All things keep getting better: Queer Eye and the makeover of American masculinity

Abstract

Netflix’s Queer Eye (2018‐present) is often criticized for reinforcing neo-liberal American fantasies of transformation of the self that distract from urgent transformations of economic, political and social worlds. Nonetheless, I use paratextual and textual analyses to argue that the verbal and physical intimacies between the Fab Five are rare in American popular culture, and offer us reworked embodiments of American manhood. It is through these intimacies that the Fab Five enable us to think through the following questions. What does it mean to be a man in contemporary American popular culture? What does it mean to be a man with other men? What does intimacy between men look like?