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a chair, a silver beauty-salon apron covering his body, while around him stand … the various members of the popular US reality-TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Feminizing the conquered is widely documented in colonial discourse, particularly in that of nineteenth-century imperial expansion. It is therefore fitting that such discourse should be revitalized during the Iraq war, thereby revealing an essential ideological trait in the attitude of Western “allies,” particularly in that of the United States. Some months later, Allatson “acquired what US collectors like to call a bobblehead or nodder, a small doll with a moveable head, made of a synthetic polymer resin, in this instance representing a uniformed Saddam Hussein with his trousers down around his ankles and a large missile painted in the colors of the US flag embedded in his exposed buttocks.” Despite the unusual and anatomically unlikely angle of penetration, it is hard to miss the allusion to the rogue state as a passive subject of insertion, an image that topples conventionally heterosexual paradigms of invasion.
The volume suitably climaxes with Allatson’s essay, which he describes as a makeover show-and-tell that considers the resonances in the conjunction of the JPEG image and the bobblehead, “two queerly touched products of global pop culture, both of which also function as imperial-history military memorabilia.” That conjunction suggests, Allatson argues, that the recent coming out of the queer I in Queer Eye could never simply be a televisual “fairies’ tale”; rather, it is a metonymy for the consolidation of the then George W. Bush–led United States of Empire, which has undergone “a formidable combat fatigue–chic makeover since 11 September 2001.” The relationship between the war on terror and the Queer Eye’s war on terrible taste is revealed in the enforced proximity of disparate pop-cultural texts and objects, proximity that implicates a dominant queer purview in the operations of the state—what Allatson calls imperial queer. The United States of Empire, even under Barack Obama’s leadership, is indeed a caustic way of sexing up Hardt and Negri’s empire and relocating it on the human map of desire. Empire is here deflected from its common etymon to accommodate a plural grammar, complete with its erotic declensions.