Wonder Woman...Or Why It Is Rough to Be a Woman Heroine

Let's start with some bare bones things first. I am a Marvel person. The majority of their media (that is comics, television, movies, etc.) just tends to resonate with me more. Possibly due to the fact that I feel that Marvel handles its social justice issues with such aplomb. I mean, I will admit that the DC does animation better (I am pretty sure that anything in the DC Animated Universe could qualify as top cartoonage) but on the whole I tend to be a Marvel girl. I say this because I want to lay all my biases out in case at any point I seem unnecessarily rough on Wonder Woman.

But there is no denying that Wonder Woman is an icon. She was really the first female superhero. She became a staple of the feminist movement. Never mind that her story nowadays does not reflect her early female empowerment vibes that she embodied (really, it sucks right now), but there is no denying that Wonder Woman changed the presence that women, especially women that took action, had in pop culture.

I start off with Wonder Woman because she is the most iconic, but what I really want to do is change it to somebody else. Or multiple somebodies. This whole blogging thing is more free form thing rather than a thought out thing, like stream of consciousness and what not.

First I want to move onto Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, and Clarice Starling. If you don't remember what they look like, here they are:

Sorry for the crappy image embedding, I never claimed to be like excellent with formatting. Maybe that is something I can learn as this blog progresses, and in the end I can just be like "LOL REMEMBER WHEN MY PICTURES SUCKED?" But that is not the point.

Getting back to Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, and Clarice Starling. I chose these three women because I really believe that they were some of the first of their kind in regards to portrayal of women as heroines in pop culture. Of course, Ellen Ripley came first and then Sarah Connor and Clarice Starling (well, Clarice is based off the book character, but I am not going to look that up because I think that the movie image is most resonating and familiar to most casual people). But just look at them. They aren't sexual objects and they just look like they are going to fuck shit up. It just isn't something that you see as much. But when your current default action heroine is Angelina Jolie, what the fuck do you expect? Sometime after Jodie Foster, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hamilton the action heroine turned into this:

I mean, Milla Jovovich is fighting zombies in a dress. Angelina Jolie's outfit is all about the breasts. You get skintight and form fitting instead of the loose functionality and practicality of the previous women's outfits. Or you get the most ridiculous of all:

I mean, how is exposed cleavage functional for battle? I mean, the answer is that it isn't, exposed cleavage is only useful for drawing more heterosexual men to the movie theaters.

I think this begs the question: why are action movies geared towards men? And why do women have to suffer or be sexualized because of it? Is an explosion not as cool if Megan Fox isn't running away from it in cutoff Daisy Dukes? If you can't see every contour of Angelina Jolie's breasts and thighs as she is tomb raiding, does it make her less of a tomb raider? I mean, to mean it seems like having pants would be more ideal. Because who knows what kind of weird jungle pants you are going to run your legs through. And for the record, I am pretty sure that most male explorer/grave robbers/action heroes wear pants (even though I am sure that most women might not mind seeing action hero thighs on display). I mean, Samus Aran's Zero Suit at least has functionality (and let's not forget that the majority of the time she is wearing the power armor:

I know that originally she wore like a bikini, but I am willing to put that more on video game design technology of the day than sexism (I mean, there was probably a lot of gender stereotyping there, but again, for the reveal of Samus being a woman to be most effective she had to be obviously a woman, which brings up a lot of other issues). 

If you type in female action movies into Google, I don't think you come up with a lot. There are very few action movies driven by women, and fewer which could be considered good movies. TV I think fares a little better and video games are almost dismal. I mean, I am looking at IMDB's list of Top 50 Action Females, and it stretches to include Keira Knightly...for Pirates of the Caribbean and Anne Hathaway for Get Smart (granted she is now Catwoman so that is like tons better). That's how dismal it is. Gone is the day of Linda Hamilton, Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster, Lynda Carter, Lucy Lawless, and Pam Grier. Even Ziyi Zhang (#never4get House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). In are the Milla Jovovich's, the Kate Beckinsale's and the Angelina Jolie's. Because for some reason directors have it in their heads that woman need to be fetishized in action movies in order to be appealing to men.

Of course this is a gross over generalization, and I openly acknowledge that. So to leave off on a good note, here is Uma Thurman with blood all over face. Because this entire post has put me in the mood to watch some Kill Bill and love on Quentin Tarantino.

The BeyonceBowl...or Women and Power

All right guys, I am sure we all watched the Beyonce Bowl this past Sunday. Football game? Psshaw, who cares about the Ravens or the 49ers? I think that we can all agree, Beyonce was the true winner of the Super Bowl. In this day and age, having a post about Beyonce less than a week after the Super Bowl is still too late to really be a part of the cultural zeitgeist, but whatever. Let's be real, Beyonce is never culturally irrelevant. 

To start with, I am an RA in an all women's residence hall. So after the Super Bowl I asked like all of my residents about how they felt about Beyonce's performance (I was still on a super Beyonce high at that point), and obviously they all loved it (which is a good thing because I love all my residents dearly and it would be heartbreaking to have to disown one for not loving Beyonce). But what was interesting was that during our conversation they were struggling to find the word "power" and instead repeatedly came  up with "masculine." They knew that "masculine" wasn't the word they were looking for, but at the same time power wasn't something that immediately came to mind.

Both Prudence Carter and C. J. Pascoe discuss masculinity in their writings. About how masculinity is associated with dominance and power. And how for males, the idea of not being masculine is almost a sign of weakness. For females it is a different case. Showing typical traits associated with masculinity don't make a female weak, and Carter even mentions that females aren't supposed to seem to "soft" (that is, feminine) either.

So why is femininity such a sign of weakness? Why is power and dominance attached to masculinity while weakness and submissiveness attached to femininity? And why is it that those sometimes less desirable traits are the traits that are traditionally forced upon the women of society?

That's what I like about Beyonce though. She is somebody who is very classically beautiful, hot, and feminine  but at the same time she exudes power and dominance. She has obvious sex appeal but at the same time, it seems that her appeal is less for pleasing men and provocation, than it is a conscious display of power over her own image.

I feel like I got a little lost with some of my last statements, but I think it mostly makes sense. Whatever, chalk it up to writing at 2:00AM. Not sure what I am going to write about next, but I am guessing it is going to be some women in pop culture. But there is a possibility that something in Pascoe's book will inspire me to do something this week. I will leave you with this:

Articles Referenced:

Carter, P. "Between a 'Soft' and a 'Hard' Place: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in the School and at Home"
Pascoe, C.J. Dude, You're a Fag

Welcome...and RuPaul's Drag Race

I won't lie that this is blog was created for class. But whatever, blogs for classes are kind of rad. Especially on a topic like this. Gender. It's a really fascinating topic just because it permeates so much of our world. Well, anyway, enough for the semi-lame intro to my blog, maybe I should just introduce myself (but super quickly of course, because really we all just want to talk about the genius that is RuPaul's Drag Race). So let's get down to the nitty gritty. I am a 21 year old college senior majoring in biochemistry planning on going to graduate school next year to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry. I have always been a bit of a tomboy, moreso when I was young than now (which is also interesting that because I liked to play outside and play video games that I was characterized as a "tomboy" maybe in a later post I can discuss that, because you know RPDR stuff). I blog on some other stuff too (mostly pop culture things, especially television, and sometimes politics) but that has slowed down in the past year due to studying and graduate school apps and the like. So I am actually super excited for this class assignment because I would like to get back into the blogging game. 

Now for something a little more formal. Hopefully, I can have a fun conversational part and a more formal part to every blog post/journal entry. And when I say less formal, I mean being more specific than just saying "and stuff" all the time. I am still going to sound friendly. Don't worry. I wanted to talk about RuPaul's Drag Race for my first blog because what better way to start a blog talk about gender than talk about those who subvert it.

Watch Reality TV, Video and Movies - Logo TV

In case you were unaware, or you are not bothering to watch the video (I don't blame you, since you probably don't want to spend an hour just sitting on my blog), this is the first episode of season 5 (5!) of RuPaul's Drag Race. I like the beginning of this season for a lot of reasons (I mean, if you ever get a chance to watch it, RPDR is just a flat out hilarious and entertaining show) but for the purposes of this blog, I like that you see a range of queens. You get everything from the hyper-feminine "fishy" queens to the campy funny queens to the plain weird queens (there is, however, no definitive "genderfuck" queen which is a little unfortunate, but it is still early in the season and the first challenge wasn't exactly conducive for genderfucking).   

Anyway, I started this blog with RPDR because the way that the men on the show is not only a kind of pseudo-reflection on how women act and dress but also because in our everyday lives we work to put on the same costumes. Maybe it is not as extreme as when you see RuPaul the man become RuPaul the woman but, nevertheless, we do "put on" gender. Everything from the clothes that we wear to even the way that we stand are conscious and unconscious decisions based on what we view as our gender.

But where does this concept of putting on gender come from? And where do we learn how to put on our gender? Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman in their article "Doing Gender" observe that we learn how to "do gender" through our interactions with others. For example, we learn how to be a "woman" through out social interactions, the reactions that others have based on how we decide to be a woman, influence how we continue to carry on being a woman, especially in social situations where women and men are expected to act in very different ways. Zimmerman and West continue on to describe a case study done by Dr. Harold Garfinkel conducted by observing a transgender woman called Agnes. Agnes learned how to be a woman through the actions of her fiance. And perhaps surprisingly, West and Zimmerman conclude this is similar to how everybody learns how to "do gender."

Going back to how I started this, I believe that nobody does gender as well as drag queens. The art of drag is based on doing gender and gender is their performance art. Drag isn't simply a man dressing as a woman, but rather a man performing as a woman. Or perhaps not. Just like most other sects of society, there are hard and undefinable lines, especially as drag culture grows, it is harder to say that a drag queen is a man dressing as a woman, especially when you have those queens who border on androgyny rather than sticking to straight male or straight female stereotypes.

I am going to leave you with this video here:

Article Referenced:
West, C and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing Gender." Gender and Society 1:125-151.