Bad Taste, Good Fun

my mother didn’t make a particularly concerted effort to share many Arab films or TV shows with me growing up - and in part, that is because her mother didn’t, either. she didn’t know where to start. and aside from Jamie Farr, Paul Anka, Tony Shalhoub, Salma Hayek, Josie Totah, Nazem Kadri and Shakira, i can’t really think of many other prominent Lebanese Americans in mainstream Western media (both the Northern and Southern continents). let alone any Lebanese American movies and TV shows i might have watched growing up. representation isn’t exactly bountiful for people like me.

then again, maybe it was more intentional than i give her credit for. because the thing about Arab characters is that all the classic Western portrayals are pretty much one of three things: greedy, barbaric monster; noble savage; or sexy, exotic belly dancer. on the screen and in written word, we’re either demonized to all hell, placed upon a pedestal shrouded in the entrails of Manifest Destiny or an orientalist’s wet dream. or some variation or amalgamation of the three. the post-9/11 terrorist.jpg memes are nothing new. and neither are #girlboss spy movies that put white women like Drew Barrymore in brownface and plastic beads for an undercover disguise (yes, that is an actual thing they did in the 2000 Charlie’s Angels movie and it shouldn’t take that to tell you just how racist that movie is).

look, i don’t have the space or bandwidth here to go into how belly dancing is not actually an inherently sexual dance. nor do i have the space or bandwidth to tell you how deep-seated the orientalism of the Dune franchise is. and i definitely don’t have the space or bandwidth to go into meticulous detail about the visceral, ice cold disgust i feel at seeing people on this site call Poster Child of the White Savior Complex T.E. Lawrence and Fictional Embodiment of the Noble Savage Stereotype Sherif Ali “desert husbands” and laud Lawrence of Arabia as an unparalleled hallmark of homoerotic cinema.

but i do have the space and bandwidth to tell you to take a deep fucking breath and pick up Edward Said’s Orientalism. learn a thing or two. watch a better fucking movie that doesn’t paint Arabs as helpless savages, doomed to become their own demise without the guidance of colonial overlords. for fuck’s sake.

as far as representation goes, Klinger is certainly ... nothing like what one could expect from the media of his era. he doesn’t fit neatly into any of the stereotypes outlined above. by way of everything we know about his family, his favorite foods and his use of Arabic, he is very situated in his Lebanese American identity. in other words, he is not just a flat token of diversity. he is fun-loving, unapologetic and exuberant and never is he shown to have any predisposition to violence or lust. he is proud of his heritage and has a sharp sense of wit that keeps his and his colleagues’ spirits up. he is brave despite the very premise of his character, with a strong moral compass to guide his actions. he consistently steps in to help others even when he'd literally rather be doing anything else. he is compassionate and strong-willed and he doesn’t want to die. he is a character we can relate to.

his relationship with femininity is a nuanced one. one that i don’t think can be easily summed up as drag or closeted transfemininity. which is not to say that it couldn’t be interpreted either way, but it’s not clearly one or the other.

it starts off as a gag, the mark of a scrappy kid from Toledo afraid to die in a war he didn’t sign up for. as time goes on, it becomes a badge of honor, a reminder that life exists outside of bombs and carcasses, an acknowledgement of the fear he and his compatriots carry with them even when there are no injuries to triage. he fashions his performance of femininity into a kind of grounding device and even uses it to support the women in his unit (sharing his clothes, taking on work typically reserved for nurses when they’re stretched for personnel, etc.). it becomes part of the emotional landscape of the unit, a single drop in a sea of desperate coping mechanisms. performing femininity is how Klinger reminds himself of his humanity.

none of this is to say, however, that M*A*S*H treats him particularly well.

digs at Klinger’s heritage are peppered throughout the show with just as heavy a hand as digs at his femininity are. they make fun of his nose, of his body hair, of his language, of his family stories (which are frequently painted in an overtly orientalist light), of his food, of his skin, of the way he chooses to decorate his personal space. plenty of his episode b-plots are centered around get-rich-quick schemes, which play into money grubbing stereotypes. and because Klinger dressing feminine to get a discharge is one of the show’s longest running gags, there is rarely a scene of his where jokes aren’t cracked at the expense of whatever genuine joy, comfort and stability he finds in gender nonconformity. granted, these jokes aren’t always malicious and the show is generally pretty good at making sure its comedy doesn’t punch down. but when it comes to Klinger, it often slips.

take “Goodbye Cruel World”, for example. what could have been a meaningful exploration of Klinger's heritage and how he grapples with being so isolated from his family culture in the middle of a literal war zone turns into a cruel, dismissive jibe at Lebanese culture as a whole. the unit doctors treat it as something disgusting, revolting. there is nothing of what Klinger decorates his new space with that doesn’t get at least a guffaw or wrinkled nose from his superior officers. and none of them are truly held accountable in the end. they apologize as if they’re being forced to humor him and move on like nothing happened. it’s heartbreaking to watch. and it comes at you like a punch to gut from a show so typically dedicated to encouraging empathy above all else.

and underneath all of that, Western conceptions of femininity and masculinity with respect to the Arab world make a contentious combination.

while the show neither explicitly nor aggressively plays into the trope, there is a reason i brought up the hypersexualization of belly dancing earlier. the sexy belly dancer caricature is, as with all stereotypes, part of a larger logistical framework built to dehumanize and thereby justify that dehumanization. at its basic concept, it is a fetishization of Arab femininity. it packs it into an exoticized and therefore commodifiable aesthetic. in practice, it is a colonialist tool of sexual subjugation, used to delegitimize that very same Arab femininity. it paints it as inherently sexual and therefore immoral, uncivilized, perverted. it doesn’t live up to Western conceptions of femininity: chaste, demure, delicate. white. there is an implicit dignity bestowed upon women who succeed in performing Western femininity and anything beyond those bounds is labeled with implicit disgrace.

when it comes to Klinger, there is yet another layer. under a Western framework, those who do not perform their assigned gender roles essentially “fail” at embodying their assigned gender. a Brown man who does not live within the bounds of Western masculinity must “fail” at masculinity and be labeled feminine as a way to delegitimize his humanity. to justify his persecution and subjugation. to strip him of his dignity.

furthermore, the entire reason Klinger wears dresses and heels and jewelry and lipstick at all is to cheat an exploitative system that views gender nonconformity as a discharge-worthy illness. there is a kind of poetic irony in the way the show treats him, gawking at a meticulously crafted survival strategy while attempting to provide meaningful commentary on the horrors of war.

Klinger’s femininity is, by the show’s and the characters’ standards, a laughable disgrace. likewise, so is his ethnicity. because Klinger is primarily feminine and Lebanese insofar as it serves the show’s particular brand of comedy. Jamie Farr understandably pushed to have Klinger stop wearing dresses - what happens onscreen veritably bleeds into the lives of those in the limelight. he didn’t want his family mocked for the gender nonconformity he performed on the show. therefore, it should not be lost on us that the only Brown character on the show is also the only character whose animosity towards Western gender roles is most consistently played for laughs. while we, as a fandom, tend to applaud the show for its attitudes about masculinity, it is no mistake that Klinger is granted far more dignity and compassion as a character once he swaps beautiful dresses for army greens. Klinger’s satin and lace are certainly worth mourning, yes. but their narrative purpose was never to celebrate gender nonconformity.

to be clear, Klinger being both Lebanese and (by Western conceptions) feminine is not an inherently bad or harmful thing. fitting a stereotype neither gives the stereotype validity nor makes those who fit it harmful in their existence. however, because Klinger is a fictional character shaped in no small part by his writers’ orientalist biases, there are aspects of the way he and his femininity are written that are harmful. as most blatantly showcased in episodes like “Goodbye Cruel World”, Klinger’s engagement with femininity and his heritage often serves as an excuse for other characters to not take him seriously. an excuse for the show to not take him seriously. which, more than the mere fact of Klinger wearing dresses, is the real sticking point in all of this.

because despite it all, i still think Klinger is extraordinarily beautiful.