On Television – Page 4

Exploring Bisexual Tension in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’

The possibility existed to use season 3 to explore the sexual identity of three very central female characters in this show. Buffy could have been questioning; Faith could have been explicitly bisexual rather than simply implying as much through very sexually-charged dialogue with Buffy; Willow could have started exploring her sexuality earlier to arrive at a more self-aware place, whether that was as a bisexual woman or a lesbian.

This guest post written by Audrey T. Carroll appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Nearly twenty years have passed since the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’re still having conversations about this TV show. The conversations range from the creepiest monsters to the most empowering moments of feminism the series has to offer. One of the staying discussions regarding Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been the queer identities of its characters. Certainly, the series invites this as it centralizes a same-sex romance in season 4 with Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara (Amber Benson). The couple wasn’t even allowed to kiss until the season 5 episode “The Body.” There’s no doubt that having a same-sex couple was trail-blazing for a television series to tackle.

That said, we now have the benefit of a retrospective view of both the series and the fifteen intervening years of LGBTQ rights progress since “The Body” first aired. Viewers can now easily recognize that bisexuality is never overtly represented in the series, and is in fact never even brought up as a possibility. But the groundwork for bisexual/queer interpretation is present. This especially comes into play when people bring up the idea of bi erasure and Willow. The possibility of bisexuality in season 3 in particular could have enhanced an already tense triangle of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Faith (Eliza Dushku), and Willow. In addition to the scrutiny of Willow’s sexuality in recent years, the obvious sexual tension between Buffy and Faith, especially originating from Faith, is never outright articulated in a consequential way. There’s, of course, the platonic friendship aspect to the tension of this triangle where Willow feels like she’s losing her best friend to Faith.

But these women present three angles on potential queerness that many viewers would have connected with:

1) Buffy must be “good” at all times, which includes being virginal (see: Angelus becoming a monster after they have sex). Potentially, this expectation of being the “good” slayer could include heteronormativity. But, in the comics, the slayer is willing to explore her sexuality.

2) Faith, in part, defines herself by using and ditching men as nothing more important than the sex they give her and the sense of power she feels with them.

3) At this stage in her life, Willow is in a committed relationship with Oz (Seth Green), but she clearly possessed an attraction to women that she had yet to discover.

While she’s otherwise dated, Buffy only had sexual experience with one person by season 3: Angel (David Boreanaz). In season 2, they had sex once, Angel turned into a soulless monster, and she eventually had to kill him. He’s resurrected, but they know they can’t fully be together. This sexual tension with Angel runs parallel to Buffy’s sexual tension with Faith. Buffy acknowledges, in season 3 and beyond, that her relationship with Faith can be perceived as more than simple friendship or fellow slayer-hood. In the season 3 episode “Revelations,” Buffy even draws attention to the fact that she “wouldn’t use the word ‘dating,’” for who she has plans with that night and, when Faith shows up as her partner for the evening, goes on to say, “Really, we’re just good friends.” In that same vein, Buffy claims in the season 7 episode “End of Days,” that “I am tired of defensiveness and — and weird mixed signals… I have Faith for that.”

In the comics, Buffy is, to quote creator Joss Whedon, “young and experimenting and… open-minded.” Even if this is a questioning moment of her sexuality, rather than an actual declaration of bisexuality, the possibility of this exploration earlier in the series could have ramped up the tension even further between Buffy and Faith and Willow, making the stakes all the more intense. It could also show that being the “good” slayer didn’t come with the implication of celibacy or heteronormativity as a requirement. If Buffy, the hero, the one who many girls aspired to be, could question her sexuality and explore her sexuality, that could create a connection to her, and a comfort for viewers who are inclined to do the same. It would, of course, have to be handled delicately, but if executed well it could have been a really revolutionary examination of identity and a fascinating aspect for the hero.

On Faith’s end, she infuses a lot of her words and actions with sexual innuendo. Often, her sexuality is tied to extracting from men what she wants — power, physical satisfaction, etc. The season 3 episode “Bad Girls” opens with Faith insisting that Buffy must have had sex with her friend Xander (Nicholas Brendon): “What are friends for? … It’s just, all this sweating nightly, side-by-side action, and you never put in for a little after-hours…” Faith insinuates that slaying together leads to sex, in the midst of her and Buffy slaying vampires together. One look at any number of Faith’s lines of dialogue with Buffy shows possibility for sexual interpretation (“Give us a kiss.”) if not outright mentions of sexual acts (“Bondage looks good on you, B.” or “So let’s have another go at it. See who lands on top.”). And this isn’t even to mention the very provocative dance scene the pair of slayers share at The Bronze during “Bad Girls.”

If Faith’s bisexuality were actively articulated, it could underscore an interesting layer to the eventual deterioration of their relationship. It seems that the path Buffy toys with in “Bad Girls” is not only one of (mostly harmless) rule-breaking. Buffy appears to be entertaining a very flirtatious and charged relationship with Faith. Faith is very lonely and wants acceptance and friendship. If you add to the pot that both of them were pursuing each other in a romantic or sexual sense, then Faith’s feeling of rejection (from the Scoobies in general, but Buffy in particular) feels like a more pointed one. In this framing, there’s even greater motivation for Faith to later hurt Buffy romantically by going after Angel and engaging in a twisted relationship with him merely to taunt the “good” slayer.

As mentioned already, Willow is often brought up in terms of bi erasure. If the possibility of her queerness is brought up in season 3, it lengthens the exploration of her sexuality and allows for her to deepen her understanding of it. By season 3, she’s only been sexually interested in Xander and her boyfriend Oz. If it were introduced that she may be sexually attracted to women, it would allow for a more fully fleshed-out representation of her sexuality over the course of the series. In fact, in the season 3 episode “Doppelgangland,” Willow thinks that the vampire alternate-dimension version of herself is “kinda gay.” Buffy assures her the vampire version of a person is nothing like the real person. Angel starts to correct her, but stops. All of this implies that, from at least season 3, Willow has her “kinda gay” self bubbling under the surface.

One of two things could’ve happened here: 1) Willow could have discovered she was bisexual, and maybe even been afraid this would cause Oz to reject her. That’s a fear that bisexual people in hetero relationships might be able to relate to. 2) Alternatively, Willow could have discovered that she was, in fact, a lesbian. This explicit exploration would have made how she self-identifies feel more genuine. Otherwise, her season five “Triangle” declaration of “gay now” feels like a tight clinging to a label rather than a genuine expression of her sexuality. If that exploration and determination happens earlier and more clearly, then the viewer can feel that conclusion is natural. It gives opportunity to address her sexuality in a more fully realized way.

One potential discrimination against bisexual people is the idea that they can’t be in a long-term committed relationship, rooted in the idea that they’ll pursue the opposite type of relationship than the one that they’re currently in (either same-sex or opposite-sex). If Willow is bisexual, and clearly so in the show, then the fight that she and Tara have in the season 5 episode “Tough Love” has more context. It’s possible, with a lesbian-identifying Willow, that Tara fears Willow may “turn straight” again. But a review of their history makes this implication during their fight feel strange. (Willow, after all, turned down Oz when he returned to town toward the end of season 4, actively choosing Tara over her first boyfriend.) But, with the idea that Willow is bisexual in mind, this fight with Tara could have tapped into an anxiety in the queer community — that bi people are more sexually deviant or less romantically loyal because they’re not monosexual.

This sexual identity questioning would also lend more tension to the whole Buffy/Faith/Willow triangle. In addition to the platonic threads there, Buffy and Faith already have an established, if not candidly articulated, sexual tension. Adding Willow’s sexual identity to the mix, she could have questioned whether her jealousy of the Buffy/Faith dynamic was platonic or romantic on her part. Buffy is her closest friend, except for maybe Xander, the latter of which she had a crush on for years and cheated on Oz with. Willow could reasonably fear that an attraction or possibility of attraction toward Buffy (akin to what she once felt for Xander) could jeopardize their friendship. On the other side, Willow might have been confused or unnerved if she thought she might be attracted to Faith, who was her opposite in many ways and with whom she had a very contentious relationship. She might not have thought about Buffy or Faith that way, but the questioning and anxieties there might have resonated with certain queer viewers and enhanced Willow’s aversion to Faith even further.

Using the context of future seasons, the possibility existed to use season 3 to explore the sexual identity of three very central female characters in this show. Buffy could have been questioning; Faith could have been explicitly bisexual rather than simply implying as much through very sexually-charged dialogue with Buffy; Willow could have started exploring her sexuality earlier to arrive at a more self-aware place, whether that was as a bisexual woman or a lesbian.

This all at least highlights an opportunity for future fiction. Allowing characters to be bisexual or to entertain the idea of not being heterosexual can add innovative layers to otherwise developed and intriguing characters. In the end, whether these characters are bisexual or simply open to questioning their heterosexuality, representation helps people feel less alone in their experiences, and ultimately guides people toward empathy.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg: Geek, Interrupted
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Humanization of the Superheroine
Are You Ready to Be Strong? Power and Sisterhood in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Audrey T. Carroll is a Queens, NYC native whose obsessions include kittens, coffee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Rooster Teeth community. Her poetry collection, Queen of Pentacles, is available from Choose the Sword Press. She can be found on her site as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Why Meredith and Cristina Redefined Sisterhood on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

Meredith and Cristina reach for each other consistently for 10 seasons, never allowing a male relationship to supersede their friendship. … Watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ depict such a powerful female friendship consistently inspires me to improve my own relationships with women, looking to Meredith and Cristina as a model for how sisterhood really should be.

This guest post written by Olivia Edmunds-Diez.

I am currently on my third rewatch of Grey’s Anatomy. It is a series to which I return when I need a good cry or when I need to feel inspired. With a dynamic and diverse cast that features a plethora of well-developed female characters, I am repeatedly drawn to Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh). This time around, I can’t help but notice that the theme of sisterhood follows them consistently. I shouldn’t be entirely surprised that creator Shonda Rhimes would feature a prominent female friendship, given the nature of the show. Although Meredith and Cristina are not related, they might as well be. Dubbed the “Twisted Sisters,” they spend 10 seasons side by side and grow tremendously not just as individuals, but as a pair. Meredith and Cristina’s friendship withstands motherhood, men, and their careers.

Meredith and Cristina earned the nickname “Twisted Sisters” for good reason. Particularly in the early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy’s, both women experience and recount plenty of hardship. They each know what it’s like to pursue work over family, to have mixed and mostly negative feelings about their mothers, and they both have a tendency to assume the worst. But where others might find fault, Meredith and Cristina bond. After all, Grey’s Anatomy epitomized the definition of “my person.” Meredith and Cristina reach for each other consistently for 10 seasons, never allowing a male relationship to supersede their friendship. They can relate to each other in ways that their friends and boyfriends (and eventual husbands) never fully understand, which to me screams sisterhood. I know I can communicate with my sisters and anticipate their feelings in ways that even our parents never quite understood. Sisters know that going to “the dark place,” as Meredith calls it, is sometimes necessary. But it is far less scary when you’re not going alone.

Meredith and Cristina spend early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy with mixed feelings about children and motherhood. Cristina is consistent in her refusal to become a mother and Meredith eventually embraces her fear of turning in to her mother in order to start a family of her own. But even though these two women ultimately take different approaches to motherhood, each enthusiastically supports the other in her choice. Cristina supports Meredith emotionally and physically when Meredith and her husband adopt Zola and then later give birth. Meredith supports Cristina through two pregnancies, with the latter concluding in an abortion. As each woman exercises her right to choose, they affirm each other’s choices and provide them the support that their male partners do not always understand how to give, just as a sister would. In the show’s tenth season, Meredith feels conflicted about her dual roles as surgeon and mother. As Meredith begins to lash out, Cristina is the one to explain that neither of them are “better” for their life choices. But their choices are different and that will continue to lead them down different roads, which ultimately results in Cristina leaving the world of Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital. And though it’s difficult for both Meredith and Cristina to separate, they can each understand that Cristina puts her career first and they are each supportive of these life choices, in ways that only sisters can be.

Meredith and Cristina also support each other through their relationships with men. Cristina is even the first to dub Derek Shepherd “McDreamy.” Whether dating men, marrying men, or having sex with men, Meredith and Cristina know not to judge each other’s choices. Meredith stands by Cristina throughout her almost first marriage and then again through her hasty actual first marriage. Cristina is sympathetic to Meredith’s on-again and off-again relationship with “McDreamy” and helped her emotionally be ready for their post-it marriage. A sister knows when to gossip about cute boys and when to hold her sister’s hand through a break-up; a sister knows when to encourage meeting someone new and when to suggest a quiet night at home.

Meredith and Cristina met as surgical interns and continue to work together as residents and attendings. They push each other, steal surgeries from each other, inspire ground-breaking research, and question each other’s judgments in operating rooms. For me, this is the most sibling-like that Meredith and Cristina can ever hope to be. Anyone with a sister knows that sisters know just how to push and prod your buttons. Sisters know when to tattle to mom or hold a grudge. But sisters also know how to celebrate your accomplishments, and that is exactly why Meredith and Cristina are so amazing. They are just as likely to be seen fighting over a case as they are “dancing it out” or drinking to celebrate.

Through Grey’s Anatomy, Shonda Rhimes teaches us that our sisters are not always related to us. Sometimes we marry into a family and discover a sister-in-law and sometimes we start a new job and find a new best friend. ‘Sister’ is so much more than a genetic link. ‘Sister’ is a job description, a kinship, a love, and a friend. Watching Grey’s Anatomy depict such a powerful female friendship consistently inspires me to improve my own relationships with women, looking to Meredith and Cristina as a model for how sisterhood really should be.

Olivia Edmunds-Diez is a Northwestern graduate, where she studied theatre and gender and sexuality studies. Her current favorite finds are Stranger Things, Big Little Lies, and the Waitress cast recording. You can follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Sisters in ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and the Slow March Toward Equality

The narratives surrounding the television series ‘Downton Abbey’ and the musical film ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ are about change and more specifically, how the daughters within both families represent the small, but important contributions that these characters make to modern feminist narratives. … In both ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ each trio of sisters takes a step in determining her own fate.

This guest post written by Adina Bernstein appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Progression, especially for women, is often a slow march toward equality. It’s easy for this generation of women to take for granted some of the rights we have: K-12 education, the opportunities for a fulfilling career, and — for cis straight people — the right to marry or not marry and choose a spouse. Although we still have a long way to go as we still contend with barriers to justice, such as abortion restrictions, wage inequality, police brutality, lack of healthcare for trans people, and only last year did the government pass nationwide marriage equality for same-sex couples.

While many modern women don’t think twice about some of these rights, there was a time in history, not too long ago, when these questions coming from women were unthinkable. Women were supposed to marry by a certain age, bring children (and by children, I mean boys) into the world, take care of the home, and ensure that their husband was happy; that was the extent of a woman’s life (except for poor women and women of color who worked outside the home).

Modern feminism often refers to the term “glass ceiling,” which represents the barriers and boundaries that have prohibited women (as well as people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities) from advancing in their careers the same as men have. It’s sometimes easier to see the larger cracks in the glass ceiling (represented by Hillary Clinton accepting the Democratic nomination for President, for example). But while we cheer on the larger victories, we must also pay attention to the smaller achievements as well.

In the early 20th century, some women may have been content to live out the lives pre-planned for them, fulfilling the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood. But some women did question if it was right or fair that a woman was forced to live a life with rigid parameters while her husband or brother was given freedoms that seemed out of reach.

The storylines and themes in the television series Downton Abbey and the musical film Fiddler on the Roof are about change and more specifically, how the daughters within both families represent the small, but important contributions that these characters make to modern feminist narratives.

Downton Abbey starts in 1912 in an aristocratic estate in Yorkshire, England. Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), the Earl of Grantham and his American-born wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), the Countess of Grantham, have three daughters: Mary, Edith, and Sybil. As they have no son, this poses a problem as the title and Robert’s fortune will not pass to his daughters. An unbreakable entail was set up years ago. Without a son, the title of the Earl of Grantham and the money tied to the estate must go to the closest male relative. Robert’s cousin and heir is dead, he is among those who did not survive the sinking of the Titanic. The closest living male relative is a distant cousin, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), a middle-class lawyer who is shocked to find out that he will one day be a member of the aristocracy.

Adapted from the Broadway musical, Fiddler on the Roof is set in 1905 during the Russian Empire. Tevye (Chaim Topol), a poor Jewish milkman and his wife, Golde (Norma Crane), have five daughters — three of whom push the narrative forward: Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava — and no sons. In that community at that time, young people did not choose their spouse. A match was arranged by the town matchmaker and if the marriage was agreeable to the parents (and the father, specifically), then the couple would wed. Tevye agreed to betroth his eldest daughter, Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris) to the town butcher, Lazar Wolf (Paul Mann). But there is a major hitch to the plan: Tzeitel wants to marry her childhood sweetheart, Motel (Leonard Frey), the tailor.

In both Downton Abbey and Fiddler on the Roof, each trio of sisters takes a step in determining her own fate. While the decisions these girls make may seem innocuous, these steps represent the larger cultural and societal fate that will impact future generations of women.

Mary/Tzeitel: At the outset of both stories, the eldest of the sisters know what their lives will look like: marry, have children, and generally live out the same lives that their mothers and grandmothers lived. Mary (Michelle Dockery) understands her status and value as an earl’s daughter, but as she’s stubborn and opinionated, she will not take the first man that comes her way. Mary initially rejects Matthew as an interloper when he is announced as her father’s new heir; it’s not the greatest start to what would become one of the great TV relationships of this era. But over time, Mary Crawley will prove herself to be much more capable than just being an earl’s daughter, as she eventually becomes a widow, a single mother, and a savvy agent of the estate.

Tzeitel is very much her mother’s daughter. Strong, outspoken, and very smart, she makes the world-shattering decision to ask her father for permission to marry Motel; not an easy feat in that community and time period. Her father balks, knowing that not only does her request break with tradition, but also fractures the verbal contract he already made with the much older butcher. Tevye finally agrees, putting his daughter’s happiness above the accepted practice of allowing the matchmaker to present a future spouse to the young person’s parents. Not only do Tzeitel’s actions pave the way for her sister’s choices, but they also encourage her future husband to achieve his goals.

Edith/Hodel: Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is the classic middle child and creator Julian Fellowes’ answer to Jan Brady. Caught in between her beautiful elder sister and her independent younger sister, Edith starts out the series as a mean spirited, angry young woman, especially towards Mary as the two share a rivalry. She begins to find her purpose at the beginning of season two during the changes that World War I brings. After Edith is dumped at the alter by her fiancé, she finds her purpose in life in unconventional ways that would have been unthinkable for the daughter of the aristocracy a generation before. She becomes a journalist and a magazine editor. She starts a romantic relationship with her editor Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards), becoming pregnant. After finding out that Michael is dead and after many emotional hurdles, she eventually makes the decision to openly raise her child. Edith finally finds marital happiness with Bertie Pelham (Harry Hadden-Paton), the newly titled Marquess of Hexham. Surprising everyone, including herself, Edith now ranks above her father and her entire family in terms of aristocratic rank and social standing.

While Hodel (Michele Marsh) is not writer Sholem Aleichem’s answer to Jan Brady, Hodel experiences a similarly unconventional story arc to Edith. Like her older sister, Hodel knows that she must marry. Her choice of husband in the beginning of the film, if she had one, is the rabbi’s son. But like any society, there is a social hierarchy. The daughter of a poor milkman is unlikely to marry the rabbi’s son. Hodel will marry Perchik (Michael Glaser), a traveling teacher with radical ideas that do not sit well with the denizens of Anatevka. When Perchik is arrested in Kiev at a protest and sent to Siberia, Hodel makes the unconventional decision to follow her fiancé to Sibera. Traveling alone to meet up with her fiancé, Hodel makes the brave choice to leave her family and everything she knows behind, not knowing when she will see them again.

Sybil/Chava: If one were to look the definition of rebellious in the dictionary, one might see a picture of Lady Sybil Crawley (Jessica Brown Findlay). The youngest of Robert and Cora’s three daughters, Sybil not only gets along with her two older sisters due to her kind spirit, but she’s also unafraid to step away from a traditional life. Whether she attends dinner wearing blue harem pants or her passionate political activism, she charts her own course. While attending a political rally, Sybil is knocked unconscious during a riot. Finally, she shocks her family with her marriage to Irish socialist chauffeur, Tom Branson (Allen Leech). Sybil dies in season three, leaving a grieving husband, a newborn daughter who would never know her mother, and a devastated family. In the end, Sybil’s legacy of love, independence, and acceptance that change was a good thing would forever leave a mark on her family.

If Tzeitel and Hodel made small steps outside of a traditional life, Chava (Neva Small) jumped across the boundary of tradition. Her marriage to Fyedka (Raymond Lovelock), a Christian boy, breaks all the rules. By marrying out of her faith and converting to her husband’s religion, she does not even think twice about asking for permission the way her elder sisters had; she just goes for it by eloping. Her parents and her father especially, are extremely upset and Tevye disowns her. In the end, Chava and Fyedka receive a reluctant blessing from Tevye as the Jewish denizens of Anatevka are forced out of their homes.

Looking back, the cracks in the glass ceiling that these women made may seem small and insignificant, but in the long run, the cracks are substantial. This generation, the great-granddaughters of the young women who lived in that era, owe a huge debt to our great-grandmothers who lived in the early 1900s. Without the bold and unconventional choices they made, we would not have the rights and opportunities that many of us take for granted today.

Adina Bernstein is a Brooklyn-born and raised writer who finds pleasure and release in writing. You can find her on Twitter @Writergurlny and on her blog at writergurlny.wordpress.com.

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and Assertive Sisters

Meredith doesn’t feel obligated to form relationships with Maggie and Amelia due to her sibling connections with them. She doesn’t deem it necessary to acquaint herself with Maggie simply because they share a mother, nor does she try to force a friendly relationship between herself and Amelia simply because she’s the sister of the man she loves. This means then, that when these close relationships are formed, they are all the more powerful. They are formed through choice, not responsibility.

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Sister relationships are, largely, ones that are developed early on in life. Relationships typically first generated in infancy, sisters’ interactions and feelings towards each other develop and change over time as events and transitions are experienced together. Through this, there is a huge wealth of nostalgia that can be drawn upon, further cultivating the closeness of the relationship.

For Grey’s Anatomy‘s Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), growing up as an only child, despite the existence of two half-sisters, has meant that any childhood memories, any experiences relating to her upbringing, belong solely to her. How then do the dynamics of her sibling relationships change when there is no long shared history to draw upon? No moment of growing up together? Arguably, this lack of collective ruminations means that her relationships with Maggie (Kelly McCreary), her half-sister, and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone), her sister-in-law, are both simultaneously weakened and intensified.

Much discussion has focused on Meredith’s relationships with women, and while her relationship with Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) has rightly been praised for its complexity and development, her relationship with other women has often been more questionable. Meredith readily admits that she is “dark and twisty” and as such, seemingly has issues in forming close relationships with others. She often feels forced to act defensively, and will distance herself from others when she feels it is necessary. Even Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) was not exempt from this forced separation when, after Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) dies, Meredith takes it upon herself to leave Seattle for a year with no warning or contact. Similarly, despite her ardent love for Derek, she readily admits to him that she can manage without him, and that she doesn’t need him. Meredith’s relationships with others are certainly complicated, and there is a clear sense that, regardless of any relationships formed, she ultimately feels that it is often essential to rely only upon herself.

Meredith is completely in control, even when it comes to her romantic feelings towards her husband, stating that she chooses to be with him and rather than not being able to exist without him, she simply doesn’t want to. It is this concept of choice that, for Meredith, is so important in forming relationships, particularly with Maggie and Amelia.

Take for example, the moment in which Meredith realizes that Maggie is her half-sister. Maggie is clearly hoping for a positive emotional reaction from Meredith; this is a moment that she has been building towards for a year, and she is hoping to reconnect with an element of her past that she has only recently discovered. Meredith, initially, reacts almost aggressively. Not knowing about Maggie’s existence she sees this admission as an attempt to intrude. For Meredith, her sense of self is absolute, and to question her memory of her mother and her own childhood is too much. Emotionally too, she is not initially ready for another sister after experiencing the loss of Lexie (Chyler Leigh), her other half-sister. Meredith is aware of the bond that can be created once she opens herself up to accepting a sibling and does not want to necessarily experience the pain that can incur again.

Contrast this initial reaction to her interactions with Maggie, once she has decided to accept her as a sister. Meredith readily opens up to Maggie, and despite trying to mask it with her macabre humor, she is talking about an issue that clearly resonates and has had a huge emotional impact upon her. Meredith, who left Seattle after her husband’s death and purposely siphoned herself away, allows Maggie to see her as vulnerable. While ostensibly Maggie’s character was arguably introduced to serve as an emotional foil for Meredith after Cristina’s departure, Maggie is not simply a replacement. Meredith’s relationships with both Cristina and Maggie are unique from one another, with each character serving a different purpose.

While Meredith’s relationship with Maggie has been largely positive, her relationship with Amelia has often been fraught. Meredith readily admits that she finds Amelia annoying, and struggles with her attitude. Through her connection with Meredith, Amelia expects to be treated as a sister in the more traditional sense, struggling with Meredith’s careful selection of those who she is close to. Amelia, at least initially, doesn’t understand that her relationship with Meredith does not come automatically. She feels that Meredith should be there for her and ensure that she informs her about important issues (such as Derek’s death) purely because of their status as sisters-in-law. Again, for any relationship to take place, Meredith has to make a conscious choice. She will not allow herself to feel forced or compelled, and she understands that the closest and most meaningful relationships develop organically.

Meredith’s struggle with Amelia largely stems from her devastation over Derek’s death. It is not until Dr. Webber (J. August Richards), a father figure for Meredith, reminds Meredith of the fact that she does not need to feel duty-bound to love, or even like Amelia, that she can finally allow herself to choose how she views Amelia. Importantly, Webber remains a father-like figure for Meredith, a role that Meredith has once again allowed, exhibiting her determination to select her family.

Notably, Meredith, Maggie, and Amelia are all strong, independent women. Each one a head of a medical department, they are intelligent and ambitious. Each woman has selected one another for their family. Take the scene in which the three help Meredith’s children prepare for the day ahead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAekRR89Q1Q”]

Each is in sync with one another, and clearly complement each other. They are all devoted to Meredith’s children, but are still characters in their own right. This scene is notable too for the inclusion of Meredith’s advice to her daughter, Zola, in which she tells her to never date a man “who can’t handle your power.” This moment, in which all three women are looking after a child, could have easily been seen as largely maternal and traditionally domestic. Meredith’s advice reinforces the power that these three women have, along with their right to control who they engage with.

Despite this, Meredith’s connection with Amelia takes long to come to fruition, and it is only once Meredith recognizes that Amelia’s attributes are similar to her own that she is able to reconcile her issues. She explicitly states to Amelia that she is her “family” and as such, will help her in any way that she needs. It is interesting that once again, Meredith reinforces this concept of choice. She does not tell Amelia what to do, instead declaring to her that she will fulfill any role required of her. Amelia needs this choice, and Meredith recognizes that, as an adult woman, Amelia should not be told what to do. She needs to own her own decision, exactly as Meredith has done for so long.

Arguably, this fractious relationship is more emotionally genuine than the typical representations of siblings on-screen. Sibling relationships are often tumultuous in reality, but are not always depicted like that in film or television. Too often, the sister or sisters become a quasi-mother figure, replacing an absent or non-existent mother. These three women have all grown up independent from one another and, as such, do not require one another to fulfill such a role. Instead, they are able to perceive one another as equals as they have to one another as adults. Unlike sibling relationships that have formed in childhood, in which one sibling may undertake a more dominant role, all three are entirely their own person.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Meredith Grey’s Woman Problem

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

Black Sisterhood in TV Sitcoms

While many Black sitcoms revolve around a family, it’s rare that specific interactions between sisters are depicted. While “sisterhood” here often refers to the strong bond between friends, biological sisterhood is sometimes forgotten. Sisters with strong relationships on television display some of the deepest and truest kinds of family love out there.

This guest post written by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Black sisterhood is an important staple in the lives of many Black women. From birthdays to breakups, it’s vital to have your girls with you in times of happiness and struggle. This relatable dynamic has been prevalent in pop culture for decades. From Living Single to Girlfriends, that deep, unshakable connection and trust between besties has been a common component in countless sitcoms. While many Black sitcoms revolve around a family, it’s rare that specific interactions between sisters are depicted. While “sisterhood” here often refers to the strong bond between friends, biological sisterhood is sometimes forgotten. Sisters with strong relationships on television display some of the deepest and truest kinds of family love out there.

Television shows that focus on a family can easily delve into the intricacies of how that family works; they may be at each other’s throats one episode and playing nice the next. The themes of family are made more complex when the relationship centers around siblings, and even more so between sisters. Between sharing secrets and stealing clothes, there’s just a special bond. Although they remain scarce, the examples of sisterhood in Black television are strong. Whether the sisters are distant or close-knit, the range in the relationships is broad.

In the pilot episode of Sister, Sister, when Tia (Tia Mowry) and Tamera (Tamera Mowry) first meet, both girls are dressed in the exact same clothes by happenstance; there was a sale at the mall and the twins unbeknownst to — and about — the other, grabs the same sweater and hat. When they first get to know each other, asking questions about the other, they discover they’re both in the 9th grade and that they both love The Twilight Zone, particularly the one with the monster on the airplane wing, and compare their situation to the show. Tamera asks if Tia also hates algebra too, but her twin says the opposite; she loves algebra and history.

Already we see the dichotomy of the twins here; although separated for 14 years, they still share distinct similarities, like the same taste in fashion and television series, but their differences are mainly academic, Tia being the “smart” twin while Tamera is the “fun” twin, a common TV trope regarding twins. They both love rollerblading and Beavis and Butthead (and have an affinity for saying the same thing at the same time). Tia has trouble talking to boys, while Tamera can’t seem to stop talking to them. They decide they’re probably not as alike as they first thought, then proceed to cross their legs at the same time and take a bite out of the lemon in their tea. The theme song says it clearly: they look alike, but they’re different.

While the first few seasons mainly focus on how two girls with the same face can be so different and so alike at the same time, the show always includes how much love they have for each other and their willingness to go to bat for the other. The season 1 episode, “The Pimple,” contains the classic twin switcharoo situation; Tia gets a pimple the day she has a date with a boy, so Tamera goes on the date instead, floundering through the entire thing since she and Tia don’t have many common interests. Earlier in the season, the girls make a pact not to go to the school dance if they both don’t have dates. When Tamera gets a date, she offers to make good on the pact since Tia will just be staying home.

If these examples seem juvenile, it’s because they are. Tia and Tamera were 14 years old at the beginning the series and their hijinks and adventures often include things typical of a young high school girl. Regardless of how silly their antics were, they showed each other a special kind of love that carried from their high school dating days to their more grown-up college days. TV shows that feature a family and don’t necessarily focus on sisters don’t often have many moments of strong sisterly bonding. The love is spread throughout the family, not centered around one particular relationship. However, when moments do spotlight the specific sisterly bond, it highlights a few key differences in how sisters interact with each other versus their other relatives.

In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, sisters Hilary (Karyn Parsons) and Ashley Banks (Tatyana Ali) couldn’t be less alike. They are each other’s antithesis; Hilary is the spoiled, selfish, materialistic, oldest sister while Ashley is the more responsible, slightly rebellious, younger sister. They don’t have very many scenes or plots that revolve around the two of them specifically, but their relationship is still shown to be positive. They’re not the closest of siblings, but they still care deeply for one another and look out for each other.

However, in season 6 episode 7, “Not with My Cousin You Don’t,” Ashley is in need of some womanly advice about her boyfriend Derek and with her mother gone on a trip, she looks to Hilary. These sisters rarely ever have serious moments, but Hilary jokes about her “big sister radar” and the two sit to chat. Ashley tells Hilary she thinks she’s in love. While Hilary is happy for her sister, she tells her that she doesn’t think long-distance relationships always work out. The conversation continues onto Ashley’s hesitations about having sex. She says that she’s scared, and Hilary says that it’s normal, everyone feels that way. Her most important piece of advice to her little sister is that “only you know when you’re ready or not.” Hilary tells Ashley that she’s independent, responsible, and smart, and while she doesn’t delve into the details of sex, she lets her sister know that regardless of her decision, she will always be there for her.

The scene includes several of Hilary’s typical humorous air-headed comments, but is ultimately played seriously; this is clearly a big deal to Ashley and her sister understands and gives sound advice. It’s a rare moment for Hilary, to have a serious scene. Other more serious tones are shown for sadder events: when she drops out of school or she reminisces about her deceased fiance. So it’s important that one of Hilary’s fleeting insightful moments is a tender one where she plays the wise older sister.

Ashley is consistently shown to have a strong bond with Will (Will Smith), so it’s telling that she comes to her sister instead of her cousin in this instance. Will even points this out after he accidentally overhears Ashley discussing it with her friends. It’s significant that even though Will is clearly Ashley’s confidante in the family, she felt more comfortable expressing her concerns about sex to her flighty sister Hillary, even though she doesn’t share that same kind of relationship with her. While they may not be as close, the topic of sex was easier to discuss with her sister and ultimately led to a healthy and positive discussion.

In the finale of the show, Ashley and Hilary are both moving to New York City for school and work respectively and the two decide to live together, and they’re both excited about the prospect. Although they were never shown to be incredibly close, it’s definitely an extension of the kind of relationship they’ve always had, and could be an insight into the possibility of them growing closer as they embark on this new stage in life together.

The Cosby Show is often heralded as one of the best Black sitcoms ever. (Although it now has a “tainted legacy”.) With four sisters in the Cosby household, there were many different representations of sisterhood. Since Sondra, Denise, Vanessa, and Rudy varied so much in age, it also presented a distinctive look into how sisters of different ages act with each other.

The personalities of the girls also tied into how they reacted to each other. Sondra (Sabrina Le Beauf), the eldest and most distinguished of the Cosby children; Denise (Lisa Bonet), the free-spirited and carefree teenager; Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe), the nosy and oft rebellious sister; and Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam), the precocious and adorable youngest sibling. From shoving shoulders over stolen sweaters to completely wrecking the kitchen ceiling, their fights varied as much as they did. The girls were all very different from each other and while their personalities sometimes clashed, at the end of the day, the Cosby siblings were all on the same side.

Despite their constant bickering and clear evidence that they were nothing alike, Denise and Vanessa always had each other’s back. In fact, they were even likened to child versions of Cosby matriarch Clair (Phylicia Rashad) and her younger sister. In the episode “Clair’s Sister,” Sara comes to visit, announcing to Clair that she’s engaged. Denise and Vanessa talk about how they want their weddings to be. Vanessa wants hers to be old-fashioned and incredibly fancy, dressed in lace from head to toe with 12 bridesmaids carrying her 20-foot-long train. Denise, ever the feminist, believes traditional weddings are a bit sexist, what with the father “giving” the bride away and the bride’s family having to pay. In stark opposition to Vanessa’s exuberant dream wedding, she says hers will be a small, intimate gathering in the living room where she’ll wear a regular dress and they’ll invite only their closest family and friends and serve sandwiches after the ceremony. Denise and Vanessa tease each other about their dreams a bit before Denise drives Vanessa to a friend’s house. Sara remarks how similar the girls are to her and Clair, and Clair says she remembers it well, not wanting to cart her little sister around town because she was too cool.

Both elder sisters are seen as the cooler ones with more laid-back ideas of the world while the younger sisters are more outgoing and energetic, excited about extravagant things like fancy weddings. It’s a cute comparison that alludes to that idea of sisters with completely divergent personalities being close and supportive of one another despite their differences.

Black sisters aren’t exactly a huge demographic in television. But the shows and episodes that explore that kind of sisterly bond are powerful and exhibits Black sisterhood in myriad ways. These relationships are hugely positive displays of the love within a family. They can be silly or serious, complicated or simple, and a million other things to describe the vast mosaic of different kinds of sisterly love that exist. Regardless of what adjective is attached to them, they’re always marvelous to see.

Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman is a freelance entertainment writer and digital content manager who is obsessed with an absurd amount of television shows. She is an advocate for accessible entertainment and sometimes develops websites. You can find her at @heycheyennehey on Twitter or cheyennecheyenne.com.

Girly Girl Vindicated: The Rise of Sansa Stark on ‘Game of Thrones’

Strength is more than fighting with swords, and no one has proved that more often than Sansa Stark. She’s gone from being a (honestly, pretty annoying) starry-eyed teen to a brave and complex heroine, capable of making tough decisions in the face of tremendous personal pain. Perhaps most importantly, she’s done it without attempting to remake herself in the image of men or by diminishing the strongly feminine traits that set her apart from many of Game of Thrones’ other women.

This guest post is written by Lacy Baugher. | Spoilers ahead.

Sansa Stark has never gotten a lot of love in the world of Westeros. (Or in the world of Game of Thrones fandom, if we’re being honest.)

Not only has she suffered arguably the most of any character on television in recent memory, she’s been constantly underestimated, belittled, and/or generally disregarded by almost every other character on the show – and half of the series’ fans, to boot. It’s kind of disturbing, actually. No matter what Sansa does, she can’t seem to win; her every decision has been questioned or mocked. She’s been repeatedly dismissed as everything from a vapid teen, to a mindless sycophant, to a selfish “bitch,” to someone hated and despised.

Why does no other female character on Game of Thrones get subjected to this kind of treatment – either inside or outside the narrative? After all, Sansa’s biggest offense appears to be merely that she’s a teenage girl. A girly teenage girl.

From the beginning of the series, Sansa’s character has been positioned as super feminine – she likes pretty dresses and stresses over her hairstyle; she loves lemon cakes; and she has dutifully memorized every basic rule of etiquette. Once upon a time, her biggest dream involved marrying a prince, having his children, and becoming a queen someday.

Sansa isn’t a tomboy, or a warrior, or an epic schemer, like so many of the other women who are cited as examples of Game of Thrones’ slate of “powerful female characters.” She’s basically everything an ideal young Westerosi noblewoman is supposed to be, which immediately sets her apart from characters like Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Arya Stark, Yara Greyjoy, and Brienne of Tarth — women who actively reject traditional female roles and attempt to carve out different kinds of lives for themselves. And who, incidentally, are all the sort of gender-defying heroines who are seen as exceptional precisely because they emulate stereotypically perceived masculine traits or they compete with the example of men. Sansa doesn’t do that, but this doesn’t mean that she is weak, nor does it mean that she possesses no agency within her own story.

This is why her ultimate transformation into the resident Stark family badass is so satisfying. Strength is more than fighting with swords, and no one has proved that more often than Sansa Stark. She’s gone from being a (honestly, pretty annoying) starry-eyed teen to a brave and complex heroine, capable of making tough decisions in the face of tremendous personal pain. Perhaps most importantly, she’s done it without attempting to remake herself in the image of men or by diminishing the strongly feminine traits that set her apart from many of Game of Thrones’ other women. She still retains and embodies all the traits the series used to punish her for – and that fans made fun of, back during the show’s first couple of seasons – only now, she’s learned to use those traits and skills to her advantage.

Sansa’s indomitable strength has been built on the things that many mock her for – her embrace of femininity, etiquette, and kindness doesn’t get a lot of respect in the world of Westeros. But, in her case, these are the reasons, along with her adaptability, why she has survived as long as she has and why she’s able to find some measure of success. Her small acts of courtesy, her conversational skills, and her understanding of the relationships between people – these are the qualities that many of the other major players in “the game of thrones” either scorn, ignore, or ridicule.

But Sansa has fought for her life with words and smiles and patience. While her battles may look very different from Arya’s or Daenerys’, her victories, though perhaps smaller in scale, are no less legitimate.

Sansa learned from a very young age that her job was to be polite, kind, and obedient – to follow the rules of etiquette laid out for all “good” young women. “Courtesy is a lady’s armor,” Septa Mordane told her, and it’s advice that Sansa constantly returns to, whether she’s trying to survive the Lannisters, manipulate the Vale lords, or get through a wedding (or two) to a man she doesn’t love.

She adapted to the revelation that almost everything she ever believed in turned out to be a lie; she’s literally been hit in the face with the fact that the chivalrous world order she idealized for so long doesn’t actually exist. However, that doesn’t make her Septa’s advice wrong, and Sansa’s survival is due to the fact that she learns to repurpose – and even to weaponize – the same skills she was once told would make her the most proper of ladies.

In the end, Sansa draws her strength from traits and skills that almost everyone else dismisses and thinks are useless – the way that almost everyone thinks she is useless. No one taught her survival skills, or swordsmanship; she was taught how to be a good conversationalist, sew pretty embroidery, and to make people feel at ease. The amazing thing about Sansa is that she manages to turn domestic tasks into survival skills.

Because of these lessons, Sansa is able to sit down across the table from monsters, smile blankly into the middle distance, and ask about the weather over her food as they insulted her family and threatened her life. (Although the addition of rape in Sansa’s storyline is troubling.) She never forgot a thank you or a curtsy. Her unfailing courtesy allowed her to shield and protect herself, so that she could survive and fight another day. (In the Stark family, sometimes just not getting yourself killed in the name of honor is probably the best you can do.)

Sansa’s perfectly polished facade even allows her to rebel against her oppressors to some extent – grand dame Lady Olenna Tyrell is the only other character on Game of Thrones who can rival Sansa for throwing shade at other people, all while masking her active wish for their death in concern or a compliment. Her rebellion is an internal one, for the most part, but her ability to strategically play the role that’s expected of her has assured her survival more than once.

Part of Sansa knowing her courtesies also means that she’s well read in the subject of other people – or at least in a set of specific people. The idea of courtly behavior in Westeros, especially for a girl like Sansa, means that she would have learned about all the other noble greater and lesser Houses – who the families were, where they were from, how they were all related, and their histories.

Sansa knows what it is – perhaps more than the younger version of herself could have ever dreamed – to be a Stark. Her name still commands the most respect out of anyone in the North. Familiar with the Northern families, she knows the debts they owed to her father, her grandfather, heck all the way back through the generations to Brandon the Builder, the first King in the North. Sansa understands the importance of the Stark name, the Stark history, and the Stark symbols; she is willing to harness the power in that imagery.

As it turns out, one of Sansa’s other frequently remarked upon, extremely feminine talents is sewing. As the seasons progress, she’s used clothing to either reimagine, hide, or reinforce her identity several times. At Castle Black, she makes herself a new dress, one emblazoned with a very obvious direwolf — not just because it’s pretty or because she certainly deserves a wardrobe upgrade after an entire season stuck in her drab Bolton prisoner attire. It’s because she understands that she is the face of this new rebellion, that she is the face of the Starks, and as such she will play her role both physically and visually. She must look the part. “The North Remembers,” “there must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” and all that, but it doesn’t hurt to give them a reminder.

Sansa even makes her half-brother Jon Snow a new greatcloak, one that looks exactly like the one that used to belong to beloved, martyred Stark patriarch Ned, because she knows that some Northerners will need the visual aid to remind them that Jon is a Stark too, and that their duty is to support Ned’s children. The wolves have come again to claim their own, that’s the message these clothes are meant to convey. They themselves are the banner the North is meant to rally behind. While Jon may be positioned as Northern army’s great leader, it’s Sansa who shows them the symbol they need.

This isn’t the first time that Sansa has displayed a stereotypically feminine gift for reading people and understanding how to present herself to match or take advantage of their expectations. As part of her upbringing, she was taught that part of the job of a proper noble lady was pleasing those around her, and anticipating their needs before they could think to ask for whatever it was they wanted. This has made her very observant, thoughtful, and aware of the relationships between the people around her – and she’s (finally!) learning how to use this information to her advantage.

Perhaps as a byproduct of the destruction of her own idealistic view of the world, Sansa has developed an uncanny understanding of people’s images of themselves and how they want others to see them, which is how she manages to survive living with both Joffrey and Ramsay for so long.

Her understanding also gives her the insight that Jon lacks about facing the Boltons in battle. She is intimately familiar with Ramsay’s sadistic streak, and she’s watched him enough to know how he wishes to present himself to his men, the other Northern lords, and even to the remaining Starks. Because of this, Sansa accurately guesses the general shape his plan will take – Rickon will likely be sacrificed because he’s a threat to Ramsay’s claim to legitimacy, some action will be taken to try and force Jon to make an emotional and/or rash decision in the heat of battle, etc.

In the end, the fact that the good guys emerge victorious in the Battle of the Bastards is almost entirely due to Sansa — a victory achieved despite the fact that Jon openly and repeatedly ignores his sister’s advice and commentary about how the encounter with Ramsay should go. Sansa, admittedly, doesn’t know anything about the actual art of fighting, and therefore can’t articulate how to incorporate her insights into the attack on Winterfell. As a result, Jon seems to dismiss her opinion outright – and then proceeds to ignore all her warnings entirely once Rickon is threatened (just as Sansa feared). Is her advice discounted because she’s a feminine woman unfamiliar with warfare? Would the same concerns have been taken more seriously coming from a character like Daenerys Targaryen or Yara Greyjoy? And why is Sansa’s tactical realization that Rickon was likely lost no matter what they did disparaged as heartless while Jon basically got a pass for almost getting everyone killed because he reacted emotionally? These seem like questions worth asking.

Unfortunately, Sansa is also not given space to explain her decision to keep Petyr Baelish’s presence a secret from her half-brother. Does she hold back the information about the possible arrival of the Vale knights because she wasn’t sure they were actually coming? Because she knew Jon would do something rash and their army would need extra support later in the battle? Did she want the chance to be a hero herself? Frustratingly, the show offers no insights on her thoughts at this key moment, and in some ways seems to imply that her decision was possibly due to the fact that she’s a flighty emotional girl who didn’t know any better. That such a reading would be a step backward for her character is both obvious and kind of gross, but it also isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, as uncomfortable as that may be, particularly given her treatment at season’s end.

The Season 6 finale sees Sansa’s contributions yet again diminished. During the half dozen speeches urging Jon (her half-brother/cousin/whatever he is) to take up Robb’s King in the North title, not one person (including Jon) acknowledges her; in fact, I’m not even sure that anyone even speaks to her during that scene. This happens despite the fact that she has a stronger claim to Winterfell as a trueborn Stark daughter and that her efforts were what really saved the lot of them in the battle with the Boltons. If it hadn’t been for Sansa’s timely arrival with Baelish’s (“Littlefinger”) army – whatever her motivations for holding them in reserve during the initial phase of fighting – all these Northerners praising Jon’s leadership ability would probably be dead.

That Lyanna Mormont, a young girl who herself leads her own House, first dismisses Sansa in favor of her brother is especially difficult to stomach, particularly in a season that has been so focused on seeing the women of the show claim their power. It’s probably not a mistake that Lady Lyanna has very little in common – in attitude or leadership style – with Sansa, and further perpetuates Game of Thrones’ general ideas of what “empowered women” are “supposed” to look like.

Perhaps the question we’re meant to ask is: What does real power for a woman like Sansa look like? What does it mean to be a feminine woman with real agency? Does that power make people uncomfortable? If so, why? It’s a conversation worth having, particularly given how far Sansa, specifically, has come.

Jon and Arya are perhaps the Starks that have displayed more flashy heroic traits, what with his resurrection and her assassin training. But that doesn’t discount the fact that Sansa too, is a survivor, and has been through just as much – probably more, if we’re honest – than any of her siblings. Sansa may not be a warrior, but she is a fighter and a leader, and she’s learned how to be better at being both of those things because of who she is, not in spite of it – girly dresses, lemon cakes, and all.

See also at Bitch Flicks: I’m Sick to Death of Talking About Rape Tropes in Fiction and all our other articles on ‘Game of Thrones.’

Recommended Reading: Don’t Hate on Sansa Stark’s Powerful Femininity via Bitch Media

Lacy Baugher is a digital media strategist by day, and a lover of all things geeky all of the time. Her major interests include British period dramas, complex ladies in superhero stories and the righteousness of Sansa Stark’s destiny as Queen of the North. Stop by and say hello on Twitter at @LacyMB.

In Rewatching ‘The X-Files,’ One Thing Is Clear: Mulder Is a Real Jerk

I realized something even worse: Agent Mulder is not a dreamboat. In fact, he’s an asshole. An asshole who spends most of the series mansplaining to Agent Scully. … Twenty years after ‘The X-Files’ debuted, it’s still rare to see a female character who’s as complicated and resilient as Scully — especially who works in science.

This guest post written by Sarah Mirk originally appeared at Bitch Media and appears here as part of our theme week on Women Scientists. It is cross-posted with permission.

When I was in junior high, I had one major extracurricular activity: watching The X-Files. I loved the spookiness and the drama surrounding FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). During the long summer months, I got X-Files consumption down to an efficient science. This was long before Netflix, back when binge-watching required serious devotion. Each day, I would walk down to the video store and rent a $2 VHS of two X-Files episodes. Then, at 9 p.m., I could watch another X-Files rerun on FX. That means I could squeeze three X-Files episodes into each 24-hour period. In my downtime, I read the unofficial X-Files guidebooks. It was a great summer.

Though I stopped watching the show as I got older (even 14-year-old me could clearly see when the show jumped the shark in season six), I remembered The X-Files as an excellent show. Agent Scully was a confident scientist. Agent Mulder was a dreamboat. I loved them both and thought they were the kind of odd couple that’s clearly made for each other. Then, last year, Fox announced that the original stars would be coming back to TV for an all new X-Files miniseries this January. I giddily started rewatching episodes.The X-Files is certainly a lot cheesier and low-budget than I remembered through the haze of nostalgia. But that’s not the biggest difference. Before finishing even one episode, I realized something even worse: Agent Mulder is not a dreamboat. In fact, he’s an asshole. An asshole who spends most of the series mansplaining to Agent Scully.

A lot of the fun of The X-Files, of course, comes from the sparky dynamic between Mulder and Scully. He’s a conspiracy theorist who instantly points to aliens, ghosts, or an errant chupacabra as the culprit for many of the crimes the pair investigate. Scully, meanwhile, is a forensic doctor whose criminal hypotheses stem from her extensive understanding of anatomy, chemistry, and biology. I’d always loved seeing the partners bounce contrasting ideas off each other. But watching the show as an adult who’s had two decades or so to reflect on everyday sexism, it’s suddenly obvious just how much bullshit Scully has to put up with. Not only does Mulder routinely dismiss her extremely practical ideas, but her knowledge often gets the side-eye from other men in the male-dominated world of law enforcement. In episode after episode, she has to defend her ideas to Mulder, her boss Agent Skinner, small-town cops, and a rotating cast of folks like the Lone Gunmen.

As a teen, I loved how Scully presented herself confidently and competently in the face of truly otherworldly chaos. She’s still a great character for that reason, but watching the show now, instead of rooting for Mulder and Scully as a duo, I find myself rooting for Scully alone. Twenty years after The X-Files debuted, it’s still rare to see a female character who’s as complicated and resilient as Scully — especially who works in science. Meanwhile, many of Mulder’s character traits that I once thought were endearing — his puppy dog attitude, his propensity toward throwing himself into the path of danger, his skepticism toward Scully’s ideas — now feel to me like standard egotistical behavior. As a teenager, I’d never met anyone like Mulder. Now, I’ve met many guys who act a lot like him — although their obsessions are usually not aliens, but Apple products, or politics, or “ethics in video game journalism.”

What stands out about The X-Files while watching it now, though, is how consistently Scully stands up for herself. There are a bunch of episodes where Scully’s no-bullshit attitude toward mansplaining shines. In season-three episode “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,’” Mulder runs around trying to prove that two upset teens were abducted by aliens while they were on a date. Scully calmly explains that it’s far more plausible that the two teenagers simply had sex and are struggling to deal with the emotional aftermath. This exchange between the agents is classic Scully:

SCULLY: We know that it wasn’t an alien who probed her. Mulder, you’ve got two kids having sex before they’re mature enough to know how to handle it.

MULDER: So you’re saying that all this is just a case of sexual trauma?

SCULLY: It’s a lot more plausible than an alien abduction.

That episode, like most episodes of The X-Files, ends in a gray area. Neither Mulder nor Scully’s ideas are completely vindicated, and it’s not clear to viewers whether the strange encounter was caused by sexual trauma, extraterrestrials, or shadowy government agents. Neither agent is wrong, but the script writers are careful to show neither is objectively right, either. Another fan-favorite Scully episode is season four’s “Never Again.” Gillian Anderson reportedly asked the show writers to put together a script specifically exploring Scully’s “dark side.” The result is this episode that begins with Scully asking Mulder why he has a desk — with a nameplate and all — while she doesn’t. Mulder says he always thought of a corner of the room as “her area” — an explanation Scully doesn’t buy. Then, Mulder heads out on vacation, telling Scully to follow up on a UFO sighting. She argues that it seems like a real waste of time, especially since the witness’s account of the incident sounds suspiciously like the plot of a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode.

MULDER: So you’re refusing an assignment based on the adventures of Moose and Squirrel?

SCULLY: “Refusing an assignment?” It makes it sound like you’re my superior.

MULDER: Do what you want. Don’t go to Philadelphia, but let me remind you that I worked my ass off to get the files reopened. You were just assigned. This work is my life.

SCULLY: And it’s become mine.

MULDER: You don’t want it to be.

SCULLY: This isn’t about you. Or maybe it is, indirectly. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost sight of myself, Mulder. It’s hard to see, let alone find in the darkness of covert locations. I mean, I wish I could say that we were going in circles, but we’re not. We’re going in an endless line — two steps forwards and three steps back. While my own life is… standing still.

With Mulder on vacation, Scully winds up going on a date with a man, who (of course) turns out to be driven mad by a tattoo laced with poison ink. Deadly shenanigans ensue and Scully lands in the hospital. When she returns to work, rather bruised, Mulder asks, “All this, because I’ve … because I didn’t get you a desk?” Scully doesn’t give into his guilt trip. The episode ends with the line, “Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.” Television doesn’t get more direct than that.

The “Mulder is an asshole” trend isn’t just something that bugs me — a lot of fans feel the same way. This fall, I was on an X-Files panel at GeekGirlCon in Seattle with five other female fans. In front of a conference room full of several dozen serious X-Files devotees, I was a little nervous to voice my negative feelings about Mulder. But panelist and X-Files burlesque producer (yes, that’s a thing) Jo Jo Stiletto beat me to it. “Mulder is a real dick,” she said, to applause. That quickly became the theme of the panel: recounting the many ways that Mulder shuts down Scully, dismisses her intelligence, and generally belittles her during the series. Every fan had their own story of coming to realize that Mulder is a dick. Instead of reveling in the will-they-or-won’t-they romance between Mulder and Scully, as adults, we all agreed that Mulder feels a lot like a manipulative ex-boyfriend all women are better off without.

When the new miniseries airs this month on Fox, I’ll be watching. But while the show will always hold a special place in my heart, what will keep me tuned into the reboot isn’t Mulder and Scully. It’s Scully, holding her own. Mulder and his eye-rolling can go get permanently abducted for all I care.

Sarah Mirk is Bitch Media‘s online editor. She’s interested in gender, history, comics, and talking to strangers. You can follow her on Twitter.

If She Can See It, She Can Be It: Women of STEM on Television

It is important to have women represented in fictional media as scientists from across the spectrum of sciences… By making women more visible in science settings on television – in both fictional and factual programming – the inspiring images of science that can and are being produced can be associated with women who are not only represented as smart individuals but as part of a network of diverse and complex professional women.

This guest post written by Amy C. Chambers originally appeared at The Science and Entertainment Laboratory and an edited version appears here as part of our theme week on Women Scientists. It is cross-posted with permission.

I am a self-proclaimed Orphan Black geek monkey and I am obsessed with Clone Club (and their marvelous dance parties). When I first started to explore the representation of women in science in entertainment media I wrote a blog post on the subject to help organize my thoughts on how and where women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were represented. I got a great response from people who read the article and received lots of tweets about the mysterious Cosima Niehaus. After a quick google I binge-watched the first two seasons of Orphan Black (an almost entirely female-led science-based series) and excitedly watching seasons three on four on TV.

I have now discovered that Cosima is an evolutionary biologist (the geek-monkey) who is one of the show’s main characters; part of a cast of clones (#CloneClub) all played by the mesmerizing Tatiana Maslany. Cosima is named after Orphan Black’s own science advisor Cosima Herter (one of the few women acting as a science consultant in mainstream film/TV) who is a science writer interested “in the ethics, philosophy, and history of biology, especially cloning, evolutionary theory, and genetic engineering.” In Orphan Black, Cosima is both an active scientist who helps to drive the plot and explain much of the series’ scientific complexities, and a science experiment as part of a convoluted conspiracy plot surrounding the Dyad Institute, the Neolutionists, the Proletheans, and Topside, amongst many others. It is a narratively dense series, but at its core it is fixated upon science and women — something that I discovered was severely lacking in the mother / daughter / lover women I found on the silver screen.

I am restricting my examples to TV series released after 2000 and I chose to split discussions of film and television because there is a disparity between the number of women scientists in mainstream Hollywood movies, and the volume of women present in television shows. Some of this is due to the fact that there are far more TV programs made than films, and that the production process is very different with the option for pilot-episodes (to test out potentially unprofitable female characters…), early cancellations (in the U.S. context), and long-running shows such as FOX’s Bones that provide the opportunity for existing female characters to be developed and for new ones to be introduced.

Bones is led by Dr Temperance “Bones” Brennan with a comparatively substantial list of female co-stars in scientific professions (in the main cast the gender split is 50:50). The women are not outnumbered, the women have conversations about things other than men, and they are not ‘damsels in distress’ – they fight their own battles and wield their own firearms. The series passes both the Smurfette test and the Bechdel test. However, Bones does not comment on the very real issue of sexism in the hard sciences but it, in part, helps to address the problem by making women, from a variety of different backgrounds, scientific role models for its viewers.

Women make up between 60-65% of the US TV viewership but, as noted in a 2013 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, only 38.9% of characters in prime-time programs are women, and only 22% of prime-time programs feature women in half of all speaking parts. Science-based television series seem to fair better with women taking some significant roles within their respective shows. There are some brilliant examples of women in STEM on the small screen for example: Astrid Farnsworth (Jasica Nicole) and Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) from Fringe; Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) from NCIS; Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) from Masters of Sex; Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox), Clarissa Mullery (Liz Carr), and Sam Ryan (Amanda Burton) from the UK’s Silent Witness; Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), and Daisy ‘Skye’ Johnson (Chloe Bennet) from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; Alison Carter (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) from Eureka; Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) – from Stargate: SG1, Stargate Universe, and Stargate: Atlantis. Where I struggled to build a long post-2000 list of women of science in cinema in a couple of hours I managed to amass a list of more than fifty women of STEM on mainstream shows with a mix of science fiction and science-based/medical dramas. I also included mechanical engineers Kaylee Frye (Jewel Staite) from Firefly, The 100’s Raven Reyes (Lindsey Morgan), and Scorpion’s Happy Quinn (Jadyn Wong). Yet despite these good examples, women still pale in comparison to their male counterparts who are often the lead characters.

“Both young girls and boys should see female decision-makers, political leaders, managers, and scientists as the norm, not the exception. By increasing the number and diversity of female leaders and role models on screen, content creators may affect the ambitions and career aspirations of girls and young women domestically and internationally. As Geena Davis frequently states: ‘If she can see it, she can be it.’” —Gender Roles & Occupations: A Look at Character Attributes and Job-Related Aspirations in Film and Television

It is important to have women represented in fictional media as scientists from across the spectrum of sciences, not just biological and medical sciences. Although I did not struggle to create a post-2000 TV list of women with science-based professions, I did find that a higher percent of the women I found were working in the biosciences including all the female medics on House, Body of Proof, CSI, Rizzoli & Isles, The Strain. Finding women represented in the hard sciences was more of a challenge – in The Big Bang Theory for example, of the female scientists that are series regulars Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) and Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch), one is a neurologist and the other is microbiologist. They are repeatedly shown to be academically brilliant and their scientific prowess adds to their characterization but they are both bioscientists – the hard physical sciences are almost entirely left to the men. Earlier in the series, there was the wonderful Leslie Winkle (Sara Gilbert) who was a physicist who was able to hold her own and often exceed the achievements of the boys – but she was not retained as a series regular.

I had to search through several of the The Big Bang Theory seasons to find a second example of a woman outside of the biosciences and medicine: Elizabeth Plimpton (Judy Greer), cosmological physicist, appears in one episode – “The Plimpton Stimulation” in season 3 – but her academic prowess is soon undermined by the character’s voracious sexual appetite. Other women include Leonard’s (Johnny Galecki) mother, psychologist Beverly Hofstadter (Christine Baranski); Leonard’s ex, Stephanie Barnett, MD (Sara Rue); and Raj’s (Kunal Nayyar) girlfriend, dermatologist Emily Sweeney (Laura Spencer, who also plays intern Jessica Warren on Bones). Rashel Li and Lindy A. Orthia conducted a study on viewer responses to scientific ability and gender balance/imbalance on The Big Bang Theory. Many participants were irritated by the gender-based stereotypes of men in physics and women in biology but conceded that all scientist characters were shown to be equally scientifically capable despite their restriction to particular fields.

This made me think about how the female characters are incorporated into The Big Bang Theory. When the sitcom began in 2007 there was only Penny (she had no last name until recently, when she married one of the male scientists and took his name, don’t even get me started on that) a supposedly ditzy actress/food server played by Kaley Cuoco to provide gender “balance.” But over its nine seasons, the show has evolved from being a tired trope of “nerdy male scientists can’t get a dates” to a show with developed female characters who are more than romantic accessories or weak comedic stereotypes. The show has been praised for its realistic representation of bench science, but up until its fourth season it failed to show professional women in STEM settings unless they were administrators, assistants, or students. Amy and Bernadette start off as the oddball lady-Sheldon and the squeaky-voiced vertically-challenged blonde – but these initially problematic characters develop to show the real-world issues faced by professional women who struggle with not being taken seriously because they are women who don’t reject their femininity. They are not the stereotypical representations of STEM women as described by Jocelyn Steinke in her study of female scientist representation in movies 1991-2001, and they are not simply sci-candy brought in to solve problems for the male leads. The women of The Big Bang Theory are now given screen-time without the male characters and Amy, Bernadette, and Penny (who left waiting tables to forge a career in pharmaceutical sales) have their own lives to discuss beyond their romantic entanglements. The show still needs to work on its representation of gender (and race) in STEM, but it remains one of the most realistic representations of real science on television, and may inspire some women to pursue a career in the sciences.

“In recent years the so called ‘fourth wave’ activists and organisations have been making great strides in bringing feminism back up the social and political agenda. Groups like the Everyday Sexism Project, No More Page Three, the Women of the World festival (WOW) and the Women on Bank Notes campaign have all contributed to widening understanding of our social inequalities. This is the wider context within which we can begin to address the inequalities in STEM.

We call on TV and other media to use the gender lens when casting new characters in widely viewed programmes, commissioning new series that challenge gender stereotypes, and to both train and use female experts.” – Science Grrl, THROUGH BOTH EYES: The case for a gender lens in STEM

Media producers need to think more actively about incorporating female characters into their science-based TV series; they should, as recommended by a report produced by Science Grrl (quoted above), use a gender lens when commissioning new shows. They need to work towards producing shows that “challenge gender stereotypes” – women should not be an afterthought or a late addition; they should be part of the initial design of the program. A huge majority of science-based television programs and films have science consultants who advise on science content and science-based storylines to make them more believable and entertaining. It is important to have scientists involved in a production at an early stage as collaborators to allow for a more organic incorporation of scientific principles and more accurate representations of the systems of science (laboratories, experiments, results). This should also be applied to the incorporation of women in STEM – as part of my developing research I want to analyze the incorporation of women into science-based shows and ask how improving the involvement of women (as science advisors, writers, directors, etc.) could genuinely improve and diversify the representation of scientists.

The film and television industry is still an extremely male dominated field. “In 2013-14, women comprised 27% of all individuals working as creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography,” according to “Boxed In Report,” commissioned by Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. For me, the most important media recommendation made by the Science Grrl report is the idea that women need to be incorporated into the process early and that media producers should even be involved in training women scientists to be active contributors. Science consultants are an increasingly important part of producing exciting and entertaining science-based TV and film. Dr. Kevin R. Grazier, the science advisor for Battlestar Galactica, Defiance, Falling Skies, and the movie Gravity spoke at an event I was involved with about his involvement in the these projects from the beginning – science was a core element of their creation. Science-based narratives are informed by the science-based worlds created by both the creative teams and their science advisors.

The experience of female scientists is an important thing to be presenting on-screen not only for young women but also for young men who can have the idea of seeing women of STEM on their screens normalized. By involving women in STEM as advisors and collaborators, the representation of women can move from being token figures and anomalies to being regular and entirely expected leading figures in science-based narratives on either the big or the small screen. By making women more visible in science settings on television – in both fictional and factual programming – the inspiring images of science that can and are being produced can be associated with women who are not only represented as smart individuals but as part of a network of diverse and complex professional women.

Women don’t need to be told that science can be girly, and they don’t need to be given pretty role models to show them the way into science; but they do need to be shown that science is for everyone.

Amy C. Chambers is a postdoctoral researcher at Newcastle University in the UK researching the intersection of science and entertainment media. Her newest project explores the representation and the projected futures of women within scientific cultures in science fiction. She blogs about her research and interests at the Science and Entertainment Laboratory and The Unsettling Scientific Stories Project, and you can follow her on Twitter at @AmyCChambers.

Dana Scully: Femininity, Otherness, and the Ultimate X-File

Instead of investigating the science, Scully actually becomes the science. …There seems to be a substantial link between Scully’s gender and the tests and science that is inflicted upon her. Is this her punishment for daring to be a woman in a male-dominated sphere? … There’s also something pretty grim in Scully’s abduction/missing ovum storyline that feels very reminiscent of higher powers meddling and making decisions about women’s reproductive rights.

This guest post written by Becky Kukla appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is my ultimate icon. She’s intelligent, cool-headed, and super sassy. She also has the best job in the world which usually involves traipsing miserably after her alien-obsessed FBI partner Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) in a bid to prove the existence of extraterrestrials to the United States government. Yeah… and I thought my job sounded stressful…

The X Files was, and to some extent still is, a cultural phenomenon. Countless articles and academic papers (including part of my dissertation) have been written about the cult aspect of the show, the allegories to our real world society, and the inversion of masculine/feminine stereotypes within the main characters (Mulder is an emotional believer, Scully is a rational skeptic). The X-Files often does hold a mirror up to the things we often glaze over within society, and its portrayal of The Syndicate (a group who effectively control everything in the world) as a bunch of old, white men is particularly relevant, even twenty years later. While The X-Files was busy being experimental in its monsters of the week and its representation of our society, the show tended to be incredibly formulaic in terms of the dynamic between the two main characters. No, I am not talking about that insatiable chemistry that still has us all guessing today, but the typical narrative structure of each episode. Mulder discovers a weird case with potential supernatural links, Scully tells him that he is mad and looks for scientific explanation, Mulder proves that his explanation is the correct one, all the evidence is destroyed (somehow) and Scully still finds that she can’t quite bring herself to ignore ‘the science.’

It makes for nostalgic viewing (we are never in any doubt about what will transpire throughout the episode), but it also feels like Scully gets the short straw a lot. Dana Scully is a qualified medical professional (“I’m a medical doctor!”), yet her years of training and experience fall flat against the little green men. She is exceptionally clever, but she is way out of her depth with these supernatural cases. Aside from doing autopsies, Mulder almost constantly has the upper hand throughout each case. That is until the events that transpire at the beginning of Season 2. Instead of investigating the science, Scully actually becomes the science.

At the beginning of Season 2, Scully is abducted — in both the physical and supernatural sense of the word — and it is later revealed that certain tests were performed on her. She returns safe and sound (okay, safe being a pretty optimistic word) and has no memory of these events, until about a season later. Scully realizes that a metal chip has been placed in the back of her neck (which she determines must have been placed there at the time of her abduction) and she ends up meeting with a group of women who have all had chips removed. Subsequently, all of the women she meets have succumbed to some sort of cancer. A skeptic at best, Scully brushes away these fears until it is revealed in “Memento Mori” that Scully has cancer, and it’s pretty bad.

I wish I could tell you that Scully’s life gets better from here on, but after her survival from cancer, she goes on to discover that during her abduction, her ova were harvested and have since been used to produce bizarre alien clone children — one of whom she has the pleasure of meeting in “A Christmas Carol” and “Emily.” But Scully’s road is never easy, and naturally, Emily dies.

To sum it up, Scully has a pretty terrible time and there seems to be a substantial link between Scully’s gender and the tests and science that is inflicted upon her. Is this her punishment for daring to be a woman in a male-dominated sphere? Scully is already “othered” by her presence in a patriarchal world as a woman — she frequently experiences sexist comments from other characters, exemplified by another female colleague in Soft Light. Scully becomes synonymous with the supernatural elements which Mulder is so fixated on, her female physicality means that she is the perfect candidate. Her ova were removed, cells which men do not possess, so it’s not a leap to say that Scully was abducted because she was a woman.

We are probably all aware of the existing link between ‘the mother,’ ‘the feminine’ and ‘the monstrous’ in science fiction (thanks Barbara Creed!). Motherhood and the reproductive process is fixated upon time and time again in the sci-fi world. Scully becomes removed from the supposed ‘natural’ process of motherhood, and her own body is used to breed alien hybrid children against her will or consent. She becomes a part of the ‘monstrous,’ something unnatural and seemingly abhorrent. In the episode, “Humbug” — as discussed by Lisa Parks in Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files — Scully shares a moment with Lenny: a man with a detachable conjoined twin who turns out to be ever so slightly bloodthirsty. Both Lenny and Scully are caught off guard and share an embarrassing look at each other when both of their dressing gowns come slightly loose. As Scully stares awkwardly at Lenny’s belly, Lenny stares equally at Scully’s breast. The implication here is that both Scully and Lenny are alike in their otherness — both regarded by society as ‘other.’ This also comes at a point within the series after Scully has had the alien implant inserted in her neck, however she is not aware of it. The process of using her ovum to produce alien-hybrid clones has also begun, not that she knows it. As cyborg feminist specialist Donna Haraway — definitely check out her book, A Cyborg Manifesto — suggested; women, cyborgs, similans and the like are all “odd boundary creatures” which constantly threaten the traditional narratives and push the limits of science. Scully, and the other monsters we meet in The X Files are certainly guilty of that.

Aligning Scully with ‘othered’ alien life, cyborgs, and other women in the series posits her in this sort of feminized space, against the patriarchal FBI. However, Scully’s work (especially her initial task which was to debunk Mulder’s theories on behalf of her superiors at the academy) serves the masculine and patriarchal government. Indeed, even when Scully isn’t debunking Mulder’s odd (but accurate) theories, she is more often than not running around after Mulder, writing down his ideas, acting as his support staff, etc. In fact, it takes Scully until season 5 to express her annoyance at not even having her own desk in their shared office.

Scully continues to be skeptical of the existence of extraterrestrials, or of conspiracy theories — choosing instead to buy into the science. Despite everything that has been aggressively done to her, Scully can’t quite bring herself to believe that the existence of extraterrestrials can be real, even though her own body harbors the technology. As Lisa Parks points out, Scully’s position as a scientist is quite precarious. The science in the show is channeled through the feminized form (aka Scully) and therefore open to critical analysis, more so than if it was a male scientist. Scully, while a firm skeptic of aliens, is almost always intrinsically linked to this (as described earlier), so her skepticism of the supernatural and her insistence to hold onto this female fallible science seems to equate to her inability to accept herself.

There’s also something pretty grim in Scully’s abduction/missing ovum storyline that feels very reminiscent of higher powers meddling and making decisions about women’s reproductive rights. Instead of making laws, the Syndicate have a very real effect on the abductees’ abilities to have children therefore taking the decision away from the individual completely. It’s interesting to note that when men are victims of alien (or government) abduction in The X-Files, it is never intrinsically linked to the fact that they are male. On a very non-supernatural level, Scully constantly has to fight in the male-dominated space which is the FBI, and her shift from rational career woman to someone who has had the choice to bear children forcibly taken away from her serves to remind us that Scully is not male, however much she tries to assert herself.

Scully, while incredibly influential to generations of young women going into STEM subjects, is a rather questionable character. Traditionally, science has positioned female bodies as passive objects for male scientific dissection. Despite Scully being a scientist, as a woman, her body is still constantly placed under great scrutiny — from the clone offspring, to her cancer, even her tattooing exploits in “Never Again.” Dana Scully is an absolutely fascinating character, but it often feels as if she is being studied during The X-Files, when perhaps she should be the one doing the studying?

Recommended Reading: Scully, What Are You Wearing? The Problem of Feminism, Subversion, and Heteronormativity in The X-Files by Lacy Hodges (University of Florida, 2005).

Becky Kukla lives in London, works in documentary production/distribution to pay the bills and writes things about feminism, film and TV online in her spare time. You can find more of her work at her blog femphile or on Twitter @kuklamoo.

Mary and Susan on ‘Johnny Test’

While the show as a whole was run-of-the-mill, it quietly had two of the most brilliantly realized female characters in recent cartoon history: Mary and Susan Test. …Mary and Susan Test are ambitious, intelligent, and fully-actualized. Exaggeratedly brilliant scientists, it’s the twin girls who put into motion most events of the series.

This guest post written by Robert V. Aldrich appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

No one’s going to blame you if you haven’t heard of Johnny Test.

It was a quiet little show that ran from 2005 to 2014, first on The CW (Kids’ WB at the time) and thereafter on Cartoon Network. There wasn’t a whole lot to it as a show, to be honest. It was pretty casual fare about a boy and his talking dog, with simple art and generic animation. The voice acting was pretty decent but nothing to write home about. Each episode was usually a very simple concept (often revolving around school, chores, and similar mundane events) that got milked for all it was worth. The series’ episodes had a few decent jokes to make you smirk, a lot of lowest-common-denominator giggles, and one or two gags that went over the kids’ heads that only mom or dad got. It was a perfectly decent show, perhaps even good at times, but never anything particularly stellar.

In another time and place, Johnny Test might have been a bigger deal, but like its ancestors from the late-80s, the series suffered from being an adequate cartoon just after a major epoch of great cartoons (with the 2008 conclusion of Avatar: The Last Airbender and the cancellation of Toonami) as well as being overshadowed by a few stellar standouts (like Ben 10 and Transformers: Animated). As such, only its very core target audience even knew it existed. Which is a shame because while the show as a whole was run-of-the-mill, it quietly had two of the most brilliantly realized female characters in recent cartoon history: Mary and Susan Test.

While the TV series Johnny Test was very clearly aimed right at the ‘boy’ demographic, with the titular character and his talking dog Dukey (…shudder…) being the centerpiece of most episodes, the two pivotal characters were Johnny’s older twin sisters. Whereas Johnny was an average, no-brand kid who was equal parts jock, geek, and lay-about (IE your generic all-American pre-tween), Mary and Susan Test are ambitious, intelligent, and fully-actualized. Exaggeratedly brilliant scientists, it’s the twin girls who put into motion most events of the series. The two red-haired teen girls are constantly working on scientific experiments that push the boundaries of human comprehension, ability, and rend the very laws of nature. Basically, think Dexter from Dexter’s Lab, only with actual manners, social graces, and no bizarre accent.

Mary, the eldest of the twins and visualized with curly hair and baggy pants, is an open-minded sort of scientist, willing to engage with most any theory. She’s slightly more out-going of the two girls and focuses mostly on their collective work. She seems to be the more mature of the two and the most well-adjusted of the three Test children.

Susan is Mary’s counterpart (if differences that subtle can be called such). The younger of the two, Susan has straight hair and typically wears a skirt. She’s a little more hard-nosed when it comes to science and interpretation, and is a little more curt. She evidences a quicker temper than her sister, and has also garnered the attention of an unwanted paramour in the form of Eugene ‘Bling-Bling Boy’ Hamilton.

Both Mary and Susan are brilliant scientists, whose work is courted by the U.S. government (who seem synonymous with the military, though they’re frequently played for comic relief) and other institutions, even while they attend school at Porkbelly Technical Institute (which seems to be a generic higher-ed establishment and made unclear if it’s a high school or a college).

Mary and Susan are not the first female science wonks in cartoon history. Prior to them, cartoon-watchers had Gadget Hackwrench from Rescue Rangers and Sandy Cheeks on Spongebob Squarepants (yep, technically the squirrel in a diving suit is a scientist). Go back any farther and you could debatably include Penny from Inspector Gadget, but at about that point, the already paltry list begins to thin out completely. Sure, some shows had the occasional one-off or even recurring character as a female scientist (Transformers had Carly, Spike’s girlfriend who seemed a little too enamored with the alien robots), but by and large, the media was woefully lacking in such representation. This necessitated audiences look to live-action entertainment for any semblance of female characters into science, math, and the like. But live-action stuff’s like, for adults and who wants to watch that?

Even more remarkable is that while female science characters are in short supply, in even shorter supply – so much so as to border on unheard of – are female scientists who are still GIRLS. In the annals of cartoon history, one would be hard-pressed to find any other characters so prominent and also so well-rounded. While Mary and Susan’s cartoon predecessors were often more scientist than girl, the Test Twins are still very much regular teen girls. They like to get gussied up in dresses, go to the pool, and go dancing. They like makeup and many of the usual trappings associated with femininity. They just also really, really love science.

This is best evidenced by both girls having an unrequited interest in Gil Nexdor (get it?), the hunky airhead that lives down the street. Both girls pine for Gil’s easily-distracted attention, but are exceptionally clueless as to how to achieve it or hold it. For most of the show, Gil seems largely oblivious to the Test Twins’ very existence, an interesting reversal on the usual trope. It’s doubly interesting because of how it is similar to Susan’s struggles with Bling-Bling Boy and his constant, unwanted (and at times, toxic) attention.

Most every episode of Johnny Test involves the girls and their intelligence. Either an invention of theirs kicks off the episode’s action, or one is needed to save the day. Episodes vary from the run-of-the-mill charm-of-life episodes involving the usual kids’ matters (lazy afternoon, not wanting to do homework, sibling rivalry, etc.) to hyper-exaggerated inanity (alien invasions, feuds with other super-geniuses). Mary and Susan sometimes struggle with one another, as sisters are wont to do, but always end up reconciling. Likewise, their attitudes towards Johnny vary from episode to episode, depending on how much trouble he’s getting them into or how much they want him to test a new invention, but they always drop everything to help him.

The Test Twins really are quite remarkable as characters. As progressive as cartoons can be, there remains a colossal dearth of science-minded female characters, especially ones who embrace femininity. Were we to guess based off the likes of their peers and predecessors like Penny or Gadget, we might get the impression that once a woman puts on a lab coat or a stethoscope, she ceases to be a woman or a girl. Once she commits to STEM interests, she quits being interested in dresses, dances, or swooning after crushes. Mary and Susan Test challenge this quietly but directly.

For girls tuning in to watch this show, they found two prominent and visible characters who appear in nearly every single episode and always contribute meaningfully, if not outright save the day. Moreover, they do it not with beauty or social graces or even physical might, but with their intellect. These girls are the force in the show because of their smarts. Name any other cartoon with any other female character (much less two!) that can say the same. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Moreover, these two girls are not the centerpieces of the show. While they’re certainly not supporting characters, they’re not quite tritagonists with Johnny either. Mary and Susan occupy some unique territory where, depending on the episode, they find themselves as anything from partner-in-crime to background character to even deus ex machina. At first glance, this might seem a bit to undermine their importance, but consider instead that the target audience of this show is likely to be boys (because heaven forbid a show appeal to both, but that’s a discussion for another matter). By having these two super-science girls in the background of the show helps normalize the notion of girls who are smart, ambitious and love science. If this show were a little boy’s favorite TV show, it would be very likely that he would be completely accepting of girls at school being into biology, math, and the like. After all, why wouldn’t they be?

The world of entertainment has not been kind to women and girls who are interested in science, technology, engineering, and math. Often these characters are written quickly out of shows, turned into one-off joke characters, or relegated to quiet support. When they are featured in any way, they are nerdy outcasts who are scientists not just first, but almost exclusively. If a female character is into STEM matters, it’s as if they must sacrifice their femininity.

Mary and Susan casually dismiss all of that as the garbage that it is. They’re girls, fully realized and healthy in every way, who love science and lose themselves in their pursuits. No struggle exists to reconcile their intellects with their lives as girls. They are the perfect role-models of the aspiring scientist who also wants to wear cute clothes and go to the prom. On a show that otherwise was solid but quite forgettable, these girls stood out as contributing wonderfully to the tapestry of rich female characters cartoons have offered.

Not too bad for a cartoon with a talking dog named Dukey.

Robert V. Aldrich is a writer and novelist, living in Raleigh, North Carolina (and plans to vote against Pat McCrory as soon as November gets here). He’s the author of numerous books including Samifel and Rhest for the Wicked, as well as a contributing writer for multiple websites. You can find more of his work at TeachTheSky.com and he can be found on Facebook and Twitter. When not writing B-rate sci-fi or smarty-pants evaluations of kids’ shows, he is working for the health department, teaching martial arts, or losing arguments to his cats.

Beverly Crusher (‘Star Trek: TNG’) and Dana Scully (‘The X-Files’): The Medical and the Maternal

The impact of Dr. Beverly Crusher and Agent Dana Scully cannot be understated, not just on the landscape of female representation on television or the portrayal of women scientists but the way they also drove young women to pursue STEM fields in reality. …They transcend mere descriptors like woman, lover, mother, caregiver, skeptic, scientist — because they’re all that and more.

This guest post written by Carly Lane appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists. | Spoilers ahead.

In the vast, diverse spectrum of science fiction worlds, it often seems as if no role, no profession, is off-limits to female characters. To that end, it has often been cited as a deeply progressive genre for fictional women, depicting the importance of their contributions as being equal to their male counterparts. When compared alongside the investigation of extraterrestrial life or the exploration of worlds other than our own, a strong and competent woman doesn’t seem that extraordinary by comparison.

Although science-fiction has been guilty of relying on outdated sexist tropes on occasion, it should be celebrated for the avenues where female characters are allowed to become more developed and three-dimensional. It’s these women that we often look up to as role models, even though they sometimes come from a future very far away from our own. Two of those characters appeared on television shows which spanned nearly fifteen years — Dr. Beverly Crusher, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Dana Scully, from The X-Files. Maybe not surprisingly, there’s more that links these two fictional ladies than the fact that they share the same hair color, or that they both have backgrounds in STEM fields. Over the course of their respective programs, they were allowed to become fully realized characters who had journeys independent of any influence from men — and though both women do have important relationships with several men in their lives, it isn’t what defines them.

When we’re introduced to Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) at the start of The Next Generation we learn two things up front: first, that she’s a single mother to young son Wesley (Wil Wheaton), and second, that she has a personal history with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), who captains the Starfleet vessel the USS Enterprise. In spite of the tie that binds them, which is revealed to be the death of Crusher’s husband Jack, the doctor assures Picard that it will in no way affect “the way [she] serves [him], the vessel or the mission” as Chief Medical Officer (“Encounter at Farpoint”).

And, for the most part, it doesn’t — at least not early on. In fact, it seems like she’s barely joined on with the Enterprise before she accepts a position as head of Starfleet Medical less than a year later. Granted, the decision of the character was heavily informed by the departure of actress Gates McFadden at the end of season one; both McFadden and Crusher returned to the show for season three after fans campaigned to bring the character back. While the reason for Crusher’s return is never provided in dialogue, we see the toll her absence has taken — especially in her relationship with her son Wesley, who had remained on the Enterprise as acting ensign. The interactions between them are initially strained and awkward, and eventually Crusher goes to Picard to ask him about how her son has been during her time away (“Evolution”).

Mother and son don’t resolve their tension right off the bat, either; when Crusher suggests to Wesley that he might have taken on too many responsibilities, he snaps at her, invoking her absence. “I’m here now, Wesley,” she says, and over the course of the remaining episode Wesley allows himself to rely a little more on his mother for a change. It’s one of the few instances in TNG where Wesley does lean on Crusher in some way; more often than not, when it comes to asking for advice or venting his problems, we usually see Wesley seek out a male member of Starfleet, or even Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), the proprietor of Enterprise’s bar Ten-Forward. Whether that was unintentional or stemming from the belief that an adolescent man shouldn’t be running to his mother with his problems, it definitely contributed to a number of missed opportunities for more meaningful interaction between Crusher and her son.

On the other hand, TNG doesn’t define Crusher solely by her role as a mother — and it shouldn’t. As Chief Medical Officer on the Enterprise, she’s the head of the team responsible for administering care not just to the other vessel’s crew members but also to the alien races they encounter over the course of their mission. Her background in science and medicine requires her to be familiar with unique anatomy, to develop cures for foreign illnesses, or to handle emergency medical situations with a calm demeanor. As a certified bridge officer, she is afforded command of the bridge on several occasions in the absence of other crew members. She has her own friendships forged outside professional boundaries, namely with ship’s counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis); the two women frequently go to each other for advice and recommendations. She also finds herself pursuing potential romantic attachments, though they don’t tend to last beyond the confines of an episode. And she even dances around a potential relationship with Picard, even though neither of them truly act on what appear to be mutual romantic feelings. Over the course of TNG, we’re afforded the opportunity to glimpse Crusher as a mother, a doctor, and a woman with feelings and strong convictions.

While Crusher’s journey begins as that of a mother and branches outward, the story arc of Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is something of the opposite. In The X-Files, it’s the skeptical Scully who serves as an avatar for the audience, our way in; it’s through her science that the FBI intends for her to debunk the X-Files and thereby discredit former golden boy Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) as a result. She’s immediately defined by her science, by her medical background; the frequency of Scully introducing herself by her profession in early seasons is a long-running joke among die-hard X-Philes, but there’s some part of it that’s almost necessary due to the occasional sexism she faces from men working in her field. When a male detective questions “the wisdom of assigning female law enforcement officers to certain types of cases” during a murder investigation, Scully assures him that his “concern” is misplaced (“2Shy”). Fortunately, she doesn’t find herself on the receiving end of any gross comments from her partner Mulder; although the two of them usually disagree on the whodunit, their verbal sparring matches are often a means to allow both parties to bounce potential hypotheses off one another.

It takes some time, but inevitably we learn that Scully occasionally harbors thoughts of having a social life, building relationships, and perhaps even starting a family someday outside of her work on the X-Files. Her attempts at dating never quite end the way she expects (“The Jersey Devil,” “Never Again”). Her alien abduction comes with its own set of side ramifications after Mulder learns that some of her eggs had been harvested during the process, eventually leading to the creation of a child (“Emily”). Scully experiences an overwhelming sense of connection with the girl and is heartbroken when Emily dies from a genetic infection, especially since this comes in the aftermath of Scully learning of her own infertility as the result of her abduction — or so she thinks.

Scully’s desire to be a mother again never truly goes away, and when she eventually decides to have a child through in vitro fertilization she asks Mulder to be the donor (“Per Manum”); although the initial attempt at in vitro fails, Scully later learns she is pregnant shortly after the alien abduction of Mulder, suggesting that the two were intimate long enough to conceive naturally (“Requiem”). While she is overjoyed to finally have a child of her own, Scully soon realizes that she and her son William will never find peace given the threats to his life that exist in her world, and makes the devastating decision to give him up for adoption so that he can grow up safely. In the revival of The X-Files, we learn that Scully frequently reminisces about the life she could have had with William if he had stayed with her, but the question of whether she will ever be able to reunite with her child even after all this time is still open-ended.

After all, as often as we’ve seen Scully try to leave the X-Files (and Mulder, by extension) behind and start anew, something always seems to occur to bring her back in somehow. And there’s value in that, in depicting a female character who wrestles with her convictions both as a woman of science and a woman of faith, in allowing her to explore her own wants and needs while not necessarily prioritizing that of her male partner’s. On The X-FIles, it never felt as though Mulder and Scully were on anything but equal footing; in his absence, she’s given the opportunity to fully champion the truth she had originally been assigned to dismiss.

The impact of Crusher and Scully cannot be understated, not just on the landscape of female representation on television or the portrayal of women scientists but the way they also drove young women to pursue STEM fields in reality. (Scully even has this effect partly named after her.) Maybe it’s because they’re impossible to sum up in just one word; they transcend mere descriptors like woman, lover, mother, caregiver, skeptic, scientist — because they’re all that and more. It’s the full representation of the many facets of their character that’s given these fictional women their long-lasting appeal for so many years already, and hopefully for many more years to come.

Carly Lane is a writer based in New York City who specializes in obscure pop culture references and miscellaneous geekery. Her work has been featured on The Mary Sue, Teen Vogue, The Toast and more. You can find her on Twitter at @carlylane.

The Female Scientists of ‘The X-Files’

‘The X-Files’ consistently worked against the idea that women could not be capable scientists. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the character of Dana Scully inspired many young women to pursue education and careers in science and technology – what is now known as “The Scully Effect.”

This guest post written by Angela Morrison appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

In the world of The X-Files, female scientists are not treated as anomalies, or exceptions to the rule. Female scientists are prominent characters in many episodes and are (almost) always treated with great respect and regard. Not to mention, one of the two protagonists is the most kick-ass television scientist of all time – Dana Katherine Scully (Gillian Anderson).

Throughout the series, it’s revealed that Scully studied physics in university, and later attended medical school, before changing career paths to become an FBI agent – where she was eventually assigned to work with Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) on The X-Files. Scully is both a brilliant scientist and an empathetic and intelligent FBI agent. She uses her skills as a medical doctor to assist with anything and everything: she performs autopsies, comes to the aid of those who are injured (Mulder, most of the time), and identifies anomalies in blood and cell samples – frequently identifying them as alien.

Writers such as Caitlin Flynn at Bustle have noted the reversal of gender stereotypes within the partnership of Mulder and Scully. Oftentimes in television and cinema, women represent the irrational, emotional, and uncontainable, while men offer the voice of reason and rationality. In the case of The X-Files, Mulder’s work is highly emotional for him as he passionately believes in all of the supernatural cases that he and Scully investigate. Scully is the skeptic, always questioning and challenging Mulder. She strongly believes in science, seeking to find a rational answer for every strange thing the duo encounter.

What makes Scully so great is that she is a complex, emotional person while simultaneously a rational scientist. She is always sympathetic to what Mulder says (even if she does roll her eyes at him constantly), and over the course of the series, her skepticism softens (it does take a very long time). Scully is also a devoted Catholic (which Flynn covers in her article) — her religious beliefs do not necessarily align with her scientific beliefs. But this does not make her a hypocrite. She believes in facts and nature, and at the same time she is spiritual and devoted to her faith. Jennifer Still at Bustle notes that Scully is complex and contradictory – a layered and brilliant character. Scully never takes off her golden cross necklace – except when she is abducted in the second season, and Mulder wears it as a symbol of his faith in Scully. Mulder is an atheist, but he believes in aliens. Scully is a scientist, but she believes in God – and they both respect each others’ beliefs.

Scully does not exist solely to be eye-candy for viewers, nor to only be Mulder’s love interest. From the very first episodes, the creators of the show make it clear that Mulder and Scully see each other as equals, and they immediately trust and respect each other. Yes, they are both beautiful, and yes, the chemistry between them is the best thing ever, but these facts never overshadow the incredible work they do together. The show does not opt for an explicit and predictable romance subplot. Instead, we see Mulder and Scully’s friendship and professional relationship blossom and take unexpected turns throughout the series. This is much more interesting, and it also indicates that Scully is an actual complex human woman, rather than a plot device to move along the male protagonist’s story.

Scully is also never treated as a “damsel in distress” – she and Mulder are kidnapped/abducted and put in dangerous situations in equal measures, and they both come to each others’ rescue whenever they can. Scully is never portrayed as “weak” just because she is a woman; she and Mulder are always portrayed as equally competent during action sequences. However, Scully does face everyday sexism on the job. There are male characters throughout the series who underestimate Scully because of her gender. But the show always proves them wrong and Scully is never afraid to call people out – in fact, she even calls Mulder out in the season 3 episode “Syzygy”: “I’m driving. Why do you always have to drive? Because you’re the big, macho man?” And of course, one of the best Scully lines ever, from season 6’s “Dreamland II”, in response to being called “baby”: “‘Baby’ me and you’ll be peeing through a catheter!” Scully always fights back against low-key sexism and proves that women should never be underestimated.

While the show acknowledges that women face stereotyping and sexism every day, it is also optimistic in its portrayal of women. Since the first season, female scientists have appeared in many episodes. Mulder and Scully work closely with these capable, at times complicated, yet fiercely intelligent women. Season 1 episode 8, “Ice,” features Felicity Huffman as Dr. DaSilva, a toxicologist and episode 9, “Space,” Michelle Generoo portrays Susanna Thompson, a NASA communications commander. These are professional women, highly skilled in their respective professions. Both Michelle and Dr. DaSilva use their extensive knowledge to provide Mulder and Scully with clues for solving the mysteries at hand. In season 1, episode 11, “Eve,” Dr. Sally Kendrick (Harriet Harris) is an evil genius, a former fertility doctor who figures out how to clone herself. Her characters could be seen as a problematic portrayal – a “crazy woman” trope – but the series features both male and female villains.

In “War of the Coprophages” from season 4, Dr. Bambi Berenbaum (Bobbie Phillips), an agricultural researcher and insect expert, helps Mulder understand the nature of cockroaches, to assist him with a case involving aggressive cockroaches. In season 5’s “Kill Switch,” Kristin Lehman plays Esther Nairn/”Invisigoth,” a computer expert. Both of these characters are objectified – Mulder flirts with Bambi, and the Lone Gunmen (Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, and Dean Haglund) are immediately attracted to Esther. Scully expresses some jealousy, but it is very mild (played for laughs, not drama), and it does not stop her from working together with these women to solve cases.

The X-Files consistently worked against the idea that women could not be capable scientists. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the character of Dana Scully inspired many young women to pursue education and careers in science and technology – what is now known as “The Scully Effect.” Representation in film and television is so important. Seeing characters such as Scully, Dr. Bambi Berenbaum, and even season 10’s Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose) — another medical doctor/skeptic — lead young women to believe that they are capable of following their dreams and being successful within the professional scientific community. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of diversity as the female scientists on The X-Files are all able-bodied, middle-class, white women. However, Scully and the other female scientists on the show have been kicking ass since the 1990s, proving that women — in both real life and on-screen — can be highly intelligent and complex human beings.

Angela Morrison is a Canadian cinephile who was raised by a female scientist (her mother, a medical laboratory technologist). She has written for Bitch Flicks before, for the Ladies of the 1980s theme week. She also writes about cinema on her blog.