Call for Writers: Women and Gender in Musicals

Here at Bitch Flicks, we love watching all types of movies. And that includes musicals. Hell, some of us even call ourselves musical geeks, that’s how much we love them! So this month we’re hosting a Women and Gender in Musicals Theme Week. 
Sure it might seem strange (or awesome!) that characters spontaneously belt out a song or break into a choreographed dance routine. But music transcends boundaries. Evoking nostalgia, they remind many of us of the animated films from our childhoods. Sometimes songs convey a more impactful message lyrically than mere prose ever could. They illicit and express a spectrum of emotions: searing pain, indomitable hope, budding love, roaring anger, jovial humor, the disillusion of dreams, unrequited passion, burning desire, driving ambition, sheer joy. 
Musicals also tackle social issues such as race, class, war, HIV/AIDS, poverty, teen angst and sexuality. And yes, feminist themes emerge too. So how do musical films depict women and gender? How are female characters portrayed? Does it promote gender equality or purport sexism? What about female friendship?
Here are some ideas of musicals to write about but please feel free to propose your own ideas too: 
West Side Story
Dreamgirls
Rent 
Funny Girl
Mamma Mia 
My Fair Lady 
Grease 
The Sound of Music 
Singing in the Rain 
Hairspray 
Meet Me in St. Louis 
Hedwig and the Angry Inch 
The Wiz 
Once
Chicago
Evita 
Pocahontas 
Moulin Rouge 
Rock of Ages 
Dancer in the Dark
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog 
Oklahoma
As a reminder, these are a few basic guidelines for guest writers on our site: 
>–We like most of our pieces to be 1,000 – 2,000 words, preferably with some images and links.
>–Please send your piece in the text of an email, including links to all images, no later than Friday, September 21st.
>–Include a 2-3 sentence bio for placement at the end of your piece.
Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts.
Submit away!
 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another

Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers
In the final scene of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Season 5, Dawn Summers, Buffy’s never before seen or heard-of little sister, appears seemingly out of nowhere. While she’s completely new to the audience, oddly, it is clear that from the characters’ perspectives that Dawn has been there all along.  
Dawn and Tara, fellow outsiders from the Scooby gang, pass time with a thumb war.
To quote my husband’s reaction as we reached season 5 during his (in-progress) Buffy indoctrination: “Why on earth are they doing this?”
Most of the Buffy fandom reacted with the same puzzlement. As Dawn’s character was fleshed out over the first few episodes of the season as the archetypical annoying little sister, the audience was still denied all but the vaguest of clues as to Dawn’s true nature and reason for being retconned into the Buffyverse.  
Dawn as annoying little sister.
It was not until the fifth episode of the season, “No Place Like Home”, that the Dawn’s existence is explained: she is a mystical key that opens gateways between dimensions, magically given human form with blood relation to the slayer, woven into her memories and all of those around her so that Buffy would protect her with her life, to keep the evil god Glory from using the Key to destroy the universe.  
Unfortunately, the only place the monks’ spell couldn’t reach was the minds of the audience, and Dawn Summers had to win us over without the benefit of false memories.  Which may have been an impossible feat, given her character is pretty much laid out as an immature, whiny, brat with a tendency to get into trouble. 
Dawn in damsel-in-distress mode.
Also, she occasionally does this thing where she piercingly shrieks “Get out, get out, GET OUT!” which ranks up there with nails on a chalkboard, dental drills, and Katy Perry songs when it comes to horrible sounds to endure:
And so it is that Dawn is one of the least-liked characters in the Buffyverse. But not by me.  I love Dawn Summers.
I suspect my unusually high tolerance for Dawn comes from my OWN memories.  In “Real Me,” the episode which properly introduces Dawn’s character, she writes in her diary/narrates: “No one understands. No one has an older sister who is the slayer.”
Dawn writes in her diary.
But I understand. OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.”  But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow.  I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys.  She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran.  Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.
And my big sister was a lot nicer to me than Buffy usually was to Dawn.  If the audience found out before Buffy did that Dawn was created to induce the slayer to protect the key, it might have been a little hard to swallow.  Buffy shows only hostile resentment toward Dawn for the first half of Season 5.  It is only after Dawn learns herself that she is new to the world that Buffy shows her true sisterly love, when she lovingly insists to Dawn that she is Buffy’s “real sister” despite her mystical origins.  
“It doesn’t matter where you came from, or how you got here, you are my sister.”
Because I relate to Dawn as a fellow annoying little brat following around her remarkable older sister, I am more forgiving of her character flaws. But I do think viewers without my background ought to take it easier on Dawn as well.  
A common criticism of Dawn is that she’s much more immature than the main characters were at the start of the series, when they were close to her in age (Dawn is introduced as a 14-year-old in the eighth grade; Buffy, Xander, and Willow were high school sophomores around age 15 or 16 in Season 1).  Writer David Fury responds to this in his DVD commentary on the episode “Real Me,” saying that Dawn was originally conceived as around age 12 and aged up a few years after Michelle Trachtenberg was cast, but it took a while for him and the other writers to get the originally-conceived younger version of the character out of their brains.  But I don’t need this excuse; I think it makes perfect narrative sense that Dawn comes across as more immature than our point-of-view characters were when they were younger.  Who among us didn’t think of themselves as being just as smart and capable as grown-ups when we were teens? Who among us, when confronted with the next generation of teenagers ten years down the line, were not horrified by their blatant immaturity?  
Additionally, Dawn starting her character arc as whiny brat lets us watch her grow and mature into a pretty awesome young woman.  It is a long road, beset by personal tragedy and a theme of abandonment: Dawn loses her mother and her sister within a matter of months in Season 5, and in Season 6 sees her surrogate parent figures Willow and Tara split up just as a returned-from-the-grave Buffy is too detached from humanity to be there emotionally for Dawn.  Throughout Season 6, Dawn acts out: lying to Buffy to stay out all night with friends, habitually and perhaps compulsively stealing, and ultimately sublimating her abandonment issues into a curse (with the help of Vengeance “Justice” Demon Halfrek), temporarily trapping the Scooby gang and some innocent bystanders in the Summers home.  
Dawn’s tantrum in Season 6’s “Older and Faraway”
But Season 6 represents an era of bad choices for almost the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so Dawn should be given as much slack for her missteps as we give the other wayward characters, including Buffy herself.  And it is Dawn who finally pulls Buffy out of the emotional purgatory she is suffering in this season.  In the Season 6 finale “Grave”, Buffy finally truly regains her will to live and recaptures her complete humanity, and this epiphany comes in large part because she finally sees Dawn as a gift in her life rather than a burden:
Buffy and Dawn hug in “Grave”
“Things have really sucked lately, but that’s all gonna change—and I want to be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. I want to see you grow up. The woman you’re gonna become… Because she’s gonna be beautiful. And she’s gonna be powerful. I got it so wrong. I don’t want to protect you from the world—I want to show it to you. There’s so much that I wanna to show you.” –  Buffy to Dawn in “Grave.”
Dawn with Buffy during her metaphorical rebirth in “Grave.”
Dawn finds her own self-actualization in the Season 7 episode “Potential.” Having once again been shoved to the sidelines of Buffy’s attention by the arrival of a collection of young “potential slayers” who need protection from the Bringers who have been systematically wiping out the future slayer lineage.  While Buffy focuses on protecting and training the potentials, Dawn clearly feels left out, trapped by her own ordinariness and unimportance (a significant change for a girl who was once the key to the fabric between dimensions).
Dawn lurks in the background as Buffy gives a speech to potential slayers.
That all changes when a spell cast by Willow appears to identify Dawn as a potential slayer herself.  Dawn is emotionally overwhelmed by the news, mainly because she thinks it means that Buffy must die before Dawn could ever realize this potential (I’m pretty sure the next potential would be called only by the death of Faith, but that’s neither here nor there).  A part of Dawn is clearly excited by the news, and given a huge jolt of self-confidence that lets her bravely defend herself against a vampire and then fight off the group of Bringers who come for her classmate Amanda, the true potential slayer identified by Willow’s spell.  Dawn handles the news of her lack of slayer potential with perfect grace, saving Amanda’s life and transferring to her the confidence that comes with knowing you are “special.”  
At the episode’s end, Xander, the only other remaining character without any superpowers, has a heart-to-heart with Dawn.  He shares with her the wisdom he’s gained in seven years in these circumstances:
Xander has a heart-to-heart with Dawn
“They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.” – Xander to Dawn in “Potential.”

 Dawn accepts her humanity and finds her maturity.
After “Potential”, Dawn, who began life at age 14, crafted from a ball of mystical energy and a spell creating powerful false memories, is finally defined by her humanity, her normalcy.  She accepts this position with dignity, grace, and bravery.  And in so doing, Dawn also steps up to her place as a mature young adult. And at least for this one-time bratty kid sister, that makes Dawn Summers is just as heroic and inspiring a character as Buffy herself.  
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.  She is a regular contributor to Bitch Flicks with a new piece appearing each Friday.  She is still upset that the Season 5 Buffy DVDs don’t include the awesome “previously on” montage from “The Gift”.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Are You Ready to Be Strong? Power and Sisterhood in ‘Buffy’

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
 
Guest post written by Amanda Rodriguez.

No one will argue that the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t populated with strong female characters. Buffy’s best friend, Willow, is a computer-hacking lesbian witch with the magical prowess to end the world. Her sister, Dawn, is a mythic Key who can open gateways between dimensions. Faith, Buffy’s sometime friend and ally, is a sexually and physically empowered slayer who revels in her body’s physical gifts. The female villains are also intensely powerful and iconic, ranging from ancient vampires, werewolves, and vengeance demons to genius scientists and even the ultimate foe, The First (though technically genderless, this force often takes the form of Buffy herself). Season 5’s villainess, Glory, is even a goddess whose power is only diminished when she is forced to inhabit the body of a human male, and if that ain’t feminist commentary, I don’t know what is.
Though the show suffers from no shortage of powerful women, the ways in which they relate to one another throughout the series is a constant struggle. This is because the dominant patriarchal paradigm within which the show is operating insists that one powerful woman is a delightful anomaly, but multiple powerful women are a threat to hegemony. By these standards, Buffy, by herself, is set up as a superior paragon of womanhood: strong, independent, sassy, beautiful, smart,courageous, and compassionate. If all women, however, were empowered like Buffy, or even a small group, it would be a subversive threat to male dominance,which is why Buffy and her power are exceptional and solitary. This, in effect,handicaps her, limiting her power.
“Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.” | Image of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)
Within this context, each woman’s power in the Buffyverse sets her apart from others and often puts her at odds with other powerful women. Buffy laments the isolation that her power causes, feeling as if no one can relate to the magnitude of the unending burden that she must bear alone. On multiple occasions, her power also puts her into a position where she feels she must destroy other women who are abusing their power.
Though Buffy has no qualms destroying evildoing villainesses, her decision-making becomes more complicated when it is a female friend/loved one/ally using her power in ways that go against Buffy’s code. Inevitably in these instances, Buffy struggles with her duties as a slayer but always comes back around to what the dominant patriarchal paradigm expects of her. Buffy begrudgingly conforms to patriarchy’s prescribed dichotomy that polarizes powerful women, steeling herself to kill the love of Xander’s life, her sister-slayer, and even her own blood sister.
Anya, Xander’s ex-fiancee and Buffy’s friend, returns to her vengeance demon ways in Season 6 after Xander jilts her at the altar. In the Season 7 episode Selfless, Anya kills an entire fraternity as part of her vengeance demon work, punishing men who wrong women. Buffy says of her responsibility to kill the rampaging Anya, “It’s always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw a line in the sand, and that is always going to be me…I am the law.” Here again the series insists that two mighty female forces cannot coexist. Their power will be constantly at odds, and a balance must be struck by either the neutralization or the destruction of one of the women’s powers. Though Buffy stabs Anya in the chest, Anya lives and chooses to “take back” her murder of the fraternity and relinquish her vengeance demon powers, becoming human again. There is a price, though, for this transformation, and another powerful woman pays it. In a cruel twist, Anya’s friend and fellow vengeance demon, Halfrek, is obliterated in order to restore balance. This implies that women are to be punished for their powers and nonconformist desires and, most importantly, that all powerful women are interchangeable.
“The proverbial scales must balance. In order to restore the lives of the victims, the fates require a sacrifice: the life and soul of a vengeance demon.” – D’Hoffryn | Image of Anya
The polarization of powerful women in the series is most exemplified by the relationship between Buffy and Faith. The nature of slayer power allows only one slayer at a time. She possesses all the power until death. Buffy is drowned and dies briefly in Season 1, disrupting the slayer line, causing another slayer to be “called.” The relationship between Buffy and Faith (commonly known as “the dark slayer”) is contentious from the beginning. There is resentment and jealousy between them. Faith is set up as the outsider little sister who has no friends, no home, no family, causing a deep resentment toward the stability of Buffy’s life. This reveals the unspoken power of Buffy’s privilege, calling attention to the economic and educational disparities between the two slayers. On the other hand, Buffy is simultaneously judgmental toward (in a classic big sister way) and intoxicated by Faith’s free sexuality and her love of slaying (fans and academics alike have cited the two as metaphors for each other).
In Season 3, Faith betrays her sacred duty as a slayer, killing humans and aligning herself with the evil Mayor. Buffy decides to kill Faith, but because the two women share the same abilities, this task is easier said than done. The two go round and round before Buffy finally stabs Faith in the stomach with her own knife, putting her in a coma. In Season 4, Faith wakes up, and after more discord, Faith leaves town and turns herself in, choosing prison as a method of atonement. Faith’s threatening power is effectively neutralized behind bars.
 “There’s only supposed to be one. Maybe that’s why you and I can never get along. We’re not supposed to exist together.”- Faith | Image of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Faith (Eliza Dushku)
The only time Buffy refuses to do her duty and kill someone she loves is in Season 5 when her sister, Dawn (the mystical Key), must be killed to stop her from unwillingly opening a gateway to a demon dimension that will send the world into chaos. Throughout the season, the sisters often have an uneasy relationship due to typical sibling rivalry and the fact that Dawn isn’t truly Buffy’s sister. Monks harness the awesome power of the Key and shape it into human form, using Buffy’s blood and altering her memories so that she will be compelled to protect it. In spite of all this, when Dawn must die to save the world, Buffy chooses to sacrifice herself and dies instead. This is meant to be a beautiful,selfless act of love, and, though it is, Buffy’s death simply reinforces the idea that only so much female power can safely exist in the world.
“This is the work that I have to do.” – Buffy | Illustration by boo21190 via deviantart.com
All these “sister” relationships are deeply dysfunctional and problematic from a feminist perspective. The show itself sits uneasily within the patriarchal paradigm that it is constantly reinforcing. Though the series complies in a circuitous way by systematically disempowering powerful women by divesting them of their abilities (in the case of Anya) or forcing them to reign in their strengths (in the case of Willow), the show refuses throughout to actually kill these women(permanently anyway). To stop another apocalyptic menace in the final season, Buffy,Anya, Faith, and Dawn all work together alongside a host of “potential slayers.”The “potentials” are women who are not actually powerful but could become powerful should a slayer die, further underscoring the notion that female power must be balanced and finite.
This is when it gets really good. The ending of this series gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. It’s a feminist dream come true. They are facing The First, a truly invincible foe who is only able to rear its ugly head when the cosmic balance is upset because of Buffy’s mystical resurrection, allowing two slayers to exist in the worlds simultaneously. One could even posit that The First is symbolic of patriarchal and misogynistic oppression of women, especially since Its right-hand man is a woman-hating religious fanatic. Not only that, but The First appears often as Buffy, herself, implying, perhaps, that female complicity or conformity to an oppressive standard is a major obstacle to equality. That’s a whole other paper, though.
To muster enough force to beat back The First, Buffy creates a new paradigm. She enlists the help of another powerful woman (Willow) to subvert the paradigm that requires only one woman/one slayer to exist at any given time. In a speech that moves me almost to tears every time I watch it, Buffy explains that Willow will use an ancient slayer artifact to release its power to all potential slayers around the world.
“So here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power, should be our power. Tomorrow, Willow will use the essence of this scythe to change our destiny. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer, will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?” Buffy

The series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells us that women must band together to defeat patriarchal oppression. Here Buffy chooses to share her power with other women,creating a community of slayers. Buffy has evolved into a powerful woman who refuses to see other women as a threat. She is now a strong woman embracing and empowering other strong women. Together they create a unified force that changes the world forever.

Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: The View from the Grave: Buffy as Gothic Feminist

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Guest post written by Jennifer M. Santos.

“It’s a relief to hear papers that don’t go on about feminism.” Such was Patricia Pender’s report on the mood of attendees at the second Slayage Conference in 2006, just three years after Buffy ended (5). Pender punctuated her discussions of an atmosphere rife with concerns of contextual redundancy with the exclamatory parenthetical, “not more feminism!” (5). Nonetheless, the prevailing mood of 2006 did little to halt the “Is Buffy feminist debates?” during the following year: in 2007, C. Albert Bardi and Sherry Hamby claim that Buffy “revel[s] in her phallic power (yes, phallic –don’t forget the omnipresent stake)” while Misty Hook returns to Joss Whedon’s self-proclaimed “radical feminist” roots (107, 119).
Which perspective reigns in 2012? Which should? Neither. Or both. More precisely, Pender’s 2002 piece – now a decade old – got it right when suggesting that Buffy’s “ambivalent gender dynamics”makes it a “site of intense cultural negotiation” (35, 43). When considered from the perspective of the Gothic tradition from which the earliest English-language vampire first sprang, ready for mischief, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Buffy defies easy categorization. Instead, the show invites viewers, along with its characters, to negotiate – rather than “simply” navigate – cultural gender norms.
The Gothic has long been known for its tendency to transgress boundaries, especially those boundaries associated with gender. So much so, in fact, that an industry of gendered Gothic scholarship has grown from Ellen Moers’ first invocation of the term “female Gothic,” used initially to refer to Gothic novels authored by women (and which typically function as “birth myths”) to Anne Williams’ more inclusive, dynamic formulation wherein female Gothic “does not simply break the rules, it creates a new game with different rules altogether” (172). Buffy not only creates a new game; it suggests a new field of play for the game by transgressing – and then effacing – traditional gender boundaries.
In 2012 – an era of the female as victim (as seen in the Twilight series and even to some extent in the Sookie Stackhouse novels) or “more masculine than the men” (perhaps a holdover from the Lara Croft or Xena) in Gothic and in larger popular culture – the available spaces for female representation are typically depicted as domestic entrapment or usurper of patriarchy (a role distinct, it should be noted, from that of matriarch). From the pilot episode to the conclusion, Buffy enters and redefines each space. She may be, as Hannah Tucker describes, a “Wonderbra’d blond chick fighting vampires” meant to invert the convention of “the blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed” as Joss Whedon has described his vision of the show, who elides the domestic sphere (quoted in Byers185, Belle). She may also be the means of celebrating what Whedon has called “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it” in the final episode of Buffy – where any female who could receive slayer powers does receive slayer powers  (quoted in Gottlieb). She may elide the domestics pace in each of these examples.
But for all her “on field” triumphs in revising the game, her exodus from domesticity is not “complete.” Nor need it be. In fact, Buffy continually cycles in and out of domesticity, as her mother pressures her to lead a normal life even as her Watcher prods her towards her destiny, and as she sets out for college on her own only to return to the home a year later to care for her ailing mother and, later, her sister. [1] And, notwithstanding the celebratory conclusion of the series, Angel episode “The Girl in Question” situates Buffy in a new domestic space in Rome with the Immortal. These series-wide arcs indicate that the either/or dichotomy no longer reigns as such; Whedon neither wishes to simply “expos[e] perils” (although Frances Early convincingly argues that Buffy does just that) nor create “a dark mirror reflecting patriarchy’s nightmare” (Williams 107).[2] Instead,the series as a whole unpacks, overturns, and undercuts – in other words, it transgresses – traditional understandings of not only female/male, but also of feminism itself.

Buffy in the series finale
The key to understanding Buffy’s contribution to feminism in 2012is remembering that Buffy is more than a simple representation. It is meant, Sherryl Vint explains, to “reshap[e] the subjectivities…of adolescent boys as well as women” (13). [3]
The final episode – “Chosen” – is case-in-point.When Buffy shares her power with all women, vanquishes the First Evil, destroys the Hellmouth, and leaves a literally decimated Sunnydale behind to start a new life, the oppressive, exclusionary, and controlling “signs of the father” are defeated.[4] Buffy,with Willow’s assistance, imbues all would-be-slayers with mystical strength,actualizing power in all women with the potential to receive it.  We may further rejoice in the revelation that a mysterious emissary of female Guardians not only predates man but also contributes to Buffy’s quest in providing a pivotal tool that enables empowerment. But its representational power is complex, and has led a number of viewers – academic and nonacademic alike, in my experience – to probe their own subjectivities.  
One argument goes something like this: given these overtly feminist messages, the troubling intrusion of masculine power structures complicates a “happy ending.”  Recall the scythe that enables sharing of female power.  The visual representation of this tool might well be considered symbolic of the phallus. To be effective in empowering women, Willow must join with the scythe in a scene rife with sexual imagery, from Willow’s initial resistance and nervousness to her gasp of awe (“oh my goddess”) to her physical collapse that implies post-coital bliss.  Of course, female pleasure here is not sublimated to the male, unless one considers that act as coerced for the greater good, much as Victorian mothers told their daughters to”Lie still and think of England” on their wedding nights.[5]  Her virgin-like nervousness before the act –and her statement that such an act will take her beyond anywhere she’s been before – also speaks to a sublimated sense of self for duty in encountering the phallus (“Chosen”). Here, an engaged viewer might ask (and have asked), “can this support a feminist message?”
Indeed, the implications of this act are all the more poignant when one considers that Willow is a lesbian in a committed relationship. That the phallus was thrust upon this woman by other, albeit well-meaning, women speaks to the deep-rooted patriarchal use of women by culture, similarly attested to by the Watchers’ Trials where Buffy is placed in a dilapidated house, stripped of powers that were initially forced upon her predecessors, and exposed to mortal danger – all “in the name of the father.”  Yet it is Giles, the father-figure, who breaks from tradition and assists Buffy in this trial, thus indicating a deeply complex and ambivalent perspective on the cultural positioning of women.
Around dinner tables and over cups of coffee, nearly a decade after the series concluded, I’ve witnessed this discussion unfold time and again. And, I think this is the key interpretative moment: are women, the series asks, dependent on men to create a new field of play? Or might the show call into question the norms and expectations of both genders? The answer to these queries may well be found in Spike’s role in the series’ finale. Certainly a number of conversations turn to Spike’s role. In its layers of ambivalence that call upon men to not only transgress but efface normative boundaries, it points to the latter.

As Wilcox notes, Spike only glows with his own power after power has been distributed to women; it is, ultimately, the eternal man, in the form of the undead Spike, whose heroics save the day (104). Indeed, while Spike assumes his heroic pose, Buffy and her cohort of potentials-turned-slayers operate as helpmeets, distracting the minions of evil until the male sacrifice – reminiscent of the Christ promoted by patriarchal religious structures – can deliver the women from a dark destruction. This comparison gains credence from the fact that this unlikely hero, after the destruction of his vampire form, is again resurrected in Angel,revealing a reification of a patriarchal structure: the female can only be empowered – can only share her power – at the behest of a man. This ambivalent twist on a seemingly-feminist agenda asserts itself further in “Chosen”  when the phallically-named Spike shoots beams of light across the female expanse, with one slicing upwards and directly into the room of the lesbian witch who embraced the phallus to empower others.[6] This final act seems to reclaim phallic power through intrusion.

Buffy and Spike
Seemingly,then, the series remains locked in the outmoded feminist argument, regardless of the subjectivities it invites viewers to explore, that describes a binary power struggle that becomes even more insidious when we consider that Spike refers to Buffy in his final words as “lamb,” implying that Buffy herself must sacrifice power to empower others. Further consideration of this thought is disturbing, as it implicates Buffy herself in the totalizing power of a patriarchal system (as the “one girl in all the world” who is chosen), as does the elitist selectivity of the chosen few who receive the newly redistributed power.  These plotpoints beg the question of whether collective female empowerment can exist within current structures.
The answer to this query, it seems, lays in the very ambivalence that the show’s conventions hint at across the seven-seasons. These various genderings indicate that it is only in comfortable ambivalence that true empowerment can be achieved for all members of society. Perhaps it is our own discomfort with this ambiguity that compels us to return to the either/or feminist debate surrounding Buffy again and again, in print and in casual conversation. Yet, in fact, it is the liminal– the space in-between – that is brought to the foreground, through the characters of Spike and Buffy. As a vampire, Spike exists on the borders, oscillating between life and death,between human and demon and between good and evil (even without a soul, Spike often acts for the greater good).[7]  It is his liminality that makes his identification with the phallus so intriguing: his story is that of a sensitive, somewhat effeminate, human male lacking self-confidence in life thatis gained in unlife. This newly-found confidence sends him on a quest for power as conceived of by cultural norms:his self-assertion takes a violent turn during which he quite literally eliminates the “other,” and, during this time, trades his given name, the ubiquitous William, for his phallically-charged nickname. That he follows the traditional conquest path to “glory” makes his shift to champion of the people all the more interesting: he moves from the effeminate male (the “momma’s boy”) to the”masculine” male, experiencing both worlds before consciously choosing to “be a better man,” as Buffy puts it, a task that for Spike involves embracing both the male and female cultural norms (“Never Leave Me”).[8] It is not insignificant that it is Spike who sacrifices himself – often the female role (excepting, for a moment, the Christ comparison) – to save the world.  By adapting cultural gender norms for new purposes, Spike offers a form of feminism that might be characterized, stripped of jargon, as “human” feminism.
Similarly, Buffy herself operates as a liminal figure, oscillating between her home life and her sworn duties, the human part of her and the demon part of her. She relies on what may be seen as a patriarchal form of power: violence and control.  She further maintains the traditionally-male isolationist stoicism while attempting to reconcile her place in the world with cultural norms, yet only when she becomes comfortable having – and not having – power is she able to empower others.  This is the crux of the issue: only by blurring binary distinctions that constrain men and women can the rules change within the system.  The staples of oppressive conventions have not been overturned: the system remains in place:globalization of female power, then, does not simply cross boundaries or”turn around” as revolution may imply in this context.[9] It instead offers the hope that if one cannot rend asunder what William Blake would call “mind forged manacles” of cultural norms, then it can infuse them with elasticity. And in 2012, when male and female icons alike so often return to the repressed as with Gothic of yore, the role Buffy can play in renegotiating a space for feminism from beyond the grave is worthy of continued attention.

Jennifer M. Santos has taken a break from professoring to do more writing about fun, feisty females. When she’s not writing about Buffy or Lady Gaga, she’s using her Ph.D. in English to unearth nineteenth century vampires. And when when’s not doing that, she continues the never-ending battle to convince her cats that she’s the alpha.

Works Cited
Angel: Season Five on DVD.  Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment,2005.
Bardi, C. Albert and Sherry Hamby. “Existentialism Meets Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  The Psychology of Joss Whedon: An Unauthorized Exploration of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.  Ed. Joy Davidson.  Psychology of Popular Culture Ser. Dallas: BenBella, 2007.  105-117.
Belle, [E] Slay. “Lady Ghosts of TV Past: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Thinking about Season 1.” Persephone Magazine. 25 Mar. 2011. Blog. 3 Aug. 2012 <http://persephonemagazine.com/2011/03/25/ladyghosts-of-tv-past-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-thinking-about-season-1/>.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection.  144 episodes.  DVD.  Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006.
Byers, Michele. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Next Generation of Television.” Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Eds. Rory Cooke Dicker and Alison Piepmeier. Hanover, MA: Northeastern UP, 2003. 171-187.
Chandler, Holly.  “Slaying the Patriarchy:Transfusions of the Vampire Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies.  3.1 (Aug. 2003): 62pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/chandler.pdf>.  
DeLamotte, Eugenia C.  Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Early, Frances. “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 2.2 (Sept.2002): 30 pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/early.pdf>.
Gottlieb, Allie. “Buffy’s Angels: The Blond Girl with Cleavage Really Isn’t So Feminist – but the Men in Her Life Are.”  Metroactive.  26 Sept.2002.  17 Jan. 2006 <http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/09.26.02/buffy1-0239.html>.
Hook, Misty K.  “Dealing with the F-Word: Joss Whedon and Radical Feminism.”  The Psychology of Joss Whedon: An Unauthorized Exploration of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.  Eds. Joy Davidson and Leah Wilson.  Psychology of Popular Culture Ser. Dallas: BenBella, 2007. 119-129.
Jowett, Lorna. “The Summers House as Domestic space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 5.2 (Sept.2005): 40 pars. 17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/jowett2.pdf>.
Pender,Patricia.  “‘I’m Buffy and You’re…History:’ The Postmodern Politics of Buffy.”  Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham, MD:Rowman, 2002. 35-44.  
—. “‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: Buffy Studies and Slayage 2006.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies. 6.1 (Fall2006): 24 pars. 9 Aug. 2012 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/Pender.pdf>.
Wilcox, Rhonda V. Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005.  
Williams, Anne.  Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995. 
Williamson,Milly.  “The Predicament of the Vampire and the Slayer: Gothic Melodrama in Modern America.” The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy. London:Wallflower, 2005.  
Vint, Sherryl, “‘Killing Us Softly’? A Feminist Search for the ‘Real’ Buffy.”  Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies.  2.1 (May 2002): 26 pars.  17 Jan. 2006 <http://slayageonline.com/PDF/vint.pdf>.
Notes
[1] Jowett’s “The Summers House as Domestic Space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” provides an excellent account of the Summers’ house as a site of domesticity both with and without the presence of Buffy’s mother. Her analysis, coupled with Eugenia C. DeLamotte’s observation that Gothic heroines perpetuate a cyclical enclosure by venturing out of the home simply to return to it again, reinforces the problematic nature of Buffy’s own empowerment. That is not to say that a woman cannot be a stay-at-home feminist if she chooses the home for herself, but rather to develop the sense of cyclical entrapment that Buffy experiences for seven years.
[2] In her discussion of Buffy as a “narrative of disorderly rebellious female as well as an effective experiment in…’open images,'”Early asserts that Buffy “expose[s]stereotypes and coded symbols that shore up a rigid war-influenced gender system” (3, 29).  Further, Holly Chandler asserts that “Buffy confidently yanks the ugly face of the patriarchy out into the light of day, where, she hopes, it will be burnt to a crisp”(62). Both Early and Chandler author valuable arguments portray Buffy as subversive from a woman’s studies standpoint, and I build on their observations in probing the nature of subversion as applicable to both men and women.
[3] Whedon has articulated his desire to “make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of the situation” (quoted in Vint 13).
[4] For additional “signs of the father” in Season 7, witness Giles’ attempted murder of Spike, the villain’s adoption of the patriarchal garb of religion, and even the villain’s assumption of a female form named Eve.
[5] A corollary problem to note is that the female creators of the scythe choose to bury it deep within mother Earth, violating,on a broad level, the natural world. Although one may explain this violation as a justified critique of a world that denigrates women and enslaves them to fight monsters or even as what Williams calls a “metaphor for accomplishment, a mode of self-creation,”the ultimate use of the scythe further complicates the issue (158).
[6] Rhonda Wilcox makes a similar observation, discussing Spike and Willow in relation to subconscious and conscious in Why Buffy Matters (104).  Wilcox also provides further evidence for those who may question Spike’s phallic associations: in “Tabula Rasa,” wherein the characters experience an amnesia spell, Spike discovers the name “Randy” sewn into his jacket and assumes it for his name,complaining, “‘Why didn’t you just call me Horny Giles or Desperate For A Shag Giles?’  Given the fact that the episode after ‘Tabula Rasa’ is ‘Smashed’ (6.9), in which Buffy and Spike first have sex, the names seems more than appropriate. One might argue that the name Randy reiterates the sexual implications of the name Spike” (60).
[7] In fact, it is worth mentioning that the soulless Spike undertakes his own journey and trials to retrieve his soul, while the only other ensouled vampire in the Buffyverse, Angel, is cursed with a soul as a punishment.
[8] Milly Williamson notes that, “[l]ike the pre-twentieth-century Gothic, the appeal of today’s ‘new’ vampire tale is to do with its ability to represent what is disavowed, to speak to anxieties and desires that are difficult to name” (69). That the anxieties of gender remain ambiguous further connects Buffy to the Gothic tradition.
[9] Williams returns to the etymology of”revolution” and reminds us that “the word means to ‘turnaround'” as well as to “cross forbidden boundaries” (172).

‘True Blood’ Asserts a Pro-Choice Reproductive Rights Message

Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley) and Pam De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten) in True Blood

Warning: If you haven’t seen True Blood, Season 5, Episodes 10 and 11, spoilers ahead!!
 
I’m pretty much hooked on True Blood. A sexy TV show with a female protagonist, female friendship, diverse and complex female characters, dreamy brooding men (eh, vampires) with tortured souls — what’s not to love??  
The popular series has long been called an allegory for LGBTQI rights with its phrases “God Hates Fangs” and vampires “coming out of the coffin.”  TV show creator and former showrunner Alan Ball sees True Blood as an analogy for “anyone that’s misunderstood” while author Charlaine Harris envisioned her series of novels which inspired the show as framing the vampires as a minority fighting for equal rights.  
But in the last 2 episodes, another parallel has been drawn: the struggle for reproductive rights.

In Season 5, viewers are introduced to the inner machinations of the Authority, a theocratic vampire government. In “Gone, Gone, Gone,” the Authority appoints creepy Elijah (who looks like he stepped out of a bad 80s hair metal band video) as the new Area 5 vampire sheriff in Bon Temps. When he arrives at the vampire bar Fangtasia, he bullies the fabulously sardonic Pam De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten) and fierce survivor (turned vampire) Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley)…aka my new favorite female duo. Elijah informs them of the Authority’s new mandate where vampires must create 30 new “baby vamps” in the district.  
Hmmm…sound familiar? Not unlike legislative restrictions on abortion access and contraception. 
After Elijah leaves, Tara muses to Pam that she will create 2 new vampires as she always wanted kids anyway. But Pam tells her: 
“No. We procreate because we want to. Not because some dickhead dipped in afterbirth told us to.” 
Later, Tara decides to take a stand. She tricks Elijah into thinking she’s accidentally killed someone while turning them into a vampire, then she swiftly decapitates him. When Pam enters the room, annoyed and exasperated, Tara tells her: 
“We’re not running. No one fucks with us in our house.” 
In last week’s episode “Sunset,” Pam fears the repercussions of Elijah’s murder from the oppressive Authority. Pam explains to Tara (who’s never heard of the Authority) how the regime doles out both laws and religious doctrine. Tara replies: 
“They can both keep their fucking laws off my body.”
Yes, yes, yes. Just one of the many pro-choice mantras feminists declared protesting the proliferation of heinous anti-choice laws.
But Pam responds: 
“No, they can do whatever they want with your body.” 
Again, sounds eerily like what conservative anti-choice legislators are trying to do: control women’s bodies any way they can. 
Sure, True Bloodis a gory, soap opera romp. But underneath the show’s glossy exterior, Tara and Pam’s conversation conveys the dangers and implications of anti-choice legislation.  
Ball acknowledged the political undertones as he said in an interview that Season 5 was inspired by the Republican primaries and watching Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. He started thinking about what it would be like to have a theocracy in America. He also found it “terrifying…how many people agree” with them.  When you stop and think about it, reproductive health is a big part of our lives. Whether we’re using it, talking about it or advocating access. Yet pop culture and media render it almost invisible. 
Reproductive rights are too often absent from film and TV. While notable exceptions exist — Maude, Grey’s Anatomy, Roseanne, Dirty Dancing, Private Practice, Friday Night Lights, Greenberg, Vera Drake, Degrassi, Sex and the City, Girls — most movies and TV series don’t show characters having abortions. But it’s not just abortions missing from plotlines. Besides a few examples — Sex and the City, Girls, Knocked Up, The Walking Dead, Lola Versus,The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Sons of Anarchy — pop culture has a “weird silence on birth control” and condoms.  
Anti-choicers have launched an all-out war on reproductive justice, demonizing abortion and contraception. And pop culture has remained fairly silent. Now, I’m not saying it’s the job of films and TV shows to educate. But media “reflects and shapes our values and opinions.” It can reinforce tired tropes and stereotypes, perpetuate myths or shed light on a topic and spark dialogue. Media impacts the way we view the world around us. 
Besides salacious sex and shocking plot twists, True Blood transcends mere escapist fun. Weaving reproductive rights into its plot, it makes a bold statement about oppressive governments and the repercussions if we don’t fight back. 
With the proliferation of legislative attacks on reproductive rights, we contend with a daily battle for our bodily autonomy. It’s nice to see this struggle reflected in mainstream media…even amongst vampires, fairies and werewolves.

A Feminist Look at The Women of ‘Arrested Development’

Written by Lady T

The fourth season of Arrested Development is in production, and fans are blueing themselves in delight. Every time I turn around, entertainment news is buzzing with more information about the show’s upcoming revival. Right after we fans calm down over our initial excitement at seeing Jason Bateman’s tweet of the first set photos, we hear more good news from David Cross as he hints at a longer season than originally planned.

It’s a good time to be an Arrested Development fan. I pulled out my season 1 DVDs the other day and watched the first two discs, and suddenly felt inspired to write about a topic that I’ve put on the back burner for too long: the women of the Bluth-Funke clan.
Arrested Development has three main female characters, outnumbered 2 to 1 by the main male characters, but they each lend their unique comic touch to the show and help make the Bluth family the wonderfully dysfunctional family they are.
The first main female character is the matriarch of the Bluth family, Lucille Bluth, who is probably the worst human being on the program.
Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) and the wink that makes her son uncomfortable
Of all the dysfunctional, vain, shallow, spoiled members of the Bluth family, Lucille is the closest to being pure evil. Despite showing a glimpse of humanity here and there, she is ruthless, cruel, and enjoys playing favorites with her children. She constantly relies on Michael to get her out of any scrape the family gets into, mocks GOB and Lindsay and purposely reinforces their biggest insecurities, and clings to Buster to his own detriment. She’s a proud alcoholic and a racist – in fact, the only time she ever shows affection for her son GOB is when he makes a crack about “horny immigrants.” She’s mean and proud of it.
Classic line: “If that’s a veiled criticism of me, I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it.”
The feminist case for Lucille: I’ve seen too many family sitcoms where the mother and wife is portrayed as the most logical, sensitive, caring person, the glue holding the group together – endlessly patient except for the rare times when she’s not, the person who takes responsibility while the irresponsible man-children get to run around and have all the fun. Seeing Lucille reject that responsibility and use her influence for evil is so refreshing, and watching Jessica Walter tear into that role is a real treat. I rarely see an actress given the opportunity to enjoy playing an evil character to the extent that Walter does.
Lucille’s bad influence can be seen in her children, including her only daughter, Lindsay Funke.
Lindsay Funke (Portia de Rossi) in her infamous Slut shirt
Of the Bluth children, Lindsay is the clear third favorite of her mother’s, slightly preferable to GOB, but below Michael and far below Buster. Lucille’s constant negative comments about Lindsay’s weight and appearance have left her insecure and determined to be a better person than her mother, but she doesn’t always succeed. Even though Lindsay is more conscious about social issues than her parents are, she’s also the biggest hypocrite in the family next to Michael. She fights for causes that she doesn’t quite understand, protesting against leather while still eating meat, fighting against circumcision and annoying the Jewish Defense League, and refusing to be objectified for her looks while feeling insulted that prison inmates don’t sexually harass her.
Classic line: “You know, we’re not the only ones destroying trees. What about beavers? You call yourself an environmentalist, why don’t you go club a few beavers?”
The feminist case for Lindsay: Lindsay is probably the only character on the show that would think to call herself a feminist, though she’d probably get the definition wrong and contradict herself several times while standing up for feminist beliefs. When there are very few feminist characters on television to begin with, Lindsay’s clueless activism could be interpreted as problematic, but the show is clear that Lindsay’s hypocrisy and shallowness are the problem, not the feminist/environmentalist ideals themselves. The joke is on her, not on her beliefs. Lindsay is also frequently put in the role of criticizing Michael’s hypocrisy, showing that she has some intelligence even underneath the shallowness, making her a more well-rounded character.
Like her mother, Lindsay is often neglectful of her own daughter, Maeby Funke.

Maeby is confused, and not impressed.

Maeby has a complicated relationship with her mother. While Lindsay often seeks Lucille’s approval only to get smacked down and criticized, Maeby tries to get any kind of attention (mostly negative) from her mother only to be ignored. In fact, Maeby is often overlooked and ignored by most of the members of the Bluth-Funke family – except for her cousin George Michael, who’s in love with her. This neglect leaves Maeby free to do whatever she wants, whether it’s skipping school, breaking into offices to steal evidence for her grandfather, or bluffing her way into the position of movie executive while she’s still in high school.

Classic line: “Marry me!”
The feminist case for Maeby: She might be the most underappreciated character on the show (or she was, until all of the “Call Me Maeby” song parodies came out), but I’ve always enjoyed the way Maeby combines cleverness and ignorance. She has almost no math skills or understanding of numbers, thinking that six twenty-dollar bills add up to $200, but she’s a master at manipulation. For two seasons, she manages to convince an entire movie studio that she’s an adult, and when her real age is eventually exposed, she still manages to work that to her advantage, making a made-for-TV movie about her life and tricking her family members into signing release agreements. When watching her effortlessly trick the people around her, the audience gets the impression that the Bluth family would have solved their problems long ago if anyone had bothered to consult their youngest member.
The Bluth-Funke women make up some of the most entertaining, well-rounded characters on television. They provide just as much laughs as the male characters on Arrested Development and help to dispel the ridiculous claims that “women aren’t funny.” I can’t wait to see what’s next for Lucille, Lindsay, and Maeby in season four. I’m blueing myself in anticipation.

The Four Mothers of ‘Hanna’

                                                                 Saoirse Ronan as Hanna
This independent film came and went and while a few friends mentioned it, I didn’t seem to read too much about it, a shame because the film offers a lot for a feminist viewers (Bechdel win!) in it’s portrayal of female friendship, Hanna’s coming of age, a female action hero and an interesting Cate Blanchette as the villain. While the story revolves around a familiar plot of revenge and CIA subterfuge, the screenwriter, Seth Lochhead, always intended for the film to feature elements of fairy tales, specifically the darkness that is featured in any morality tale.
Hanna is certainly suited to a Grimm fairytale ambiance; Saoirse Ronan (Hanna) is cursed with special gifts and raised by her vengeance-fueled father in a faraway land. There is a wicked witch (Cate Blanchette) who cursed her with her special abilities and who must be destroyed, Hanna’s father (Eric Bana) must then push his daughter out into the world to fulfill her cursed destiny, during which time Hanna will ultimately grow up and discover the truth about her mother.
Specifically, it was the portrayal of parents, mothers especially, that I found really interesting in the film. There are three mothers portrayed, Hanna’s mother, Hanna’s grandmother, and the mother of Hanna’s friend (Olivia Williams), all of which are shown to be absent mothers to their daughters.
Motherhood is tricky in Hollywood; films about the subject usually involve a lot of tears and yelling and misunderstandings. It’s understandable, this confusion over the topic, since there is no definitive model of what a perfect mother would look like; however, there is usually one characteristic that we do all seem to seek in our perfect mother: her presence. I can name dozens of films that feature the absent mother: perhaps she is dead, or ill, or a drug addict, or even (gasp) the clichéd, power-hungry career woman.
In the case of Hanna, there are other forces that drive mothers and daughters apart; for Hanna’s mother, it’s her unwanted pregnancy and then later, her involvement in a top-secret government program (which is just a more complicated version of the guilty mother trying to give her kid a better life plot). Hanna’s mother ultimately fails in this task though; all her attempts to “make her baby special” (enter fairytale queen asking the witch for some special gifts for her kid) leads to Hanna’s cursed nature (abnormal abilities) and itinerant loneliness. Hanna is so lonely that she follows around a traveling family, amazed at their family life and obviously longing for the things she cannot understand.
Olivia Williams plays the ultimate bohemian mother; her fifteen year-old daughter is given leave to run around Europe on the back of a moped with a few boys she met at the pool. This sentence alone would probably give my mother a heart attack. Williams believes so wholly in the purity of independence that she allows her entitled daughter complete and total rein, even allowing her to engage in activities, which could be harmful. Yet Williams still considers herself to be a maternal protective figure in her choice to take in Hanna, believing her to need some parenting (of which she doesn’t seem to do much). In the end however, despite her daughters friendship with Hanna and her own desire to help her, William’s character closes off their family to Hanna, pushing her away yet again from another mother figure.
Hanna’s grandmother is a different kind of woman, solid and gentle, who longs to know where her granddaughter is and whether she is safe. She is so pure and innocent in her serene motherhood that she allows herself to be killed, rather than reveal any information about her granddaughter’s whereabouts. It’s a powerful scene of what I imagine we think of for ideal motherhood: self-sacrifice and love. 
                                                               Cate Blanchette as Marissa Weigler
Cate Blanchette, who plays the villain, in a way even struck me as a type of mother, which could be read in one of two ways. Either she’s no mother at all—the anti-mother if you will, the woman who is negative mother space in that she considers the progeny which she helped to create to be disposable tools. Or perhaps she is instead the great mother figure who tries so hard to control her children, to mold them into her image that she ultimately destroys them or must be destroyed.
Startlingly, in order for Hanna to thrive, all of her mothers must die, forcing her to experience extreme independence. After which she crosses over into her own womanhood, freed from the four women whose influence has controlled her life.
The intended morality of this dark fairy tale was not that mothers should be killed, however the intersection of independence, self-discovery and loneliness was pivotal for Hanna to grow up and discover her self.
This is only one facet of the film though; the film almost reads like a backpackers love song to Europe, exploring the little known and “off the track” places in much of Southern Europe. As a bonus, look for Tom Hollander (of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) as a brilliantly creepy, Eurotrash thugs, all whilst wearing absurdly small shorts.  

‘Yo Bitch’: The Complicated Feminism of Breaking Bad

The cast of Breaking Bad



Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Season five of Breaking Bad began with the unraveling of Gus Fring’s drug operation, which had served as a puppeteer for most of the cast during the preceding seasons. The second episode, “Madrigal,” is named for the German parent company of Fring’s Los Pollos Hermanos. While the business of fast food and methamphetamine is set firmly in a modern era–especially feeding off the addictions of desperate Americans–the term “madrigal” brings to mind centuries’ old songs, performed by multiple voices singing in harmony. We can expect Breaking Bad to be as artfully and tightly constructed as a traditional madrigal. This season, however, the voices won’t just be men’s. 
For the majority of Breaking Bad’s critically acclaimed run on AMC thus far, the female characters have mostly served as annoyances and scapegoats for the audience. The hatred for Skyler White, especially, is palpable and vicious. 
Her husband, Walt, the ultimate modern anti-hero, has had the audience in his corner from the moment he was diagnosed with cancer. It doesn’t matter how many young women he watches choke to death in their own vomit. It doesn’t matter how many children he tries to poison. Nobody on Facebook wants him dead.
In the last two episodes of season five, however, women have come to the forefront of making or breaking the plans of the great male trinity of Walt, Jesse, and Mike. The men in the series have done what they wanted (or felt they needed to do), and have been clawing for, and getting, power as they go. The women, however, have had to navigate the systems around them to go forward in their lives. Skyler frantically establishes control over her life, and Lydia (a Madrigal executive who was part of Fring’s team) eventually allows the trinity to continue making meth.
Lydia, one of Fring’s former associates, takes the reins in the new meth operation.
Skyler has clearly reached a breaking point in her new, seemingly settled life with her dangerous husband. She doesn’t want her children in the home in order to protect them. In episode four, she dutifully makes Walt a birthday dinner, and sits down to eat with him, Marie (who has received her share of “annoying wife” eye-rolls), and Hank. She is clearly detached and disoriented. Hank and Marie credit her infidelity–which Walt told them is at the root of all of their problems–with her despondence. She gets up and wanders towards the pool, slowly stepping in. She submerges herself, and when she doesn’t return to the surface, Walt saves her (although one might wonder if he would have without an audience). The image of a trapped, miserable wife drowning herself is nothing new–it’s the ultimate representation of suffocation. Because she certainly seems unstable, Hank and Marie agree to take the kids for the time being. She has won this battle.
Skyler attempts to drown, and succeeds in having her children removed from their home.
After floating in the watery depths with Skyler, the audience is jerked to an electric grid operated by Lydia. Two women, juxtaposing water and electricity, a deadly combination. 
In episode five, Lydia is the driving force behind the train heist that allows the men to procure the methylamine that is necessary for their product. Her power and knowledge from serving as an executive allows them to move their business forward. Lydia proves herself time and again (stemming from a desire to protect herself for her child), even though her nervous energy makes the audience clench. 
The series started with Walt’s crisis of masculinity, in terms of how he could “protect” his family from the cost of his chemotherapy and his paltry income. He was the wage-earner in the household, and had a son and a baby on the way. He began cooking meth to protect his family, and we loved him for it.
As Skyler has moved from a clueless wife, to an accomplice, to Walt’s antagonist, she has had the goal of protecting her family every step of the way. She orchestrated the money-laundering car wash, she has saved Walt, and she saved a former boss–and herself and Walt–from the IRS (for now, at least). And we hated her for it.
Skyler did everything in her power to keep the IRS away from her professional and personal business.
Lydia, who is willing to kill to keep herself and her history safe, is only working with the men in order to protect her child. When Mike had a gun to her head (after she’d put a hit out on him), she begged him to kill her and make sure her young daughter found her body so she wouldn’t think she’d abandoned her. Mike has a change of heart, or perhaps he simply realizes she’s the source of methylamine they need. Before she proves herself as helpful to their cause, Mike says, “I gave her a pass; this is what I get for being sexist.”She proves herself invaluable, in part by saving them from taking GPS-outfitted methylamine.
Lydia points out the GPS device to Jesse. The men suspect she planted it, but she ended up saving them.
These passing comments and the clear symbolism of female repression and underlying power make it clear that Breaking Bad isn’t simply a tour de force of masculinity. The negative reactions to the female characters reveal misogyny in the audience, not in the series. The fact that we are exhilarated by men plotting and killing, and are nervous or annoyed when the female characters attempt to navigate their lives tells us more about ourselves than the characters.
This season–the first half of the final season, which is set to air next summer–is poised to be decided by women. 
Walt’s hubris has completely removed him from being a loving father or anything but an abusive husband. His growing god complex probably can’t end well, and the audience is becoming more and more OK with that. Walt is a twenty-first century Macbeth.
Skyler, while beyond her breaking point, has gotten her way for now and the children are out of the house. The cards are in her hands more than Walt is comfortable with. She will keep risking herself for her children, and waiting. “For what?” Walt asks. “For the cancer to come back,” she says. 
Without Lydia, the men are without their “ocean” of methylamine. She–like the ocean–is a feminine life-giver, and is orchestrating her moves to protect her daughter (from “group homes” if she herself was sent to prison). She has control.
The imagery of Walt, Mike, and Jesse as a holy trinity is becoming clear. Jesse as a Christ-figure is more evident than ever, in his sacrificing his relationships and fighting passionately for nonviolence. And much like traditional religion, men are worshipped while women are in the trenches, cooking and cleaning–literally and figuratively. We celebrate the men, and push aside the women. It’s becoming evident that we’re not supposed to be doing that.
The “trinity”
At the beginning of the last episode, a young boy, riding alone in the desert, picks up a tarantula and gently puts it in a jar, screwing the lid tight. This clear symbol of entrapment echoes what Skyler says to Walt later in the episode: “I’m not your wife–I’m your hostage.” While her character has clearly broken bad and is now breaking down, she is still entrapped by her husband’s–and now her own–crimes. The tarantula must shed its old skin to grow, as must Skyler. 
That boy is killed at the end of the episode (as he’s witnessed the train heist), and one must wonder if his fate may represent Walt’s. The tarantula is still trapped after his captor is killed, just like Skyler, if her life is spared, will always be trapped by this life. Perhaps Walt, like Arachne, will be punished for his pride above all else. Or maybe Skyler, like Lady Macbeth, will keep unraveling out of fear and guilt, and that will lead to her downfall.  One could also draw a comparison between the young boy and Jesse, suffering while trying to keep captive the beasts of others’ actions.
The tarantella (tarantula), an Italian folk dance originated hundreds of years ago, is identified by “frenzied” dancing. The mythology suggests that the dance cured spider bites by allowing the dancer to sweat out the poison. It’s a safe expectation that audiences will be seeing much frenzied dancing as Breaking Bad culminates its five-season run, and only a few of those dancers will be left standing.

Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She teaches composition, literature, and journalism courses. While working on her MFA in creative nonfiction writing, Leigh was the editor of a small-town newspaper. In her academic and professional life, she’s always gravitated toward the history and literature of the oppressed, and wants to see their stories properly inserted into our cultural dialogue. She believes that critically analyzing popular media is an important step in opening those conversations. Leigh lives on a small farm with her husband, dogs, cat and flock of chickens.

Weekly Feminist Film Question: Who Are Your Favorite Amazing Female Characters in Film and TV?

Hey film lovers! It’s time for this week’s feminist film question. Who are your favorite amazing women in film and television? Here’s what you said:
Sidney Prescott (Jennifer Garner) in Alias
Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection
Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve
Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in The Amazing Spider-Man
Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) in Battlestar Galactica 

Violet (Jennifer Tilly) in Bound
Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) in Broadcast News
Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), Dr. Lanie Parish (Tamala Jones), Alexis Castle (Molly Quinn), Martha Rodgers (Susan Sullivan) in Castle
Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs) in Community
Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) in Easy A
Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hey) in Farscape
Zoe Washburne (Gina Torres) in Firefly and Serenity
Annie MacDuggan Paradis (Diane Keaton), Brenda Morelli Cushman (Bette Midler) and Elise Elliot Atchison (Goldie Hawn) in The First Wives Club
Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) in Fish Tank
Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace / Rooney Mara) in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / The Millennium Trilogy
Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur) in The Golden Girls
Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind
Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi) in The Good Wife
Dr. Christina Yang (Sandra Oh) and Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) in Grey’s Anatomy
Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in Harry Potter
Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) in Homeland
Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) and Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) in Mad Men
Alike (Adepero Oduye) in Pariah
Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in Parks and Recreation
Lizzie Bennett (Keira Knightley / Greer Garson) in Pride and Prejudice
San (Yuriko Ishida / Claire Danes) in Princess Mononoke
Alice (Milla Jovovich) in Resident Evil
Sailor Uranus (Megumi Ogata / Sarah Lafleur) in Sailor Moon
Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) in Scandal
Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy) in Six Feet Under

Chihiro Ogino (Daveigh Chase) in Spirited Away
Uhura (Nichelle Nichols / Zoe Saldana) in Star Trek

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton / Lena Headey) in The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley) and Pam (Kristen Bauer van Straten) in True Blood
Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) in V for Vendetta
Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) in Weeds
C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) in The West Wing
Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) in The Wizard of Oz

Xena (Lucy Lawless) in Xena: Warrior Princess
Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files
Who are your fave female film and TV characters? Tell us in the comments!
——
Each week we tweet a new question and then post your answers on our site each Friday! To participate, just follow us on Twitter at @BitchFlicks and use the Twitter hashtag #feministfilm.

‘Young Justice’ Grows Up

The Season 1 Team From Left to Right: Superboy, Zatanna, Kid Flash, Rocket, Robin, Miss Martian, Artemis, and Aqualad.
Written by Myrna Waldron.

SPOILER WARNING – No major plot twists are revealed, but there are minor spoilers.

It’s a sadly accepted fact that the superhero genre just isn’t women-friendly. The few times we have gotten a major motion picture centered around a female superhero (Supergirl, Catwoman, Elektra), the results have been abysmal to say the least…leading executives to conclude that superheroines aren’t cost-effective (of course). Films based in both the DC and the Marvel universes all star male superheroes, with heroines only appearing in ensemble groups like X-Men, Fantastic Four and The Avengers (curiously enough, all Marvel properties). It doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon, since all of the upcoming superhero blockbusters are sequels and reboots to already established male-centric franchises. I fully expect Batman to be rebooted AGAIN before we get a Wonder Woman film.

So it was with trepidation that I started watching Young Justice, an animated TV series centered around the teenage protégées of the members of the Justice League. Produced by Greg Weisman, who created cult classic animated series Gargoyles, I was encouraged by Weisman’s involvement in the show, as Gargoyles’ heroine Elisa Maza is a rare animated lead character who is not only fully competent and well developed, but is also a POC, (Person of Colour) as she is half African-American, half Native American. The series is definitely aimed at a teenage audience, as it has an overarching storyline (rather than self-contained episodes), moral ambiguities, and romance (naturally). Over the course of the first season (Young Justice is now currently in its second season) the teenage team gradually forms, with a combination of well-known and obscure characters, male and female, human and non-human, and white and racial minority. The main cast is as follows:
Green Arrow, Aquaman, Flash and the four protégées, Speedy, Robin, Aqualad and Kid Flash
Robin/Dick Grayson, Batman’s very well known protégée, who is talented with acrobatics, explosives, and computer hacking.
Aqualad/Kaldur ‘Ahm, Aquaman’s protégée, who is Atlantean, so he has the powers of water breathing and manipulation of electricity and water “blades.” Although non-human, he has the appearance of a young black man with blonde hair.
Kid Flash/Wally West, The Flash’s nephew, who, while not as fast as his uncle, has the same super-speed abilities.
Superboy/Conner Kent, a weeks-old clone using Superman’s DNA. He has most, but not all, of Superman’s powers, including super-strength and invulnerability. He lacks the heat-vision, x-ray vision and flying abilities, but can still, as they say, leap tall buildings with a single bound.
Miss Martian/M’gann (Megan) M’orzz, a green-skinned Martian immigrant who is the first female character introduced. Initially pretends to be the niece of Martian Manhunter to conceal a secret about her true Martian identity. She has by far the most powerful and varied abilities, including telepathy, mind-reading, super-strength, flight, shapeshifting, and most importantly, pilots a biological ship that the team uses to travel to their assignments.
Artemis/Artemis Crock, Green Arrow’s protégée posing as his niece. Predictably, she has the same abilities as Green Arrow, including incredible accuracy in archery, use of arrowheads with varying effects (explosive, etc), and general martial arts abilities. Although blonde, she is eventually revealed to be half Vietnamese.
Zatanna, the daughter of Zatara. She has highly varied magical abilities, which require a spell to be spoken in reverse order. Although powerful, her father still outclasses her.
Speedy/Red Arrow/Roy Harper, Green Arrow’s previous protégée. Went solo and renamed himself Red Arrow after still being treated like a sidekick during his introduction to the Justice League. Has the same abilities as Artemis, and only assists the team occasionally.
Rocket/Raquel Ervin, the apprentice of Icon. Gets her powers from her inertia belt, alien technology that grants her the ability to manipulate kinetic energy for flight, super-strength and as a force field. Like Icon, she is (or at least appears to be) African-American.
As a general whole, the equality between the sexes on the team, and the inclusion of several characters of colour, is encouraging. However, the series takes far too long to get to this point. I was incredibly dismayed to notice that for the first episode and 95% of the second episode (which premiered together as a “movie”) no female characters speak at all. Other than Aqualad, the first two episodes are, well, a white sausage-fest. Miss Martian is introduced at the very end of the second episode, and remains a token female for several episodes more. Black Canary, a Justice League member, is assigned to train the team in hand-to-hand combat, (which is a good idea, as it establishes a female hero in a position of leadership and competence) but only appears in episodes occasionally. Artemis is not introduced until the 6th episode, with Zatanna and Rocket joining in the 15th and 25th episodes respectively. Considering that the first season is only 26 episodes, that’s pretty sad.
The series also takes a very long time to pass the Bechdel Test. For those who are unfamiliar with this term, the Bechdel Test is used to help determine female representation in film & television. In order to pass, the media must A) Have two or more named female characters, B) Who talk to each other, C) About something other than a man. Unfortunately, while Miss Martian and Artemis talk to each other, they only talked about the male members of the team (and especially about Superboy, as there is a very minor love triangle surrounding him). 

Artemis: You embarrassed Superboy!
Megan: Didn’t hear him say that. Must you challenge everyone?
Artemis: Where I come from, that’s how you survive.

Cheshire and Artemis
The series does not pass the test until the 12th episode during a flashback scene depicting a younger Artemis begging her sister (antagonist/anti-hero Cheshire) not to run away from home in order to escape their abusive father. 

Cheshire: You should get out, too. I’d let you come with me, but you’d slow me down.
Artemis: Someone has to be here when Mom gets out.
Cheshire: Haven’t you learned anything? In this family, it’s every girl for herself.

Fortunately, after this barrier is finally broken, conversations between the female characters become a regular occurrence, including sequences where Megan and Artemis team up, and an entire subplot in one episode centred around Artemis and Zatanna having a “girl’s night out” and fighting crime together after Artemis discovers that Megan and Conner have become a couple.

Artemis: (seeing a crime scene with police presence) Whatever happened here is over. I want some action.
Zatanna: Then maybe you need to talk…about Conner and Megan..or whatever.
Artemis: What I need is something to beat up.

The female characters in the show are generally well developed, with Miss Martian getting the most attention and development. It’s a little unfortunate that a lot of the character development surrounding Megan and Artemis is about their romantic entanglements with Superboy and Kid Flash respectively, but that is not unusual for a teenage audience show. One thing I appreciated was that Megan and Conner become a couple fairly early on (the 11th episode) rather than spending an entire season with endless sexual tension (which, unfortunately, is what happens with Artemis and Wally). 
Speaking of which, I also have to say how much Kid Flash annoys me. His treatment of women is pretty deplorable; he constantly flirts with Megan despite her total lack of interest, and butts heads with Artemis due to his resentment at her replacing Speedy/Red Arrow. 
Red Arrow and Artemis argue while Green Arrow looks on

Artemis: (teasing Wally, who was preparing to go to the beach) Wall-man! Love the uniform. What exactly are your powers?
Wally: Uh, who’s this?
Artemis: Artemis. Your new teammate.
Wally: Kid Flash. Never heard of you.
Green Arrow: Um, she’s my new protegee.
Wally: W-what happened to your old one?
Roy: Well, for starters, he doesn’t go by “Speedy” anymore. Call me Red Arrow.
Green Arrow: Roy! You look —
Roy: Replaceable.
Green Arrow: It’s not like that, you told me you were going solo.
Roy: So why waste time finding a sub? Can she even USE that bow?
Artemis: Yes. She can.
Wally: WHO ARE YOU?
Artemis & Green Arrow: I’m/She’s his/my niece.
Dick: Another niece?
Kaldur: But she is not your replacement. We have always wanted you on the team. And we have no quota on archers.
Wally: And if we did, you KNOW who we’d pick.
Artemis: Whatever, Baywatch. I’m here to stay.

Miss Martian and Artemis in general are not treated as equals until later; Megan makes an honest mistake in one battle (she assumes that an antagonistic android with wind powers is their “den mother” Red Tornado, who has similar powers and implied he would be testing them) and is made to feel foolish for it, and Artemis is treated like an outsider due to the team’s loyalty to Roy. Both are distrusted for their general lack of practical battle experience, despite Superboy being theoretically just as inexperienced. He may be invulnerable, but he is literally months old and is extremely rash and sullen. His impulsive actions during the 5th episode, where he abandoned the team’s mission to fight an enemy on his own, jeopardized the team’s safety far more than Miss Martian’s mistake did earlier, and yet he does not have to endure nearly as much blame and condescension as she did.

Superboy: You tricked us into thinking Mr. Twister was Red Tornado!
Aqualad: She didn’t do it on purpose.
Robin: It was a rookie mistake. We shouldn’t listen.
Kid Flash: You are pretty inexperienced. Hit the showers. We’ll take it from here.
Superboy: Stay out of our way.
Miss Martian: I was just trying to be part of the team.
Aqualad: To be honest, I’m not sure we really have a team.

In terms of racial representation, although the Young Justice team is still primarily comprised of white heroes, having three major characters that are racial minorities is better representation than usual. The alien heroes, Miss Martian and Superboy, also serve as metaphorical representations of racial minorities through their, well, alienation from the team members native to Earth. Although it is tricky to show inclusiveness and diversity without looking like a cheesefest from the 90s, there is definite room for improvement – ideally, the ratio between white and minority characters should be at least 50-50. In addition to this, I was somewhat uncomfortable by Kaldur’s character arc; as the most mature member of the team he is a natural leader, but makes it clear he eventually plans to step down once Robin comes of age. It has been previously established that Robin is usually the leader of these teen teams, and he is by far the most well-known character, but it seemed problematic that the racial minority is acquiescing his position of leadership to a white male. 
Another area of representation that needs to be improved is inclusion of LGBTQ characters. So far, all of the romantic relationships depicted in the show have been heterosexual. While not every character has had their romantic interests explored, none have been established as LGBTQ either. If the formerly staid, heterocentric and whitewashed Archie Comics can reinvent itself to include permanent minority and gay characters, there’s no reason that a TV show that skews towards an older audience cannot do so. It would be even more exceptional and encouraging, albeit unlikely, if there was a trans* character introduced in the series, as it is unfortunately very uncommon to see trans* characters represented in the media.
The Season 2 Team, Clockwise From Left: Robin II, Wonder Girl, Lagoon Boy, Bumblebee, Batgirl, Miss Martian, Beast Boy, Superboy and Blue Beetle.
On the bright side, the writers and producers of Young Justice are definitely improving on some of the criticisms I have detailed here. As I mentioned, although the series starts off with far too much emphasis on white male characters, more female characters and more minorities are gradually added to the cast. The second season improves on this even further by introducing even more minority and female characters, including Batgirl, Beast Boy (who, although originally a white male, is technically no longer human), Blue Beetle (who is Hispanic), Bumblebee (who was DC’s first black female superhero), Lagoon Boy (another Atlantean like Aqualad, but less human in appearance), and Wonder Girl. Other additions to the cast in the second season include Tim Drake, who assumes the Robin title after Dick Grayson becomes Nightwing, and Impulse, The Flash’s grandson from the future.
The series also is notable for having a very mature storyline. As I mentioned earlier, the episodes are not self-contained, but all form one continuous plotline. Themes such as sacrifice, wanting to prove oneself, child abuse, and living in someone else’s shadow are prevalent, as well as moral ambiguities such as the implications of being a clone, accepting a parent who is a former convict, and whether antagonists have (human) rights and if the ends justify the means. There are also subtle representations of sexuality, as in the second season some characters are depicted cohabiting, and others having shown to have married and had a child. Previous animated series based on DC comics such as Justice League, Team Titans and Batman: The Animated Series, which all had mature, morally ambiguous stories, are an obvious influence here.
As a general whole, I was very pleasantly surprised with Young Justice once it got over its initial speed bumps. It’s still got a long way to go, but I can say fairly confidently that the representations of women and POC are head-and-shoulders above many other contemporary animated series. The second season indicates that the writers and producers have learned from their mistakes, and are becoming more inclusive as the series goes on.  In fact, one popular scene in the fifth episode of the second season points out how absurd it is that an all-female team is considered unusual.

Nightwing: …but Biyalia’s dictator, Queen Bee, is another story. Her ability to control the minds of men is why Alpha is an all-female squad for this mission.
Batgirl: Oh REALLY? And would you have felt the need to justify an all male squad for this mission?
Nightwing: Uh…ahem. There’s no right answer for that, is there? Uh…Nightwing out.
Batgirl: Queen Bee isn’t the only one who can mess with a man’s mind.

The series will be resuming the second season this fall. I look forward to seeing just how much better the series can get in terms of equal representation. Like its teenage protagonists, Young Justice itself is growing up.
All images gratefully borrowed from the Young Justice Wiki

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Women in Science Fiction Week: In Defence of Jo Grant, Beyond Screams and Miniskirts: The Women of Classic ‘Doctor Who’

Guest post written by Barrett Vann.
Let’s talk about Doctor Who. Let’s talk, in fact, about the Doctor’s companions. Back in the day of 2005, when Doctor Who came back to the airwaves, there were a lot of inevitable comparisons between this New Who and the Classic Who that ran from ‘63 to ‘89. People talked about the Doctor himself, about the plots, the monsters– and they talked about his companions. Rose Tyler was lauded as a new kind of companion– not so much an assistant as a partner, wearing baggy jeans and using her wits and determination, not one of those screaming, knicker-flashing ninnies from the old series back in the sexist sixties and seventies.
Well, wait just a bloody minute. Certainly the stereotype exists that companions back in the day were nothing but a bit of eye candy to entice the dads into watching a family show, and no-one is going to argue that feminism and gender issues haven’t advanced in fifty years. But were the women of Classic Who really nothing but a load of scantily-dressed damsels who screamed at the first sign of danger or imminent alien invasion?
They certainly were not.
I’m going to start with the Third Doctor, because I love him, and because two of his companions make a wonderful illustration for the variety of why and how the women of Classic Who were awesome. The Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-1974, had several companions, but it is the first two I want to compare here, Liz Shaw and Jo Grant.

Dr. Shaw, being serious
Jo Grant, being a nature child
Dr. Liz Shaw was a Cambridge-educated scientist, and expert on meteorites with at least two degrees, one in physics and one in medicine. Although young and fashionable (fashionable here meaning improbably short skirts and equally improbable heels), she has no romances whilst on the show, and grows impatient with being treated like the Doctor’s errand-girl. A career woman (and undeniably a woman not a girl), she’s part of UNIT before the Doctor showed up, and though they do develop a good relationship, he’s never the end-all be-all of what she’s doing with her life. Indeed, when she does eventually leave UNIT to return to her research, she cites as her reason that the Doctor did not need a capable assistant, what he really needed was “someone to pass him his test tubes and tell him how brilliant he was.” Amusingly, this rather meta observation does indeed reflect what was often the role of the Doctor’s companion, a role Liz often deviated from.
Her successor, Jo Grant, would seem initially to fit much more comfortably into that role. When she first hit the screen, Josephine Grant was young, 19 or 20, inexperienced, and only got the job at UNIT because she had an uncle in the ministry. She’s blonde, bubbly, and at first appears to be a bit of a ditz. She flirts with the UNIT men, she giggles, she admits (often) that she doesn’t understand things; when she’s frightened, she screams. In her first appearance, she accidentally wrecks an experiment the Doctor’s working on, and then is hypnotised into almost blowing up UNIT. In stark contrast to the very scientific Liz, and the Doctor himself, she’s a New Agey 70’s girl, open to the possibilities of magic and superstition, and occasionally the show mocks her for this. On one occasion, she actually ends up dressed in white and strapped to an altar as a virgin sacrifice. A more potent image of objectified, powerless femininity it would be hard to find. Unlike Liz, who leaves the show to further her career, Jo leaves because she’s fallen in love and wants to get married and study mushrooms in the Amazon.
So it might be easy to dismiss Jo as one of those useless female companions. A pretty bit of skirt to be an audience stand-in for the Doctor to explicate to. Except for the fact that Jo Grant is awesome. She’s a trained escapologist, she can fly a helicopter, she can abseil; in ‘The Mind of Evil’, she karates a prison riot leader out of his gun. On numerous occasions, when the Doctor’s got himself locked up somewhere, she comes to his rescue. Though in her first appearance, the Master hypnotises her, the Doctor teaches her how to resist it, so that in later confrontations, the Master is utterly frustrated by his inability to dominate her mind. In ‘The Time Monster’, when they run into the Master, again, and he finds himself unable to find anything to say, she mockingly suggests, ‘How about, “Curses, foiled again”?’ She’s also bold, capable of making hard decisions under pressure. Again in ‘Time Monster’, the Doctor threatens their mutual destruction by initiating a Time Ram, shoving his and the Master’s TARDISes into the same temporospatial coordinates; but when the Doctor hesitates, Jo’s the one who makes the final move to press the big red button.

Jo Grant is unimpressed by your gun, Master

Ultimately, though, even disregarding her badassery, Jo is a great character. It’s easy to dismiss her because she is, in many ways, very girly. And as anyone knows, girliness is too often considered one and the same as weakness; girly characters have to ‘make up’ for themselves by compensating with more masculine traits if they are to be considered strong. But are Jo’s girly qualities weak? Not at all. She’s good with people, certainly better than the Doctor; she’s emotional and empathetic– and if she screams when she’s frightened? I call that a perfectly reasonable response. She is sometimes gullible, ditzy, she did fail her science A-levels, but all that means is that she’s flawed, as all good characters should be.
One of the things about the women in Doctor Who that’s wonderful is that, like Liz and Jo, they’re strong in different ways. Another interesting dichotomy appears with the Second Doctor, when he travelled with Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot. Jamie– short for James Robert– is a Scottish Highlander from the mid 18th century, while Zoe is a scientist who lived on a space station in the 21st. Despite the fact that Jamie was snatched, literally, out of the middle of a battle, and is still quick with his knife, it is he, not Zoe, who spends the most time physically clinging to the Doctor in times of danger.

Jamie McCrimmon does not know the meaning of personal space
Here, while Zoe is the competent scientist, Jamie is the volatile, emotional party who depends on the Doctor. Being a Scot, there are, of course, also the obligatory jokes about which member of Team TARDIS is the one wearing the short skirt this time.
And the list continues. Travelling with the Doctor’ fourth incarnation, there’s Romana, a Time Lady. Cool, arrogant, sharp-tongued, the Doctor’s intellectual equal; as she’s quick to point out, she did graduate from the Academy with a triple first. Romana is also eager to see the universe, despite coming from a highly insular society. Later, Leela, a knife-wielding warrior, all instinct and impulse, who doesn’t care for being treated like the Doctor’s own personal Pygmalion project. With the Fifth Doctor, there’s Nyssa, an alien, a scientist and pacifist; with the Seventh Doctor, Ace McShane, an emotionally troubled teenager who puts on an unfailingly tough facade and likes blowing things up. Or beating up Daleks with baseball bats. Even Peri, the American who travelled with the Fifth and Sixth Doctor, and who fairly obviously was there to be little more than a lot of bouncing cleavage, is a botanist, clearly intelligent, and refuses to take down-talking from anyone, whether the rather bombastic and volatile Sixth Doctor, or the Master, whom she famously tells, ‘I’m Perpugilliam Brown, and I can shout just as loud as you can!’

Most of the Doctor’s companions, Old and New (if you don’t include non-televised media)
All these characters have strengths and weaknesses, but one thing they certainly are not is a homogeneous mass of legs, high heels, and helplessness. Another wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that the universe is a living one. In non-televised media (the Big Finish audioplays, and Doctor Who novels, which, incidentally, I wholeheartedly recommend), characters who were short-changed in canon, like Peri, are expanded, and others who were a little one-note, like Tegan and Ace, are allowed to develop. But even without that, there’s far more to the women of Doctor Who than might at first meet the eye, and there are no few who’d give you a proper talking to for saying otherwise.

Barrett Vann is an English and Linguistics student at the University of Minnesota. An unabashed geek, she’s into cosplay, literary analysis, high fantasy, and queer theory. After she graduates in December, she hopes to tackle grad school for playwrighting or screenwriting, and become one of those starving artist types. 

Women in Science Fiction Week: Thoughts on Strong Female Characters: Carolyn Fry from ‘Pitch Black’

This guest post written by Rhea Daniel previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on June, 13 2012 and  originally published at Short Stories, cross-posted with permission. 
So I saw The Avengers(2012). I’ll be honest, pure entertainment, skillful use of existing archetypes to create entertaining group dynamic, how can you not fall for that? 
However the whole ‘strong woman character’ attribution to Joss Whedon isn’t completely merited. I love his truly sympathetic essay about women on Whedonesque.com, and his feminist bent, however as ‘strong’ women go, I could never relate to his female characters.  
To me a character that deserves the reputation of a feminist heroine would be Carolyn Fry(Radha Mitchell) from David Twohy’s Pitch Black (2000), regardless of whether he intended it that way. We have time to watch her character grow through the movie, but she is a secondary character, Riddick is the famed anti-hero. To make an impression in spite of that is huge.

While Fry takes the reins of the group on the deserted planet by default, the one thing that drives her bravery is her terrible mistake — attempting to eject the passengers in cryogenic sleep to lighten the load of the spaceship before it crashed, stopped from doing so by the more conscientious navigator who died as a result, earning her a lot of resentment from the group, their mistrust eventually pushing her to fight for her leadership position more fiercely. I don’t particularly consider that a negative point, I see a person deeply ridden with guilt, antagonists willing her to fail, Riddick keenly watching her every move, reacting to her willingness to risk her safety for the sake of the others with amusement. I see a lot of a pressure on a person who is not particularly skilled to handle the task before her, but she pushes on in spite of that.

[…]

It’s not that I don’t still love Ripley/esque sci-fi warriors, I just find Carolyn Fry’s inner turmoil borne of the vicissitudes of external forces much more approachable, and strangely unsung. I like her more because she is unsure of herself, searching for firm ground to walk upon, because unlike Ripley, she doesn’t know where she stands, steeling her vulnerable frame against the next onslaught.

Continue reading –>


Rhea Daniel got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/.