He flexes his own masculine charms, talking about himself in the third person, promising to orchestrate the masculinities back at the house for our viewing pleasure. Flash back to previous seasons, men beating each other up in the hallway. He supposes that’s what we’re looking for.

But we get something else: a complex masculinity that eschews easy claims to testosterone. The show offers a series of examples of how these men are learning to be with each other, to support each other in a group endeavor. This is a competition, but they seem almost unaware of that fact. The first big task is a five mile run, and Diddy tells them, through Michael Bivens, that they all must finish. Attention turns to Michael, one of the two overweight competitors, and the rest of the group worries that he won’t be able to finish. The goal, then, is to get him to the finish line. Their encouragement and push gets everyone through, and after this, there’s no “old” and “new.” Doing the long run together has brought them all together as a group.

In the next segment, the group is divided into smaller groups of four to learn Motown songs. We’re promised fireworks, as the old guys and new guys are thrown together. But the fireworks don’t materialize; Ankh Ra informs them that they’ll have to learn to harmonize, and that’s what they do. The viewer’s expectations that we’ll get a violently competitive masculinity in this house filled with African American men is played to by Diddy’s narrative, but the show has yet to play out that way. After the smaller groups perform, Diddy is unable to cut anyone, because they all lived up to his expectations. The men cheer themselves for they are all saved for another day. Even the group that had trouble getting it together because of Robert’s “woman trouble” managed to pull off a great performance, thanks to Ankh Ra’s reminder that this is a contest about teamwork.

But somebody has to go, and Diddy tries to manufacture some drama here, pulling some of the top performers out of the pack to decide on two who will go home. They all easily decide to send two of the new guys home, the ones that went out to a strip club the night before. They should have been sleeping, according to Dan, and they get soundly punished, both for breaching the rules of hard work taken on by most of the guys, and for their dalliances with women. Indeed, women are present at each of the moments where something goes wrong. Robert’s having trouble with his girlfriend at home, and his hours on the phone threaten to upset the brotherhood in his group. The turning point for his group is when he tells someone who picks up the phone to tell his girlfriend that he’ll call her back later. This one move transforms his group as they go from the bottom of the pack to the top, with three of the four making Diddy’s list of top performers. The other one goes home, the one who went to the strip club, the one who tells us in his close up that he’s “not good with big groups of men,” who wants to go home to his fiancee who keeps him “grounded.” His violation appears to be a violation of the homosocial.

Next week features dance practice, and the preview promises big fights between Diddy and his choreographer, Laurie-Ann. We’ll see what role her female presence plays in what is at present a curiously serene house.

The show dabbles in Otherness in unproblematic ways, at least to itself. And this makes sense in our multicultural society, where sampling the cultural productions of people unlike ourselves is deemed practically political. But the show is remains haunted by uncertain masculinities, or what we might call the spector of Ricky. In response to Lauren and Neil’s admittedly poor tango, Nigel told us last night, “At least you dance like dudes.” And we get to see him saying the same thing again tonight. Who didn’t dance like a dude? Ricky, of course. Ricky didn’t meet the heterosexualized standard of masculinity, and it is as if Nigel wants to remind us all, all of us who wanted to watch Ricky dance, that at least Neil (who’s masculinity is a bit queer itself, what with the sweater vests and spiked hair) is a “dude.”

And now to the bottom three couples. The big surprise, of course, is that Danny and Anya are in the bottom three instead of Shauna and Cedric. Danny and Anya are clearly a cut above the rest, especially Danny, who can barely contain his laughter? his disappointment? at dancing for his life. What I find curious, however, is the continued pretension that Shauna isn’t even there. The judges assume that people voted for Cedric out of some pity or in response to the judges’ harsh comments and patronizing insistence that he’s taught other street kids that it’s cool to go to dance class. While this was surely the reason behind many votes, why isn’t it possible to vote for Shauna? She was outstanding, and last week’s dance for her life put her on the map. But perhaps John is right: perhaps this is a show about masculinities, about policing them, about redeeming dance from its queer streak.

In the end, Jessie goes home without ceremony, “completely stunned,” and we are given no reason other than “it wasn’t good enough from any of you.” Total silence. But the guys were all outstanding, and the men remain the ones to beat. Jesus goes home, not because he isn’t good, but because the other guys are so good. Jessie’s back to her desk job, and Jesus to the “ghetto.” And this is the problem with letting folks go at this stage of the competition. Everyone is so, so good, that really good dancers are cut.

But this season Diddy’s making another kind of band, an all-male band “in the tradition of New Edition, Boyz II Men, and N*SYNC.” This inside glimpse into the world of male artists is something a bit new, and unlike So You Think You Can Dance, Diddy and friends don’t seem at all anxious about the masculinity of the men who are preening for spots. And this is what makes the show so interesting. Representations of Black masculinity in popular media are largely one dimensional, centering a masculinity without fault lines. But that won’t do in the world of boy bands where part of the appeal is indeed a femininity that makes the band approachable by teen girls, a less risky place for girls to center their desire.

On the latest episode of the show, we see Ankh Ra, the resident vocal coach, teaching the young men to get in touch with their emotions, to bring their emotion to their songs and performances. Chris, remembering the death of his grandfather and telling the story to the rest of the contestants, breaks down in tears, and the others follow, a rare representation of male-male bonding, especially among young men. Chris’s problem on the show is that he can dance, but he can’t sing. Or can he? If he accesses the right emotion, the right “soul,” perhaps he can. He is admonished to “believe in himself,” as if that will erase his lack of vocal training and ability. But after his breakdown, we don’t see him sing, see if “being real” automatically translates to vocal success.

The real star of this emotional outpouring, however, is Danny, who sings a song about love. He’s admonished for singing without “soul,” and this is one of the themes of the show–that he lacks soul, which is code for blackness. Danny is one of two white men in the house, and we constantly see his fretting about this. He worries they’re trying to make him something he’s not (read: “African American”) and when he is assigned to his group of four for the contest, he tries to center his needs immediately. He wants to make sure that the outfits they choose will flatter his physique–he’s chubbier than the others–and that he will get to sing the parts he wants. In other words, he’s being white, assuming the centrality of his experience and needs, and the African American members of his group are quick to point this out to him. (“You’ve always been the lead singer…you aren’t the lead singer anymore,” his bandmates tell him.) Danny’s sense of white privilege is on display, and as viewers, we’re struck by his lack of comprehension of this (though others might identify with him…there are, of course, many ways to watch (the same show). And yet Danny’s privilege is supported as he is the central character of the episode.

He gets in touch with his emotions when he sings his song about love. He tells the story of his current love affair, affecting tears as the others watch, seemingly transfixed by Danny’s love. And then he sings again. And it is noticeably better. All because he’s gotten in touch with his emotions, that quintessentially feminine moment. And he got there through love.

The show, then, offers us a rare view of alternative masculinities–and not just the ones inherent in boybandom. This is a space where being in touch with your feminine side is key to success. Of course, we’ll see as the show progresses just where this line is drawn, and what it takes to secure proper masculinity. What seems clear so far, though, is that whiteness will be much harder to decenter than masculinity. We’ll have to tune in next time.

This situation is anything but unusual, of course. The hyping of the Duke lacrosse rape case has done what all hyping does: make it seem as if this case is unique when it just plain isn’t, even if those accused look different from who we expect to be accused. Self-interest and race, sex and class are always in play in the justice system, especially in these sorts of spectacular moments where national anxieties are worked out.

The coverage of this case, from all sides, has worked on the basic assumption that there is something as clear as guilt, innocence, and evidence, as if all these aspects of something we call justice are ontologically real rather than what they are: social projects. What makes this case different, perhaps, is the national demand for redress for these accused players who are constructed as innocent bystanders caught in the media firestorm.

There is nothing particularly unusual in the confluence of social differences that congealed in this case, and nothing unusual about the actions that led to the charges in the first place. Hyperprivileged young men at private colleges throwing drunken team parties imbued with the erotics of sexual violence isn’t anything new. And the individualizing of social disorder through methods of crime and punishment isn’t new either. What is perhaps unusual was that these men, and their lacrosse coach, were made to pay the price for the social disorders caused by racism, sexism and classism that lead to the shocking inequities among people in the same community. The outcry at this injustice is, I think, telling. These young men are figured as the victims of terrible loss. What is lost when these men can’t play their last lacrosse season, can’t enjoy their senior years as big men on campus, is true loss, while the multitudes of poor people and people of color who regularly lose, who daily pay the price for social disorder in prisons, in neighborhoods purposely blighted by white flight, in schools massively underfunded so that others can prosper, is expected loss, and loss that we are increasingly unable to mourn. None of this is to say that this case itself was not terribly botched, or that these individuals did not suffer wrong. But this settlement does expose the difference in value of some lives over others, and that difference means the lacrosse players will get their settlement while others are expected to endure as the necessary cost for others to exercise their privileges.

Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister decry Paris’s return to prison on different grounds. Their headline, “Paris isn’t free–and neither are we,” at first suggests that perhaps Salon writers, at least, will be able to connect this case to a more generalized critique of the unfreedom inherent in a system of crime and punishment that relies almost entirely on fairly arbitrary caging. But the unfreedom that “we” suffer is not at the hands of the criminal injustice system, but rather at the hands of the media that continues to follow the story. We are unfree in the sense that we must continue to know about Paris Hilton. She will not disappear from the news, and the writers fear we are destined to lifetimes of hearing about this no-talent debutante and her comeuppance. This slippage in the discussion of unfreedom in the context of incarceration, such that the unfreedom is our inability to not hear about this woman rather than the unfreedom inherent in prison itself, points to the insistent permanance of the culture’s assumption that we need prisons in the first place. Our discussion of whether or not Paris should be freed is confined to an individualized account of whether or not she deserves the punishment she’s getting and whether or not is it tied to her celebrity status. Missing here is the important conversation about the injustice of the L.A. County Jail in the first place. We are in fact quite free in Havrilesky and Traister’s terms–that freedom is freedom from having to hear or know about something. We may not be free from Paris, but we remain free from ever having to hear about the realities of the prison industrial complex.

Paris is not fighting this new sentence, instead playing the part of contrite woman who has learned her lesson and will use her prison time fruitfully to reflect on what she’s done. She’s suddenly the model prisoner, and we are content, happy that she’s agreed to settle down and pay the price. We fail to ask the stakes of that price for the millions who are forced to pay it. And we learn the unfortunate and deeply false lesson that incarceration “works.” It doesn’t.

After all, what’s so funny about Paris in jail? It’s funny because we think she doesn’t belong there. She is rich and girlish and sexy and blonde and white and pretty. That’s somebody who belongs on the “outside,” right? So who belongs inside? Poor people and people of color. And look at the conditions in the LA County Jail where she was to be held: she was kept in isolation in an 8X12 foot cell, supposedly for her own protection. Protection from what? From other prisoners, one supposes. Because we make this assumption that people in prison belong there because they are bad people, dangerous and lacking the moral fiber and humanity to be integrated into life on the outside. This assumption draws from and feeds into the “tough on crime” rhetoric and logic of criminalization that has put over two million people in cages in this country.

ABC News quoted officials on the conditions of life behind bars for Hilton; it wouldn’t an easy stay: “Forty-five days in L.A. County Jail is really rough. That’s an awful, hellish place,” said criminal defense attorney Dana Cole. “Conditions are miserable, people take showers under cold dripping water, the food is completely inedible.” Paris faced staph infections, a medical problem rampant inside. And we laugh. How funny that Paris is in there, this heiress princess who couldn’t possibly make it. Again, the assumption here is that a whole class of people should be able to “make it” in jail. These conditions are figured as inhumane for Paris, but the jail is filled, beyond capacity, with so many others who, following the logic that Paris is an oddball there, somehow belong there, and should live in these inhuman and dangerous conditions.

All those crying foul that Paris gets off while “the rest of us” have to serve certainly have a point. Al Sharpton is right–there is a racist and classist double standard at play when Paris is excused from prison from having a rational reaction to the irrational space of the prison while poor folks and people of color, who are incarcerated at much higher rates than rich white people, are forced to stay inside, no matter what. Unequal justice is the rule; Paris is not an exception. Fox News agrees with Sharpton, arguing that everyone in prison should be there and should stay there. This is the danger of using this logic that Paris should serve her time, just like the rest of us. This moment where we see inside prisons, a space usually shielded from those who are, for the present moment at least, untouched by incarceration, where we really see the unhealthy, dangerous and unliveable conditions inside prison, should be seized to say no one should be locked inside there. Paris shouldn’t be in prison, and neither should anybody else.

UPDATE: Well, it loooks like Paris is headed back inside, making clear the often arbitrary nature of incarceration. More later.

And this is the logic of transgender representation in popular culture these days. To be trans in U.S. popular culture is to be on display, and the success or failure of your gender depends on the recognition from another individual whose gender, being secure, renders him or her a better judge of gender than you’ll ever be. The relationship is between two individuals, and how these individuals have come to know their own and the other’s gender is figured as outside the social. A recent Newsweek article addressing issues of gender difference and variation takes up the increasing visibility of transgendered folks to ask how “we” might understand this “confusing” new trend. The reader is presumed to be comfortably man or woman, curious for a tour of this unusual, yet increasingly familiar, gender landscape. The article opens in much the same way as this episode of CSI: with a person who appears at first glance to be a typical, in this case, man. J.T. Hayes is a race car driver, and a good one. He’s the all-American male, growing up with a father who teaches him and his brothers how to be men, er, I mean, fix cars. We readers are in for a surprise, though. Hayes “had always believed he was a woman.” And the proof is the body itself, even prior to any surgical modification: “He had feminine features and a slight frame–at 5 feet 6 and 118 pounds he was downright dainty–and he had always felt, psychologically, like a girl.” Her own experience of her body is secondary to what that body ostensibly told outside viewers, even though that body can only tell that story after the fact, as the past is rewritten to meet the mandate that our stories of ourselves are seamless and secure.

The Newsweek essay tells us over and over again that our own gender is indeed secure. “To most of us, gender comes as naturally as breathing. We have no quarrel with the “M” of the “F” on our birth certificates,” we read. It is as if for the rest of us gender is something we are rather than something we do, and what this ontology is is very clear. The writer offers us a caveat here, however: “And, crash diets aside, we’ve made peace with how we want the world to see us–pants or skirt, boa or blazer, spiky heels or sneakers.” Leaving aside the fact that other than the Pussycat Dolls, few of us choose boas over anything, this statement pretends that gender is simply a matter of personal choice or comfort. But gender is clearly something that we do only intersubjectively, in relation with each other. Few of us can even quickly locate our birth certificates, much less understand our gender identities through a letter on the form. I know that Newsweek is just trying to be pithy here, but they give away more than they’ve planned. Crash diets aside? How can we possibly “put crash diets aside” when for many women (and increasingly, men as well) efforts to make our bodies meet the simple M/F box are more likely to kill us than make us meet the requirements of that box? What does it mean to be “comfortable” in your gender, when you can never fully meet the expectations that box holds?

The problem, I think, is the institent individualizing tendencies of our representation of gender difference. “Transgender” is a minoritizing dicourse that depends on the faulty notion that the rest of us are the gender we think we are. But we are the gender we think we are largely because it is the gender others recognize, and we do our gender to meet those expectations that precede us and produce us as intelligible in the first place. I’m not arguing that the experience of transgender folks is just the same as the experience the rest of us have when we realize we can’t play on the Little League team or that we can’t wear pink. Or that suddenly we can. The danger in minoritizing transgender experience is that we begin to imagine gender as something an individual does alone, outside of the social norms that shape the contours of gendered existence for all of us. The CSI episode, the Newsweek article, and many transgender cultural projects themselves play into this fetishization of the individual that pretends the rest of “us” simply are our gender.

The newest change to birth control is Lybrel, a pill regimen approved by the FDA that will allow women to stop having periods altogether.  What does it mean for women’s menstrual cycles and womanhood, some are asking, now that women won’t have them at all?  Is this some kind of unholy messing with nature that rips from women something essential to their being?  Or is this the next step on the path toward full liberation for women?  Saleton quite rightly notes that this technology (which isn’t exactly new–women have been taking extra pills to avoid their periods for a long time) should cause us to pause to think not only about what this pill means for women’s nature, but also for women’s freedom.  He worries that women will choose to forego their periods not for themselves, but for others.  Women’s freedom is thus at risk.

What worries me here is this conception of freedom as wholly individual, as if women can conceive of our choices in a vacuum, unaffected by the needs and desires of others.  Saleton writes, “Last year, when Lybrel’s manufacturer, Wyeth, asked women what bothered them most about their periods, most picked pain or inconvenience. But one in four cited mood swings, weight gain, overeating, clothing anxiety, or feeling dirty.”  Saleton sees these last five reasons as inconvenient for boyfriends or employers rather than women themselves.  This is a false distinction.  The idea that women have a relationship to themselves and their bodies that is unmediated, that is outside the social in both intimate and more generic terms, seems problematic.  Are women simply victims of false consciousness when they feel “dirty,” bleeding on a hot summer’s day?  And what if a woman did choose to stop her period to please someone else?  We make choices that demand attention to our interdependencies all the time, and while I would agree that women are asked to sacrifice when making choices to please men more often than not–we do still live in a patriarchy, contrary to what some postfeminists might think–it seems strange to put this burden on women, to decipher within themselves their “true” motivations for avoiding menstruation in order to serve a more generalized alleged freedom for women.  Who decides the “right” and “wrong” reasons for choosing Lybrel?  This is a problem, I think, with our generally emaciated concept of freedom, one that figures freedom only in terms of individual choice, usually in the marketplace. 

Saleton begins his essay by drawing our attention to his lack of real knowledge on this issue: ”I’m a guy, so I’ll stay out of the fight over womanhood.”  But he doesn’t.  To be a woman, or at least a properly liberated one, according to Saleton, doesn’t necessarily mean being dedicated to having your period.  But it does mean not complaining about “mood swings, weight gain, overeating, clothing anxiety, or feeling dirty.”  These are demands that pretend that how we as individual women experience our periods can happen outside of the social processes that tell us what our periods are, and what it means to be properly reproductive women.  Saleton is right.  We need to consider what Lybrel can tell us about freedom, but I would like to see that conversation move away from freedom as the right to choose whether to have our periods or not, with that choice, and why we make it, signposts of our own liberation, measured by men like Saleton.  What would it mean to instead think of freedom more collectively, in ways that resist the individual-as-consumer model? 

This season Oprah is engaged in two tasks of self-making: The Secret and The Best Life Weight Loss Challenge.  This week Oprah hosted her The Best Life Weight Loss Challenge Weigh In.  The six challengers, hand-selected by Oprah and her diet guru Bob Greene, were here to face the music following 18 weeks of following Greene’s lifeplan.  Oprah served as a kind of confessor for the challengers, listening to them tell their stories, confess their past food sins and declare their redemption at the feet of Oprah and Bob.  But their truth-telling isn’t enough for Oprah.  There is a sense that they cannot be trusted, that they are not experts in their own lives.  Bob needs to vouch for them, needs to filter their stories for Oprah.  For example, 41-year old Tori insists in her interview that she is not an emotional eater, that she just likes to eat, like her whole family does.  Cut to Bob: he insists that one of the biggest obstacles for Tori on the way to success is that she insists she’s not an emotional eater.  Cut to confessional video where Bob convinces Tori that indeed she is an emotional eater.  Tori can live her Best Life, but only insofar as she meets to truth expectations of Oprah and Bob.  And Tori does: she declares that she is indeed an emotional eater, breaking down as she remembers a childhood filled with comments about her body that have led, we suppose, to emotional eating patterns.  The audience nods knowingly.  We are all emotional eaters.

Everyone is losing weight, and at a faster clip now that Oprah and Bob have convinced them that their self-assessments are wrong.  But one contestant isn’t losing weight.  LaToya.  She has lost only 5 pounds, and the viewers are promised throughout the episode that LaToya will be called to account.  And she is.  Oprah’s disapproving-mother stare pins LaToy, who insists that she’s working out, that she’s following the eating plan.  She professes ignorance to why she isn’t losing weight.  Oprah and Bob are suspicious, and ask her fellow challengers if they believe her.  To a one, they say they do.  They’ve seen her exercising, they’ve watched her portion control, they think she’s doing her best.  LaToya’s truth is only truth if confirmed by these others.  But these others aren’t good enough–they can’t be trusted to tell the truth about themselves and thus lack the access to truth necessary to tell the truth about LaToya.  But Oprah and Bob dismiss them all; they just don’t get it.  Oprah steps in, having a long history of weight loss and gain as an understood backdrop to her professional analysis.  Oprah tells LaToya that she’s not doing it right.  That she’s underreporting her eating, that she’s sneaking bites of calimari and a drink or two.  LaToya’s resistance is futile.  She nods, muttering under her breath, “calimari.”  Oprah tells her that she is successful, and we discover that LaToya is writing her dissertation, though we don’t find out any more than that.  Oprah becomes LaToya’s mouthpiece, declaring LaToya’s smarts in so much of her life and asking why she’s so dumb when it comes to food.  LaToya’s nodding, acquiescing to Oprah’s production of LaToya’s self.  But isn’t this the story of Oprah’s life?  And why doesn’t it matter that LaToya is so smart and successful?  Why is the only thing that matters in the Best Life is Diet?

LaToya becomes, then, Oprah’s mouthpiece.  We get the sense that Oprah is talking about herself, and LaToya is helpless to resist as she is called to stand in for Oprah, to take the scolding that Oprah so often faces.  Oprah’s own quest for meaningful life depends on us, the viewers, acknowledging her success.  And in turn, LaToya can only be successful insofar as the Other (here, Oprah and Bob) confirms her reality, after reshaping it in her own image.  Properly admonished and her soul set on a new path, LaToya is invited to continue in the challenge even though up to this point she has lost.  Bob declares LaToya newly committed, and she gamely nods.  These challengers cannot be trusted, their truth-telling is always suspect.  Their, and the viewer’s, self-making must be funneled through Oprah’s sense of self, just as hers depends so deeply on us.  And this becomes the structure of self-making in the age of Oprah, though one could argue that this is simply the televised version of selfhood that dominates the modern western Christian conception of self with Oprah as our confessor (or is it Bob, with Oprah as new avatar?), putting our thoughts right when we are unable to do so ourselves.