Looking at the Modern Family Episode : ClosetCon ’13 Using Queer Theory

The premise of this episode contains two main parts that perpetuate the existence of binary:

• The couple Mitchell and Cameron visit Missouri where Cameron’s southern family is still coming to terms with their relative’s homosexuality.
• Father and daughter Jay and Claire are attending ClosetCon, and Claire believes that her father may have had an affair twenty years ago.

Sexual preference plays a large role in this episode of Modern family because not only are the characters Mitch and Cam visiting Cam’s family farm for the first time since their engagement, Claire assumes her father had an affair with an old colleague simply because she overhears a weird conversation between the two. I also found a major focus on ‘the closet’ in this episode, which spreads the idea heterosexuality as normative behavior within the show.

Claire finds out later in the episode that she had simply jumped to the conclusion that since her dad and his colleague were whispering about something that they must have been keeping a secret about their sexual relations when in reality they had never been together in that way. Their interactions also bring to light the idea of playing the prank of putting a skeleton in the closet because it is Claire first time at the convention. The skeleton in the closet may be a play on the idea that Cam and Mitch were trying to find a way to tell Cam’s grandma that he had fallen in love with another man. Jay and Claire may have been at ClosetCon, but the binary highlighted in Queer theory is also present in this episode because Cam is trying to “come out of the closet” for his older family members.

      I saw the binary being most present during the scenes where Claire is sneaking around trying to get evidence of her fathers’ affair, but she never really hears anything. It is because her dad is a well known individual and his colleague was a woman that it seems obvious that the two were hiding a sexual past. In the scenes with Mitch, Cam, and his grandmother, it almost seems like she would accept the two for their love, but when Cam ‘comes out’ the old woman immediately expresses her disapproval. These two occurrences are almost opposites, which a perfect example of how the binary works. Simply because a man and a woman were whispering to each other a third person assumes there must be something sexual happening, whereas when a homosexual couples finds the courage to come out of the closet they are shot down with denial from a close family member. ClosetCon becomes a representation of Cam and Mitch's attempt to come out of the closet, while Claire embarrasses herself by accusing her father of cheating.