. I recently created a care crew for a friend who needed day to day support, but when the moment of intensive needed receded, so did the group’s energy and activity. People can end up forgotten and neglected when the crisis fades, or when the story gets mundane.

So we’ve got the limiting fantasies of rescue and short-term care that is removed from the day to day. What are the alternatives? Empowerment, solidarity, mutuality and community building. Care is collaboratively built and sustained. This happens best with a sensitivity to power and how that effects the way care is embodied, given and received.

I think that as TV shows go, Queer Eye does a relatively good job at moving away from a rescuer-victim dynamic. Much of what they do is empower people with the knowledge, confidence and skills to begin to make changes within their lives. They also use their relative wealth and resources to contribute to a person’s needs. Perhaps one better side of the Fairy Godmother fantasy, is that people are asked what they want and they finally get it. The Fairy Godmother gives space to the expression of longings and desires. There is value in being asked. There is also value in recognising you have resources to support meeting another person’s needs. Not charity, but if you understand and challenge the power in it. If you seek to move towards mutuality. This is perhaps a generous interpretation of a paternalistic practice, but with some imagination, it helps us think about the value of redistributing resources, and ultimate moving towards a anarchism of care.

I’ve found value in ‘reading’ Queer Eye alongside disability justice thinkers, who think about the value of mutual aid, peer support and solidarity. Ideas which try to queer the idea of care relationships as short term, rescuing and somewhat paternalistic. When I had surgery, I built my own ‘Care Club’. This group was not originally inspired by Queer Eye but by the book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha which celebrates care web models, and gave me the confidence to ask for a group of people to care for me. Whilst this group kicked into action, coordinating themselves to look after me, I nursed my post surgery wounds, watched Queer Eye and chuckled, comparing my friends to different members of the Fab 5. (One of them really loves to cook, and looks a little like Antoni). My care club offered different things, some cooked me food, some talked with me over the phone, some kept me company. I now care for many of them in different ways. This is as moving to me as the tear-jerking episodes of Queer Eye, even more beautiful and much messier.

You could dismiss Queer Eye as just a TV show, but its made a splash culturally (and literally as it’s made me cry more than once, in case I’ve not mentioned that already). So its perhaps an opportunity to build from, commercially driven TV isn’t going anywhere. Yes, it’s a carefully constructed story of what could be possible if we put collective energy towards responding to people’s needs, and we are writing our own messy stories too. Queer Eye is by no means the way to do coordinated care, nor are the Fab 5 the first nor last people to do it. But its a reference point, from which to learn, improve or do something totally different.

Some friends, inspired by the show, showed up to other friends to do a small scale ‘queer-eye-ing’. (There is a whole other reading here of how to ‘queer’ something often means to imagine alternatives) This ‘queer-eye-ing’ could involve a few friends coming together helping an overwhelmed pal clean their flat, encouraging them to wash their hair, helping them sort their laundry whilst listening to them speak about what they’ve got going on. Could this become a regular part of friendship, this care work? Not just an emergency response? Could this be one way to find time to care for one another in amongst the demands of our days, sharing and redistributing domestic labour?

What if in the show, and in life, we thought about building broad, deep, long term and sustained webs of care? I would love to see a version of Queer Eye where local mutual aid organisers lead the show, politically educating the viewer and working to connect those in the show with other community members. Supporting the person to weave more deeply into community where they sustain one another after the cameras were off, and the excitement faded.

What care do you dream of? What fantasies do you want to indulge and which do you want to rewrite? What aspects of care would you like to see built into your day to day life? Which of the Fab 5’s skills do you need at the moment? What ways can you contribute to mobilise those around you to support your care needs and the needs of others? If you had Fab 5 esque specialism, what would it be that you would offer - it can be as specific or as broad as you like? What extra support can you call in today?

‘What extra support can you call in today?’ - Written on the pavement during lockdown by the one that cooks and bears a passing resemblance to the Fab 5’s Antoni.

With care,

Rachel x