Codifying the Gender Binary?: MTV’s ‘Guy Code’ & ‘Girl Code’

With an eye on Sex, Subjectivity, and Representation our class examined two cultural artifacts in the form of MTV’s shows "Guy Code" and "Girl Code."  

“Guy Code” has become a “top rated [sic]” series that features “irreverent commentary that fans have come to love;” spawning its successor, “Girl Code,” which is described as, “a strong and smart female driven [sic] comedy series bringing” a “hilarious how-to manual full of over the top [sic] tips to push the envelope and open the dialogue about the wonders and woes of womanhood” (Mtv.com).  MTV reports that “Girl Code” intends “to weigh in on the sisterhood that all girls share.”         

We are interested in gender performance and performativity, cultural heteronormative traditions, and re/presentations of individuals that fall within the “acceptable” (read identifiable) ranges of articulating one’s gender “of” and “in” a restrictive binary.  Jake Simmon’s performance piece reveals an embattled embodiment at the mercy of other’s perceptions and assumptions about his sexual desires and subsequent identity.  His “performative disjunct” “body is a ‘liar,’” “flawed by [a] contrasting presentation of the body that is vulnerable to this scathing critique” (p. 332).  In short, his body did not know “The Code.”

Fortunately for Simmons, culturally savvy MTV has come to rescue him from his apparent bodily disjunction by demystifying the [universal] “Guy Code.”  We viewed the trailer for this show that portrayed a group of male friends partying at a club, when one of the guys deviates from the norm and bursts into a dramatic dancing fit.  The friends and surrounding milieu eye him suspiciously and step away, distancing themselves from this expressive performance that quite obviously ruptures what “the dominant discourse demands” (Simmons, p. 334).  While nothing is said, “Dancing—  Know The Code” is displayed, implicitly reinforcing the prevailing “hyper-masculine” discourse that orders docile bodies in a binary of historicized mythology.  

Interestingly, the “Girl Code” trailer features several commentaries that delineate and delimit acceptable female behavior—mainly through a critique of other women (“Don’t be that girl!”).  It makes me question whether the Guy Code is considered to be more universally apparent than a much more discursively constituted Girl Code; in that, the Guy Code does not feel the need to verbalize these performative violations—only to point them out.

After viewing these humor-infused texts, we began by discussing the comedic aspect of these portrayals and what this could mean for these show’s interpretations.  It was asked, “How seriously do you take your performances?”  This is a valuable lens for analysis for it reifies the notion that for something to be funny, it must violate an established code—therefore there is a code.

We observed that these “Codes” exist in a particularly candid, condensed “real world” sculpted for a preconceived, already-interpolated demographic (youthful, middle-class).  In this ‘stop operation’ of a culture, a specific ideal gendered performance is reinforced, while ambiguous or inter-gendered embodiments are explicitly un-coded, wrong, and “disjunct”—such as the case in “Guy Code.”  Both shows exhibit “wrong” performances to distinguish the “correct” decorum through humorous skits exemplifying “Girl Code” as vulnerable and self-reflexive, and Guy Code as self-evident.

Whether these shows function as divisive or unifying productions/projections of our culture, and whether these shows essentialize or reinforce a flawed fiction of constrained performances—one thing is for sure, we all have to perform “of” and “in” our lives.  Our lives just so happen to include everyone else too, and as such, gender performances are imagined, constructed, and reinforced socially.  Elizabeth Grosz warns us that,

To focus on the subject at the cost of focusing on the forces that make up the world, we lose the capacity to see beyond the subject, to engage with the world, to make the real. We wait to be recognized instead of making something, inventing something which will enable us to recognize ourselves, or more interestingly, to eschew recognition altogether. (p. 152) 

Invoking Deleuze’s the virtual and the real, Grosz asserts that we need to unfetter the virtual’s hold over our lives in order to create new “real(s)” with greater possibilities.  It was posited that perhaps “The Code” is most important to those who already “know” it.  Within the captivity of the gender dichotomy as it is currently imagined, the world is flat and some identities are not real. 

 [T]he performativity of gender revolves around… the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself…[P]erformativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.

~Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990