Chapters: 7/?
Fandom: House M.D.
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Gregory House/James Wilson, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Gregory House/Stacy Warner, Gregory House/Henry Dobson, Amber Volakis/James Wilson, Gregory House/Amber Volakis/James Wilson, Gregory House/Amber Volakis, Allison Cameron & James Wilson
Characters: Gregory House, James Wilson (House M.D.), Stacy Warner, Lisa Cuddy, Original Characters, Amber Volakis, Allison Cameron
Additional Tags: Time Skips, Angst with a Happy Ending, Internalized Homophobia, Closeted Character, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Bisexual Gregory House, Gay James Wilson (House M.D.), Survivor Guilt, Hate Crimes, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Self-Esteem Issues, Explicit Sexual Content, Discussions of bad sex, Background Character Death, Drug Abuse, Recreational Drug Use, Drug Addiction, Autistic James Wilson, Pegging, Oral Sex, Frottage, Grief/Mourning, Nonbinary Stacy Warner, Come Eating, Voyeurism, Suicide Attempt, Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Dom/sub Undertones, Puppy Play, Collars, Mommy Kink, just a little, Body Horror, Sex Tapes, Canonical Character Death, Metaphysical Sex, Dubious Consent, Mental Health Issues, Anal Sex, Vaginal Sex, John House’s A+ Parenting, Child Abuse, Ableism
Summary:
House and Wilson are stuck in a cycle of coming together and falling apart, struggling to break free. Unfortunately, the only way out is through.
Long time, no update but Chapter 7 is out now! It’s time for Birthmarks babeeyyyyyyy!
Birthmarks: House tries every delaying tactic available when Wilson forces him to attend his father's funeral. Meanwhile, the team tries to find the cause of a young woman's abdominal pain and hemorrhage that occurred in China.
Three Stories: House's ex Stacy Warner asks him to treat her husband. House takes over a diagnostics class for a day and presents the class with three case studies of leg pain. As House tells his story and the class gradually fills up with listeners, the class learns a lot about how to be better doctors, and Chase, Foreman and Cameron learn some important details of House's past.
i just think Cuddy and Wilson should have gotten together for real (like over a whole season arc and not a few dates) for many reasons but mainly because House would unleash a bisexual tantrum of such magnitude he would raze New Jersey to the ground
choosing death to escape abjection: death's liberatory potential in house m.d.
aka: the presentation i've been yapping about for weeks in its abridged, tumblr-friendly format <3
below is my conference presentation, quoted almost verbatim, with some omissions for length/clarity. it wasn't a paper but more a conversational slideshow. probably for the better, then, it doesn't read like a jstor article.
this is, ultimately, exactly how i feel about the finale in the tightest vacuum possible. there was no space in 15-20 minutes to unpack wilson's comphet, nor was there time to do a true house-is-bisexual deep dive, but completing this project gave me back the intimate, private feeling of glee i had towards this show pre-fandom in the best way. if you give it a read, i hope you enjoy!
Today, I’ll be sharing with you my first real foray into queer theory applied to a text that I never expected to write about: House M.D. My presentation is titled “Choosing Death to Escape Abjection: Death’s Liberatory Potential in House M.D.” Namely, however, my goal is to engage with two major queer theorists in characterizing what I thought was a shockingly compelling and queer ending to a network TV show. In short, I’m arguing that the series’ finale of House M.D., wherein Dr. House joins a terminally ill Dr. Wilson in an off-screen road trip before Wilson’s death, represents an innately queer search for escape, granted through the joint acceptance of death.
First, I feel that I ought to justify why I’ve selected this show some more, since it’s completely beyond the scope of my usual research interests (though this, I’d argue, is good for the academic soul every once in a while). I happened upon House M.D. during the throes of my master’s thesis, and along the way, I noticed how the show struck that crucial mid 2000s nerve that balanced raunchy and regressive jokes about sexuality, gender, disability, and the like with genuine, nuanced portrayals of each. Within the show’s hallmarked irreverence emerged sincere discussions about living in otherness, medically and socially. I found myself consistently touched by the sincere efforts at portraying honest human existences amidst lines such as, “Is it still illegal to perform an autopsy on a living person?”
Yet, as I’ve said, I will be exclusively discussing House M.D.’s two leading characters within this presentation - House and his counterpart, Dr. James Wilson (who happens to be my problematic favorite since the pilot episode). Necessary preamble for my critical framework and interpretation must answer the following questions: How do House and Wilson intersect? How does their relationship impact the text of House M.D.? How are they each queer-coded? Does this individual queer-coding complement the other (YES!)?
House and Wilson open and close House M.D.; among the core cast, Wilson has the first and last lines of the series. They live their lives largely in tandem throughout; several season finales hinge on the preservation or destruction of their friendship. However, as we’ll observe, House and Wilson never fully diverge from the other, and through writers’ room choices and extraneous network TV drama alike, the surrounding cast fades away until House and Wilson are the obvious driving force in the show’s death throes.
House’s queer-coding and otherness is obvious, so much so that it’s garnered the show a new wave of viewership in the last year or so (including myself). Most clearly visible is his right leg, which suffered muscle death after an infarction, and for which he now uses a cane. More subtextually, though, House repeatedly shows solidarity with fellow othered patients - notably, in an episode titled “Hunting” in season 2, House bonds with an openly gay patient diagnosed with HIV, as both characters wear their otherness on their sleeves as an attempt at reclamation. Later, in season 6’s “The Choice,” when a character refutes his own sexuality with “I’m as straight as any of you,” House and a canonically queer doctor famously fall silent, look to one another, and raise their eyebrows. Analyses of House’s queerness are legion, but what’s most central to my argument here is his potent awareness of his othering, and his choice to lean into what Wilson characterizes to be “misery” as a fundamental, unyielding part of his identity.
Characterizing Wilson’s queerness, meanwhile, would take at least an hour on account of its subtle intricacies and Wilson’s own attempts at refuting it entirely. While introduced as a serial cheater in the first two seasons, Wilson’s later arcs revolve around a troubling, unnameable inability to maintain successful heterosexual relationships and a sense of self. He codependently lives with House on several occasions throughout the show. He laments never having children, especially in the final two seasons. Most importantly, however, is his trademarked people-pleasing tendencies, and his reliance on outward personas. From Wilson’s own mouth in season 5: “My whole life is one big compromise…I spend all my time analyzing: what will the effect be if I say this?”
I’ll assert moving forward that these two modes of otherness, the potently visible and the desperately invisible , necessarily complement each other to create House and Wilson’s endgame quest for death and joint invisibility.
I will investigate this complementary queerness, how it grants House and Wilson invisibility, and its potential for liberation using two conceptual frameworks: Judith Butler’s abjection, borrowed from Bodies That Matter, and Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. Regarding abjection, Butler writes of the self-defining nature of norms that dictate which identities, or bodies, are intelligible and habitable. She states that by way of naming certain bodies as habitable, there must exist an entirely separate, non-oppositional category that “is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the specter of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside.” Otherness haunts the ingroup, which, in the text of House M.D., constitutes “able-bodied people” who are no longer ill, thanks to House’s genius. House clearly exists in the realm of the abject, which he outright claims in season two’s episode, “Lines in the Sand,” stating that,
Skinny, socially privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle. and everyone inside the circle is normal. Everyone outside the circle should be beaten, broken, and reset so that they can be brought into the circle...can you imagine how liberating it would be to live a life free of all the mind-numbing social niceties?
House - and the show overall, really - show a remarkable understanding of Butler’s abjection, describing not only the social forces that other, but also the ways in which that othering is maintained by violence from the ingroup onto the outgroup.
Halberstam, meanwhile, advocates for a certain degree of liberation within the abject and within the failure that occurs in the abject among queer individuals. Failing heteronormativity can be a purposeful assertion of transgressive identities. As Halberstam writes, “heteronormative [success] leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope,” none of which House pursues throughout the series, and elements that Wilson abandons upon his terminal cancer diagnosis. Failing heteronormativity is especially prescient for Wilson, whose dedication to normative heterosexuality is a defining struggle for his character.
I read House and Wilson’s complementary queerness as contingent on the politics of invisibility and visibility. As previously mentioned, House embraces his visible otherness. He’s painfully aware of his abjection, and its myriad deleterious impacts on his life: it leads to his addiction, the dissolution of friendships and romantic relationships alike, it lands him in a psychiatric facility, and has engendered a jaded, irreverent attitude toward the world that never relents. The cyclical nature of abjection, therefore, never motivates House to seek an escape.
Wilson, meanwhile, remains wilfully ignorant of his own abjection (subtextual as it is), and chooses instead to try again and again for heterosocial success that forever eludes him. Only when Wilson is abruptly thrust into the outgroup through his cancer diagnosis does he admit his otherness. Here, cancer functions as abjection manifest, an immutable part of oneself that supersedes all other components of your identity now that your existence has a clearly defined expiration date. Wilson rejects the idea that his otherness will become visible when he tells House that “I am not going to die slowly in a hospital bed under fluorescent lighting with people stopping by to gawk and lie about how I look. Even a small chance of that happening is too big a chance for me.” Under the duress of abjection, Wilson already craves invisibility.
Wilson’s late season 8 cancer diagnosis gives way to the infamous “cancer arc,” the three episode stretch wherein Wilson eventually rejects life-extending chemo, and House grapples with the idea of life without his best friend. The arc creates a remarkable and conscious divergence from form: Wilson attempts to replace the titular character by asserting his own emotional needs and selfhood, and House struggles with this assertion, with this narrative shift away from his selfishness.
“The C-Word” features Wilson’s one and only attempt at treatment through a dangerous cocktail of chemotherapy administered at House’s apartment. When it’s unclear whether Wilson will survive the treatment, he makes House promise to preserve his invisibility: “I’d rather die here. Not in an ambulance. Not in a hospital. You can’t do that to me.” Begrudgingly, House agrees.
In “Post-Mortem,” Wilson decides to seek out his teenage crush with House and adopts the persona of a popular kid in high school named Kyle Calloway. After a series of hypermasculine and heterosexual indulgences (akin to sardonic last rites), which include eating an 80oz steak and vomiting, a threesome with two women that ends with his wallet being stolen, and crashing his brand new sports car, Wilson finally admits that these superfluous methods of rejecting otherness don’t work. He tells House, regarding his people-pleasing, that, “I let it go, like I let everything go. And here I am, sitting on this bus…heading back home so a CT scan can decide my fate.”
In “Holding On,” just prior to the finale, Wilson learns that his cancer did not respond to the chemo cocktail, and he announces his final intentions: he will reject chemotherapy and radiation, despite the resulting life expectancy of just five months. When House struggles to accept this, Wilson pleads with House to support him: “I’m pissed because I’m dying and it’s not fair. And I need a friend. I need to know that you’re there. I need you to tell me that my life was worthwhile. And I need you to tell me that you love me.” House relents at the very end of the episode (for now), and allows Wilson to engage in Halberstam’s queer failure, described as a “particular ethos of resignation to failure, [a] lack of progress and a particular form of darkness, a negativity really…[that] can be called a queer aesthetic.” In this case, this lack of progress refers to Wilson’s voluntary lack of healing.
However, in typical House M.D. fashion, things can’t be that cut and dry, and through some dense plot machinations, House suddenly can’t be with Wilson in his final five months after breaking his parole. We learn in retrospect that House, so distressed by Wilson’s impending and isolatory death, stole away with a heroin addict patient, shot up in an abandoned building, and, in the present moment, struggles to escape the building as it’s slowly engulfed in flames. Wilson locates him just in time to watch the building erupt, presumably killing the only friend who was willing to help him fail.
That was the lazy tragedy I expected House M.D. to conclude with, but we are instead reminded one last time of that 2000s sweet spot this show embodied. House interrupts his own funeral by texting Wilson as he delivers the eulogy, and Wilson soon finds him sitting on a stoop, very much alive. After explaining that he “got out the back of the building,” a brief and clever conflation of the deliberate failure of his suicide attempt and queer escape, Wilson assumes that House has pointlessly upended his life one last time. He lists all the ways in which House has heteronormatively failed: “You’re destroying your entire life. You can’t go back from this. You’ll go to jail for years. You can never be a doctor again.”
It’s only when House announces to Wilson that he, too, is now embodying queer failure, and thus invisibility, does Wilson understand: they can both escape abjection together. Smiling, he tells Wilson: “I’m dead, Wilson. How do you want to spend your last five months?” Through symbolic death, chosen in the same way that Wilson chooses to die from cancer, they fail together. They leave the narrative, and in the following montage of remaining characters, nobody knows of their true fate. House and Wilson remove themselves not just from the outgroup of abjection, but from that cycle entirely.
I’ve had many an online debate about the merit of the finale, and among those who enjoy it, many argue that it’s a happy ending, and that, in a perfect world, Wilson ends up seeking treatment, and he and House live on in private. I push back on that interpretation, however, because of the way Halberstam’s queer failure fails to resist abjection in a way that is liberatory.
In the pilot episode, House tells the patient that “We can live with dignity. We can’t die with it,” implying a foundational awareness of the politics of visibility. Perhaps, in his attempts at claiming visibility, House strives for dignity, yet he believes that resignation to death, the seeking out of invisibility, undoes an otherwise dignified existence in spite of abjection. And though he surrenders to invisibility in order to bear out his existence with Wilson, who at this point is effectively his life partner, this glaring question bears asking: is invisibility liberatory? Is the only escape route from abjection to effectively kill oneself? What messaging may this capture regarding House’s other forms of abjection? The inherent romance of this final scene - House and Wilson driving into the wilderness together, the camera tracking them until they disappear within the foliage - isn’t lost on me, but something deeper, and sadder, lingers within that bittersweet conclusion.
To answer that lingering sadness, I’ll quote one of the sources I happened upon during my larger project research. Tina Takemoto, writing in “Queer Art / Queer Failure,” disparages the notion of queer failure, arguing that it is unproductively removed from our shared realities: “How can we hold on to the Utopian dimensions of queer possibility and failure without forgetting or acquiescing to the devaluation, marginalization, and exclusion of queer individuals in modern life? This question challenges us to consider the bleaker side of queer failure that bears witness to the enormity of queer loss, social injury, and grief.” This, of course, adds maybe an unwarranted amount of realism to the fictional text of House M.D., but something about Wilson’s final expression here compels me to mention it. I don’t think there is happiness here. I think there is contentment but, predominantly, resignation, and not the resignation that Halberstam promises as liberatory.
None of this is to say, however, that queer failure isn’t a striking, real-world force, one that I’m compelled to believe in myself, and one that doesn’t have tangible impact. I’m simply making the case that this network TV show’s conclusion is more than just a tragedy - it’s a tragedy made only possible by its longstanding dedication to telling a fundamentally queer story. And it helps, as I’ve said, that Wilson is my favorite character.
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