desperately need you to elaborate on your thoughts abt how house is the âbabyâ, amongst the big 3
dw i will elaborate! it sounds so silly every time i write it out lol.
1x18, "babies and bathwater," asks the question is house worth throwing the whole hospital under the bus. in this goofy metaphor, house posits himself as the baby since we don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. meanwhile, both cuddy and wilson struggle with their own iterations of that problem, with cuddy able to see the forest for the trees and wilson eventually relenting to house's POV - even if house isn't the hospital's baby, he may as well be wilson's, so he votes against the hospital's best interests. i argue that this dilemma recurs somewhat in 3x06 when the intro scene introduces having a child as a way of fully committing to someone or, in paul anka's view, the ultimate/only way to fully commit.
but when i was thinking about this more last night as Sleep Was Taking Me, i figured i needed to give you a more thorough/interesting answer so bear with me here, if you will. introducing the conceptual "baby" into the house/wilson/cuddy dynamic shines a light on all the ways these 3 maintain (or fail to maintain) heteronormativity. i just realized that i get to talk about comphet wilson hehehehe.
house - as arguably the most queer-coded character of the bunch imo - rejects falling into that preestablished normalcy both on account of his innate rejection of the status quo and also because he's been pushed out of the social "circle." he defines this as the boundaries set by the most privileged in society, which include "able bodies." i talked his this in my 3x04 recap and will continue to do so forever! lol. i think this rejection and subsequent othering allows house to subsume the baby/bathwater issue, as well as the other heteronormative ways individuals are "expected" to show commitment in a relationship - reproduction being high on that list. he can be their commitment, unwittingly or not.
cuddy, meanwhile, strives constantly toward motherhood for myriad reasons. there are cuddy devotees who can speak to this more than i can, but i'll give it my best shot. cuddy does have a persona, tied up in the way she visually/physically presents (hyper feminine) and how she then subverts the expected stereotyping/objectification that comes her way by being That Bitch. sometimes i find it very elle woods of her. she's able to (successfully and fruitfully) perform the role of businesswoman, a frontward facing role, and maintain both the baby (house) and the bathwater (PPTH at large).
this is why it's SO fascinating that her disability (infertility) is invisible. for all of cuddy's frontward facing success, her body, too, is socially othered, though only in privacy/to those she's most intimate with. she can only mother the Conceptual Baby (FOR NOW. i'm talking strictly in the run-up to rachel here). this is also a good time to mention the social stigma around IVF/fertility treatments, which still exists today. under that stigma, cuddy fails in her performance of heteronormativity because she can't reproduce in the "normal" way. just typing all this out is giving me the ick...medicine is banked on so much misogyny.
when we throw wilson into the mix is when i get really excited. wilson bears all the markers of a successfully heterosocial/sexual individual on the outside. but some of glaring questions that the series will continue to ask him are why no kids? why no "real" relationship? why no commitment? again, in keeping with paul anka's reductive view of commitment (which house md sardonically injects into 3x06), then wilson fails in this regard, too. the only commitment he can show (and chooses to show against his better social interests, more often than not) is to the Conceptual Queer-Coded Baby that his gregory house.
in 2x22, cuddy and wilson even attempt to bond over the question of parenthood when she's secretly considering asking him for a sperm donation, and their subsequent reactions speak volumes. cuddy can hardly broach the subject because to do so would reveal the intimate ways she feels like a failure, and wilson can't even meet her eyes when asked about being a father because, under any heterosocial scrutiny, his persona starts to wear thin. what bonds them together is the baby concept.
TLDR: cuddy and wilson's often undying commitment to house is the closest they can get to "a baby," inherently queering their characters because they fail the socially mandated heterosexual reproduction. and i don't mean to cast house as a man child lmfao. i'm just pointing out what 3x06 was laying down!!
i'm so sorry to anon that this became so long, but thank you for giving me the space to ramble about this! it's always a good time, seeing how these 3 align, diverge, and continue their cyclical destruction of heteronormativity, for which they're always socially punished.
