The Politics of "Guilty" Pleasures

On the first day of class yesterday, I asked my students as an icebreaker (as I've been doing for years) what their guilty pleasures were: movies, songs, bands, television shows, any mediated object they are embarassed to admit that they love. Sad to say, but this is really the first time in which I've actually contemplated the implications of precisely what a "guilty pleasure" actually is.

Pleasure and affect are hot topics right now in media theory after a long period in which criticism misguidedly (but understandably in terms of the political climate) attempted to construct a politics of media that is divorced from questions of pleasure and affect. But the social "guilt" we commonly associate with our fondest pleasures doesn't, to my knowledge, get investigated all that often (the MLA online database only notes 17 entries which use the term, and they all seem to do so uncritically--this is, however, a very cursory search). But this seems to be a defining aspect of our taste culture in general and how we define "pleasure" through questions of quality and social expectations. "Guilt" necessarily implies a kind of law that is imposed on pleasure from the outside of our discourse about pleasure itself: these laws are determined to a large extent by popular criticism of these media artifacts and by the kinds of expectations that we as a culture impose for certain kinds of objects and certain kinds of audiences. The guilty pleasure seems to be something of a missing link in that all-too-present question of how our critical discourse and vocabulary (popular and academic) in part define and to an even larger extent reinforce what and how people enjoy the things that they do. (It is especially disconcerting that the question has not really arisen that forcefully in fan studies, in which the types of objects audience choose to invest in affectively are under scrutiny.)

The examples provided by my students seem instructive here (and, incidentally, this is just a reminder that we should always be ready to learn from our students). Some of the examples and the responses provoked by the rest of the class were explicit references to questions of the quality of the object (perceived trash television like A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, for instance, or another student's love for the film Elizabethtown, a movie he noted was hated by critics), while others clearly were directed to questions of their investment as the "right" type of audience, based on age ("Disney movies" as a category came up in both classes), maturity (the Spice Girls and late '90s boy bands came up in both classes), gender (a male in each class cited favorite movie The Notebook, while another cited Ever After), and race (some white students emphasized this aspect when they referred to "thug" music or "hardcore gangster rap"--an especially odd "guilty" pleasure since white suburban kids are statistically the most likely consumers of hip-hop culture). In some ways, the instances of the latter pleasure are a kind of performed drag, in which people who totally own their own pleasure performatively disavow how they impersonate the "proper" audience for these objects. But the drag in still something of a defensive posture to take against social forces (including my own authority as instructor) which label their pleasures as "bad."

We see this happen in reverse all the time, as well. In my own studies of Shakespearean fandom, for instance, I see something like the exact opposite of what we find in the narratives these students have constructed around their guilty pleasures. The opposite of "guilty," but not exactly synonymous with "proper" either. Many self-professed Shakespeare fans, for instance, are invoking an object that could not be more acceptable as an object for their pleasure. And yet, they continually announce themselves as alienated from their peers (a common thread being, "I thought I was the only one who got it"), noting the effects of their affect in a manner similar to those who discuss guilty pleasures. Shakespeare is an acceptable object, but it is precisely their performance of themselves that makes it seem as though they are taking pleasure in something that is outside the norm. While those who invoke their guilty pleasures are implicitly appealing to the alienating effects of a law governed by a variety of social circumstances, those who are Shakespeare fans seem to be performing the law themselves and, in doing so, constructing it altogether. In this sense, the kind of "class drag" these Shakespeare fans perform through is in some sense a defensive pose against the perceived lack of social/cultural laws governing the quality of Shakespeare as an object. In any case, it's all very strange and needs a great deal of further elaboration.