The Subversive Insight of MTV's Faking It

MTV's Faking It is centered around the original idea of best friends (Karma and Amy) faking a lesbian relationship for popularity in their super-liberal, oddball Austin, Texas high school. The premise is that in this high school, the misfits are the cool kids. Being different is considered a virtue as opposed to something that will get you ostracized from the group. The plot is driven by the event of Amy discovering, that in the process of faking it, she has unmasked real feelings of love for Karma. The latter, however, is hopeless obsessed with Liam, the handsome artistic boy, who begins to fall for the redhead, who also remains oblivious to any feelings Amy might have for her. Other characters include the sassy, gay Shane and the somewhat conservative soon-to-be Amy's stepsister, Lauren.   

 A screen capture from episode 2 of the series, featuring a dream sequence where Karma (right) kisses Amy (left).  

The aim today is not to discuss the main storyline. While the dynamics between the incredibly endearing Amy and self-centered Karma can tug on the heart strings, there is nothing particularly unique there. The genius comes in the writing craft of Carter Covington, the series' creator, who himself is gay. Covington's genius exists in the subversive message hidden underneath all snappy dialogue. His subversion appears to have escaped the purview of the actors, who seem to have only nice things to say about the fictional high school.

It is effortless to mock conservatives. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert do it non-stop during the weekdays. It sometimes gives us a good chuckle. Yet, it is a more difficult thing to mock liberals who are supposedly all about humanist tolerance and progressive values. Covington has succeed in subverting the liberal discourse through satire, exposing its hypocrisies and bigotries from a progressive standpoint. The magic of Faking It is that it is a satire which simultaneously critiques both conservatives and liberals. 

Karma and Amy's high school appears to be tolerant of everybody, but their tolerance is merely a façade; a de-humanizing sort of toleration. Covington demonstrates a liberal tolerance that is obsessed with categories which does violence to the singularity of the Other by reducing that singularity to a mere category. Shane thinks he has discovered that Karma and Amy are gay, but too afraid to come out of the closet. In front of all the people at a big party, he announces that they should elect them homecoming queens. He had mentioned to his best friend Liam that he has been wanting to make lesbian friends, and that these two will do the trick. 

Shane nominating Amy and Karma for homecoming.

The students at the school support Karma and Amy as the poster couple, not because they are a good couple, not because of any virtue of theirs, but simply because they represent a new category for the school to feel more liberal, more tolerant. Karma's parents are so happy that she has come out as lesbian, since in their circle of friends this makes them the cool parents with an edgy lesbian daughter. Saying, "I have a lesbian daughter" is mark of social distinction. At homecoming, when Amy makes an off-the-cuff joke, another girl says, "I love lesbian humor," as if everything she does it lesbian, lesbian, lesbian, all the time lesbian. All she is to them is the Lesbian.

Covington has created a brilliant critique of liberal tolerance that is reductionist and violent against the singularity of the Other. In a poststructural vernacular, it is said that this liberalism pretends that the categories are presence without absence, without a remained. Faking It reminds me of that old Fresh Prince of Bel-Air episode where Carlton confronts the frat-boy who wants to keep him from entering the fraternity for not being authentically black (see the Fresh Prince Moment). Carlton protests that, "Being black isn't what I am trying to be. It's what I am." Covington is doing for sex and gender what Will Smith did for race. 

Covington's Faking It explores the dynamics between the category and singularity in a way that is uncommonly critical of liberalism. The modern liberal tradition has a violent tendency to reduce people to their categories—denying absence. Liberal feminism has been criticized for thinking that merely by flooding public offices with women, that feminist objectives will be accomplished. It is a reductionist position because it assumes that women think, believe, act like x. They will do all of this because they are this category. People thought that President Obama would shake up the status quo, because his identity being more or less African American. Yet, once in power, nothing has changed. The color of a man's skin or the fact of female genitalia does not ultimately define a person one way or another. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of identity politics, but it is a violence against singularity nonetheless. 

Such is not to say that categories do not matter, or that identity politics is wrong. Oftentimes, hegemonic relations seek to dominate through an appeal to a common humanity that just happens to be created in the image of the dominant category. The fictional Austin high school is not portrayed as wholly bad. In fact, sometimes its drive towards tolerance can be warm and inviting. Yet, Covington had the genius to subvert liberal tolerance and show how it often turns into its opposite as symbolic violence against the actual person. It is something you rarely find on television today.