Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century : Marlboro Men and California Gurls [1 ed.] 9781527505285, 9781443878982

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Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century

Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century: Marlboro Men and California Gurls Edited by

Astrid M. Fellner, Marta Fernández-Morales and Martina Martausová

Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century: Marlboro Men and California Gurls Edited by Astrid M. Fellner, Marta Fernández-Morales and Martina Martausová This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Astrid M. Fellner, Marta Fernández-Morales, Martina Martausová and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7898-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7898-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century Astrid M. Fellner Marta Fernández-Morales Part I: From Chicks to Vampires: New (?) Femininities in Popular Culture Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Fifty Shades of Grey: The Neutralization of Female Sexual Desire in a Neoliberal Time Meritxell Esquirol Salom and Cristina Pujol Ozonas Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Of Chicks and Girls: New Femininities in Chick Culture Heike Mißler Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 49 Rethinking the Image of Women in Contemporary Mass Media: The Case of the TV Series Girls María Dolores Narbona-Carrión Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 73 The Virtuosic Labor of Femininity in Mad Men Leopold Lippert Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 The Legacy of Lucy Westenra: Female Postfeminist Subjects in The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and The Twilight Saga Lea Gerhards

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 111 I Sing Her Body Electric: Plotting Contemporary Science Fiction Heroines Irina Simon Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131 “Both married, both moms, both determined to keep getting their message out”: The Russian Pussy Riot and U.S. Popular Culture M. Katharina Wiedlack Part II: On Masculinities: The Making, Remaking, and Queering of Men Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 163 What Have We Learned since the 1950s? The Return to Conservative Gender Roles in Sam Mendes’ Film Adaptation of Revolutionary Road Rubén Cenamor Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 185 The 21st-Century American Adam: Postfeminist Masculinity in American Cinema Martina Martausová Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 199 Codifying The Doctor’s Queerness in British Sci-Fi TV Show Doctor Who Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 221 “Of Other Bodies”: An Analysis of Heterotopic Love and Kinship in Crossbones (2014) Eva Michely Contributors ............................................................................................. 245

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The genesis of this book can be found in the 12th International ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Conference, held at the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University (UPJŠ) in Košice, Slovakia, in August 2014. ESSE regularly arranges conferences to foster research networks in topics which bring together scholars and writers to facilitate intellectual cooperation. The conference in Košice, besides other interesting fields related to the study of English, opened up lines of debate about the new realities of popular culture(s) in the post-9/11 era in two seminars related to the fields of gender and cultural studies. More specifically, the initiative arose from the promoters of the two panels—“Gender and Popular Culture,” co-convened by Astrid M. Fellner and Viera Novákova, and “Gender across the Media: 21st-Century Masculinities in Film and TV Fiction,” co-convened by Marta Fernández-Morales and Martina Martausová. Both focused on the exploration of the cultural makings of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in English-speaking countries’ popular culture. In these events, challenging discussions took place about current constructions of gender identities and the cultural products that inspire and/or reflect them. All in all, the conference included over 100 works presented by researchers and academics from 43 countries who gathered at the UPJŠ for five days of intense activity, and the two seminars that we organized received a considerable amount of interest from scholars from different areas of the world. The quality and the innovative approach of many of the papers presented during the ESSE events encouraged us to consider the possibility of taking a step forward and putting together a volume with a selection of texts in English, so that the materials, the knowledge, and the original academic proposals that circulated during the conference could reach a larger academic audience on an international level. Thus, we shifted our role from co-convenors to co-editors and committed to collaborating with Cambridge Scholars Publishing in order to make our idea a reality. The articles published in this volume are the result of a rigorous peer-review process that took into account not only quality but also thematic coherence. We contacted the authors of the selected papers and asked them to consider revising and expanding their work, which they did duly and generously. In addition, we invited some upcoming academics as well as some senior scholars from our gender and cultural

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studies networks to send us proposals that could establish a dialogue with the ones presented in Košice. Together, as seen in the following pages, these articles cover a wide range of topics, making for an exciting reading for the general public and an invaluable source of secondary materials for specialists and researchers. Furthermore, since the volume includes contributions of non-English-speaking authors from four different countries in Europe— Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and Spain—it offers a transnational scope of cultural analyses. This is especially interesting in the current context of globalization, as the papers provide insight into how the media of Englishspeaking countries (most obviously the U.S., as a powerful globalizing influence) mould the perception of gender identities amongst international audiences. This collection of essays owes much to the generosity of many people. First of all, we would like to thank the Scientific Committee that put the Košice conference together for accepting our original proposals and providing the space for the exchange of ideas that is at the root of this book. In particular, we want to thank Viera Novákova for her valuable support. We are especially grateful for the assistance we have received from Mohammad Al-Saqqa, Markus Hetheier, and Banu Ahibay, who paid attention to every detail and who provided indispensable assistance in formatting the articles. We are thankful for their many comments and suggestions that helped to develop this volume through its various transformations. This book could not have been finished without their arduous work behind the scenes. Thanks also to Bärbel Schlimbach for helping proofread the articles. We are also grateful to Eva Nossem, who carefully helped prepare the manuscript and offered guidance and support. Our thanks go to the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their interest in this book and their support, especially Theo Moxham and Victoria Carruthers. Finally, we want to thank all our authors for their collegiality and commitment to this project.

INTRODUCTION RETHINKING GENDER IN POPULAR CULTURE ST IN THE 21 CENTURY ASTRID M. FELLNER MARTA FERNÁNDEZ-MORALES

In 2010, Katy Perry’s song “California Gurls” became the summer anthem in many countries around the world. It was the first single from her third studio album Teenage Dream, which was produced by Capitol Records/EMI. Teaming up with Snoop Dogg, Perry offered a light-hearted and ironic subversion of the famous East Coast/West Coast hip hop feud. Perry’s “California Gurls” reveals many issues relating to gender and pop culture. In fact, the song and the music video, which is set in fictional “Candyfornia,” partake of a kind of popular feminism which appeals to many young women today. Wearing cupcake bras, bright colored wigs, extended eyelashes, and glittery costumes, Perry’s artist persona challenges understandings of female identity and sexuality, combating the dictates of hegemonic masculinity, represented by Snoop Dogg. At the same time, Perry’s candy gender politics that represents female empowerment as a matter of freedom and choice is complicit with neoliberal forms of selfgovernance, where the only principle is marketization and self-interest. The notions of “California Gurls” and “Marlboro Men” in the title of this collection stand for a contradictory gender politics that is indicative of a postfeminist media culture.1 The phenomenon of postfeminism called in a new era of gender-based discussions and heralded a revival of chick culture.2 Conversely, the new century and its mediatized inauguration— 1. According to Rosalind Gill, postfeminism is “best thought of as a sensibility that characterises increasing numbers of films, television shows, adverts and other media products.” Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility,” (emphasis in the original). 2. “The stereotypical chick,” as Heike Mißler explains, “is single, lives and works in an urban center, is surrounded by a network of friends, and is struggling to find

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Introduction

the events of 9/11—reopened the debate about masculinity when the transnational crisis and the culture of fear3 contributed to the revival of the John Wayne myth, as Susan Faludi argues in The Terror Dream.4 Marlboro Men and California Gurls explores the makings, un-makings and re-makings of femininity and masculinity in Western popular culture since 9/11. It aims at contributing to the ever-expanding field of gender and cultural studies, exploring 21st-century representation(s) and reception(s) of female and male figures in film and television fiction and other forms of popular culture. Continuing the intense dialogue forwarded by Susan Faludi and writers like Peggy Noonan, who in 2001 affirmed that “[f]rom the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues,”5 they pay attention to the intersections between postfeminism and new forms of femininity/ies and masculinity/ies, while also considering some queering processes that are taking place in contemporary audiovisual products. The core of the volume is structured as follows: Part One approaches the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of female identities in the 21st century, specifically within the context of the ongoing debate about feminism(s) and postfeminism. As Angela McRobbie has explained in The Aftermath of Feminism, since the 1990s a new—or maybe we should say reactivated, since there is no novelty in it—set of representational practices have taken the media and popular culture by assault. From political positions that, at best, take the second wave of the feminist movement for granted and, at worst, undermine its contribution to the cause of equality, the proponents of the latest trend—and we use this word very consciously—of female rebellion shift the focus from collective struggle to individual success, reworking the meaning of concepts like

a fullfilling [sic] job and a meaningful relationship. The best-known elements of chick culture are certainly chick lit […] and chick flicks, i.e. films; Other media forms comprised by the term are TV programmes, advertisements, music, magazines, websites, and blogs.” Heike Mißler, The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 1. 3. See about the culture of fear. Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (London and New York: Continuum, 2005); Frank Furedi, Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown (London and New York: Continuum, 2007); Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Updated for Our Post9/11 World (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 4. Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (New York: Picador, 2007). 5. Peggy Noonan, “Welcome Back, Duke,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2001, www.wsj.com/articles/SB122451174798650085 (accessed April 8, 2017).

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empowerment or choice for their own purposes.6 In the framework of a praxis that is deeply embedded in the neoliberal capitalist system, “feminism” becomes a brand that sells tickets for a Beyoncé concert or a Fifty Shades of Grey movie just as easily. In the midst of this perverse conversion of a revolutionary movement into a lifestyle, some activists and artists try to rekindle the fire of resistance through the creation of their own counter-discourses. The texts—a term that we understand here in the widest possible sense—that our contributors dissect in the seven chapters included in this section stand in a dialogic relation, offering an ample panorama of the public conversations that are happening around these issues. The authors illustrate the discussion about changing perceptions of what it means to be or to become a woman, and how dominant cultural representations project the influence of postfeminist discourse on the contemporary landscape of gender identities. The collaborative paper signed by Meritxell Esquirol-Salom and Cristina Pujol-Ozonas uses precisely Fifty Shades of Grey as a case study to try and prove that the discourse that currently dominates the Western media and institutions is based on a logic of cultural (re)production that, despite the achievements of the women’s movement, is still regulated by a heterosexual male gaze that establishes the rules for power relations and for the development of gender and sexuality. They argue that the neoliberal system of the 21st century instrumentalizes the language of feminism to encourage women’s access to consumption and to entice them to exploit their own sexuality as a form of free choice. Individual experiences dominate over the social conditions of female citizens, and empowerment or liberation cease to be collective aims to become personal decisions. As tends to happen, by the way, in the second text that our authors bring to the spotlight in this section: HBO’s Girls, created by Lena Dunham, is the object of study of two chapters by scholars from very different environments: Heike Mißler, writing in the German context, approaches it as both a continuation of and a challenge to the ideas and aesthetics of the 1990s chick culture, which in her view is relocated in the post-recession moment and rewritten to incorporate the conditions of life of the millennials. María Dolores Narbona-Carrión, in turn, looks at the comedic side of Girls from the Spanish standpoint, discussing the show’s potential for transformation as part of a genre that is supposed to be subversive. Still in the field of television fiction, Leopold Lippert’s paper tackles AMC’s successful Mad Men. Through a detailed close reading of a much-

6. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 1.

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Introduction

discussed episode from the fifth season, and drawing on the work of theorists of postfeminism such as Rosalind Gill, Yvonne Tasker, and Diane Negra, he states that the notion of femininity is converted into a form of labor in favor of capitalist accumulation in the show at hand. The complicity between the postfeminist ideology and the dominant benefitand growth-centered economic system, which is already pointed at in the first text of this section (Esquirol-Salom and Pujol-Ozonas), is thus made transparent through the example of a fictional audiovisual product that has become one of the most resonant in recent U.S. television, percolating, in Mendelsohn’s words, every corner of American popular culture.7 Other relevant instances, in this case from transmedia texts that have cut from literature onto the screen, serve to expand the examination of feminism and postfeminism in English-speaking cultural manifestations. A valuable contribution to this discussion, Lea Gerhards’ chapter deals with postfeminist subjectivity in the vampire genre. She puts the characters of Caroline Forbes (The Vampire Diaries), Jessica Hamby (True Blood) and Bella Swan (The Twilight Saga) in dialogue with the classic female model of Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She establishes a continuum of characterization, from very conservative to somewhat alternative femininities, but all of them contained within the limit(ation)s of postfeminist representation. The last two texts in this group of papers are the ones that analyze the female figures that dare to tread the furthest into the slippery fields of transgression. Among the movie characters discussed by Irina Simon, some have been decoded as very radical in their gender politics, as is the case of Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015), which even raised a protest wave among self-defined “men-rights’ activists”: they encouraged viewers to boycott the movie due to its alleged feminist ideology.8 Developing her analysis on the basis of Propp’s model about the function of characters in classical tales, Simon explores the different positions taken by the protagonists of the aforementioned Mad Max, together with Gravity (Cuarón, 2013), Ex Machina (Garland, 2015) and Upstream Color (Carruth, 2014), combining commercial filmmaking and indie productions. Finally, bringing us back to reality after these journeys 7. Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Mad Men Account,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011, www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/24/mad-men-account/ (accessed April 8, 2017). 8. Lorena O’Neill, “Anti-feminists Call for Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, Citing Feminist Agenda,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2011, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mens-rights-activists-boycott-mad-795658 (accessed April 8, 2017).

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through film and TV fiction, M. Katharina Wiedlack also focuses on a woman-centered plot. In particular, she analyzes the cultural narrative woven around the two Pussy Riot members Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in the United States after their arrest and imprisonment. Like the characters that the rest of our contributors comment on, the punk female activists studied by Wiedlack were made to play different roles in and by the media, with more or less obvious political intentions. Similarly to the protagonists of some of the films and TV series in the rest of this section, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were (hyper)sexualized, orientalized, commodified, and even symbolically turned into supermodels in some of their audio/visual representations. Conservative gender politics once more aligned with capitalism in order to de-activate the radical collective embodied by these two women, oversimplifying their image and their cause, and changing potentially transformative praxis into monolithic, domesticated, consumer-based thought. Part Two places its emphasis on masculinity. Individual authors present up-to-date analyses of the view of male gender identities on the screen, and their articles embrace a thematic scope that includes the renewed forms of the male chauvinism of the 21st century, the revision of American myths in the past two decades, the queering of (male) gender politics on TV, and the representation of same-sex relationships between men. The problematization of masculinity in a range of cultural products of our times seems to point in the same direction as Tim Edwards’ Cultures of Masculinity (2006), where he affirmed that “masculinity is not in crisis, it is crisis.”9 Questioned on different fronts, traditional male practices of identity construction and reaffirmation struggle to find new shapes in order to maintain the patriarchy alive, but intersectional politics of difference burst into the scene to challenge the old ways, trying to kill John Wayne once and for all. Just as feminism and postfeminism are confronting their own internal and each other’s dialectical and political issues, traditional masculinity and alternative masculinities are up against each other for a space on our screens and in our collective psyche. Ruben Cenamor’s article explores the mechanisms of nostalgia in Sam Mendes’ screen adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. Discussing the evolution of the male protagonist in a comparative framework, he concludes that the film is more conservative than the literary text. As presented by Cenamor, the movie seems to constitute an example of what some feminist thinkers and media have started to call

9. Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006), 14.

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retro-sexism,10 a phenomenon very much in accord with the postfeminist wave explored in Part One. Consolidating this idea, Martina Martausová introduces us to the highly productive encounter between postfeminism and traditional masculinity in her paper about recent films dealing with fatherhood. Articulating her discussion around a corpus constituted by The Pursuit of Happyness (Muccino, 2006), Martian Child (Meyjes, 2007), and The Descendants (Payne, 2011), she argues that the classical myth of the American Adam is a malleable one. With the turn of the century, as she demonstrates, it has undergone a process of adaptation that allows for certain concessions to the egalitarian vindications of feminism while actually establishing, with great force, a cinematic model of postfeminist masculinity. With an appearance of progressive advancement, male authority is (re)confirmed at the expense of everything female— discredited or simply made invisible in the plots examined. Rubén Jarazo, like Cenamor, writes within Spanish academia, on this occasion to introduce the question of sexual identities and the possibility of successfully queering male characters in popular TV series. With Doctor Who as his case study, Jarazo explores the gender-sex axis, with an attentive eye on the history of this long-running British production (it premiered in 1963). After analyzing a whole host of significant episodes, he detects an evolution in the main male character’s options for queerness, a status that relates here to the representation of homosexuality, but also of asexuality on the part of the primary male role of the new Doctor Who. Finally, homoerotic relationships are at the basis of the chapter that closes the volume, Eva Michely’s essay about NBC’s series Crossbones. According to the author, this pseudo-historical production presents an archetypal heterotopia in transition; a locus where hegemonic masculinity plays an important symbolic and organizational role, but where this traditional convention is also challenged through bottom-up social practices of kinship. The narrative includes interesting struggles between mainstream gender roles and potential alternatives, but it falls back into a process of recuperation that reinforces traditional patterns. Both Doctor Who and Crossbones, then, open windows onto other possible ways of being or becoming a man, although both have to struggle with the power of a stubborn heteronormative system. 10. See, for example, Anita Sarkeesian, “Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising,” Feminist Frequency, September 21, 2010. https://feministfrequency .com/video/retro-sexism-uber-ironic-advertising/ (accessed April 8, 2017); Meghan Murphy, “Men Embrace Women Who Embrace Retro Sexism,” Feminist Current, January 16, 2015. www.feministcurrent.com/ 2015/01/16/men-embrace -women-who-embrace-retro-sexism/ (accessed April 8, 2017).

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As editors of this book and as gender studies scholars, we are very aware of the tendency toward dismantling binary thought in today’s theory and activism around gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, we have made the difficult but conscious decision of maintaining the male/female pair as the organizational principle behind this collection of essays. The reason for this is clear to us: however hard we may be fighting to move beyond dichotomies and to live in a world where categories are fluid and labels merely temporary—in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, a liquid modernity where certainties are substituted by questions and permanent selfhood by nomadic identities—11gender is still an active and productive principle in our society and, most particularly, in the internal dynamics of popular culture. In line with a form of academic feminism that refuses to be coopted by the system and to turn into individualist, neoliberal postfeminism, we invited our colleagues to examine the concept of gender and its intersection(s) with other identity variables, and to produce texts which would make visible that gender is still a powerful construct and that much work remains to be done. The female and male characters/images/representations addressed in the upcoming chapters swim in a sea of contradictions, crises, mainstream currents, and bold counter-discourses. Some go with the tide, some resist it. And we must be able to pinpoint and understand them all, decoding the meanings that they produce and incorporating them (or not) to our models of possibility (what if...?). That is the beauty in the project that we now present to readers. Is the Marlboro type alive behind some of the alleged “new men” of our age? Are women back to being “gurls” and are they happy about their positions in the name of (post)feminism? This book gives us ways to deal with these questions.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. London: Polity Books, 2000. Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity. London: Routledge, 2006. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. New York: Picador, 2007. Furedi, Frank. Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. —. Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown. London and New York: Continuum, 2007.

11. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Books, 2000).

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Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 147 (2007): 152. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2449/1/Postfeminist_media_culture_(LSERO).p df (accessed April 8, 2017). Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Updated for Our Post-9/11 World. New York: Basic Books, 2009. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “The Mad Men Account.” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011. www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/24/ mad-men-account/ (accessed April 8, 2017). Mißler, Heike. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Murphy, Meghan. “Men Embrace Women Who Embrace Retro Sexism.” Feminist Current, January 16, 2015. www.feministcurrent.com/2015 /01/16/men-embrace-women-who-embrace-retro-sexism/ (accessed April 8, 2017). Noonan, Peggy. “Welcome Back, Duke.” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2001. www.wsj.com/articles/SB12245117479865 0085 (accessed April 8, 2017). O’Neill, Lorena. “Antifeminists Call for Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, Citing Feminist Agenda.” The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2015. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mens-rights-activists -boycott-mad-795658 (accessed April 8, 2017). Sarkeesian, Anita. “Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising.” Feminist Frequency, September 21, 2010. https://feministfrequency.com/video /retro-sexism-uber-ironic-advertising/ (accessed April 8, 2017).

PART I: FROM CHICKS TO VAMPIRES: NEW (?) FEMININITIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

CHAPTER ONE FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: THE NEUTRALIZATION OF FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE IN A NEOLIBERAL TIME MERITXELL ESQUIROL-SALOM1 CRISTINA PUJOL-OZONAS

Over the last decades, Western women have gained places of political, economic and cultural visibility. For example, they have normalized their inclusion in the academic sphere and in cultural labor. Thanks to these achievements, women increasingly form part of some spaces of leadership where their participation was, in historic terms, merely anecdotic. For these reasons, it seems that Western women have achieved more social relevance and have attained more autonomy in economic terms. Taking into account that nowadays consumer culture is the main platform of social access, women are ready to invest in themselves and to try and fulfil their own wishes. This new form of cultural participation is regulated by the postfeminist stereotype that promotes the idea of an independent woman who overcomes her insecurities basically in two ways: by appealing to the idea of free choice, and being ready to display and (over)exploit her active sexuality.2 At the basis of this stereotype is the fact that the neoliberal ethos promoted by contemporary capitalism and based on narcissistic consumerism as represented by the popular slogan “Because I’m worth it” has convinced women to invest in their own pleasure, beyond the traditional concerns of family care. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the media mainstream and the consumer culture have taken into account this social and cultural turn, and 1. Meritxell Esquirol-Salom would like to acknowledge the following funding for the research behind this paper: Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, research project El rol de la ficción televisiva en los procesos de construcción identitaria en el siglo XXI. Research grant #FFI2014-55781-R. 2. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009).

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how in order to include women as a worthy target, they instrumentalize the anxieties that feminism has to confront and resolve. Our initial hypothesis is that the institutional and media discourses which promote the image of this “new woman,” are built on the logic of cultural production regulated by a male gaze and a set of power relations that regulate female sexuality and desire. The contents offered to contemporary “emancipated and autonomous” women of the 21st century are not that different from those offered when the female role was limited to the domestic sphere and to a social contract based on dependence and submission. We propose an analysis of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, a trilogy written by a woman (E.L. James), starring a woman (Anastasia Steele), based on a fiction written by a woman (Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer), read by millions of women around the world, and adapted for the screen by yet two more women (screenwriter Kelly Marcel and director Sam Taylor-Wood) with extraordinary success. This case study will be the basis to discuss the ways in which contemporary female sexuality is imagined, thought, promoted and consumed. Beyond a mere analysis of content or a study of the characters in the saga, it is necessary to inscribe this imagery within the logic of production of cultural industries which, in their quest for new market niches, instrumentalize feminist struggles and the politics of difference in order to promote cultural identities with a commercial purpose. In the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, the interpellation to female sexuality is different in the movies and the novels. All the novels are structured around a traditional romantic narrative written from the female character’s point of view, promoting the naturalization and internalization of a sexist narrative order. In the movie, in turn, the female character’s viewpoint, through which female pleasure is structured, is absorbed by a spectacularly eminent male logic, strongly guided by consumer culture and the media entertainment industry. With this starting point, we will focus on three aspects: a) The female sexual imagery inscribed within the discourses of meritocratic order integrated in the contemporary cultural and economic liberal model. A model that uses freedom of choice as a basis to empower individuals—in this case women—and through which we negotiate questions of power, ambition, complacency and an alleged self-awareness with which to validate representations. b) The patriarchal imperative under which consumer culture is constructed, and the cultural imagery that makes it impossible to represent a female-centered sexuality. The Grey phenomenon in

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film responds to a male-dominated imagery that revises and neutralizes female sexual desire under the scrutiny of the dominant male gaze. c) The discourse of popular disavowal through which the Grey phenomenon is identified as a minor cultural object, thus resulting in a patronizing attitude towards women consumers. Our aim is to describe the way in which cultural industries intervene in complex processes of social regulation: on the one hand, the regulation of the ways in which sexual practices and debates have to be performed in a society (discourse); on the other hand, the regulation of the modes of our sexual relations both at a symbolic level and in the cultural imagery (representation).

Female Sexuality in Popular Culture From the perspective of sociology, the recent process of sexualization of popular culture is a result of positioning female sex and pleasure as the central themes in multiple narratives and popular products, with the advertising industry as the most obvious platform of female sexual promotion. Even though this is evidently not news in a media landscape that has historically used the female body as advertising ploy, a turning point takes place when the emphasis is placed, not on the usual representations of women as objects of desire and source of male pleasure, but on female agency.3 This change was initiated in the nineties by TV shows like Ally McBeal (FOX 1997–2002) or Sex and the City (HBO 1998–2004), and it continues nowadays with Girls (HBO 2012–present). They are all examples of narratives with active, empowered female protagonists who verbalize their wishes in uninhibited, hedonistic and complacent ways. This is far from the usual taboos and frigidities with which, historically, female sexuality had been dealt with in film and literature. These narratives also treat the new status of women and sexuality in a reflexive and self-aware manner, in constant dialogue and conflict with the representations and mediations that each society has imposed on the meaning of “womanhood” in a specific historical moment.

3. Rosalind Gill, “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising,” Feminism and Psychology 18 (2008): 35–60, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353507084950 (accessed August 8, 2015).

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In this first decade of the 21st century the representation of women is closely linked to the exhibition (in a more or less explicit way) of their sexuality, entering in a “cultural logic of striptease.”4 The social promotion of women, as we see in the paradigmatic case of celebrities, requires an “indispensable” and “necessary” process of sexualization so that the pop divas—Rihanna, Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus—can be incorporated into the entertainment industry. Such process, beyond the iconographic world of pop stars, also affects politicians, athletes, journalists, writers, or any woman in the process of professional promotion. Their presence in the social media tends to be inscribed by a tension created between the representation of a self that is sexy enough to satiate contemporary expectations of the sexually active woman, and the necessary sobriety required for the promotion of a professional activity. This cultural logic has placed female sexual agency at the center of commercial circuits of popular culture, connected to the entertainment industry, thus reducing women to the status of goods in a marketplace. From this moment on, the exploitation of all kinds of products or media content (TV shows, video clips, videogames, books, magazines, clothes and accessories...) responds to this cultural logic that reduces female sexuality to a lifestyle, and therefore into a commodity susceptible of being designed, produced, promoted and consumed.5 The result is an imagery of empowered women who seek their own pleasure and exhibit their desire in an uninhibited, active, almost aggressive way, within a panorama that has inherited the language of pornography (sexual positions, challenging looks at the camera, heavy breathing and orgasms) filtered through the glamour of advertising; a porno chic aesthetics as an added value to all kinds of products, which has transformed “the explicit into something familiar and the sexual transgression into mainstream.”6 Within the logics of production and marketing, women are increasingly identified as sexual consumers. Today they can access a whole cultural market that allows them to purchase all the necessary complements to organize a sexual rendezvous. A niche has been opened which incorporates 4. Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 5. Feona Atwood, “Fashion and Passion: Marketing Sex to Women,” Sexualities, 8, no. 4 (2005), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460705056617 (accessed August 8, 2015). 6. Feona Atwood, “Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture,” Sexualities 9, no. 1 (2006): 80, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/ 1363460706053336 (accessed August 8, 2015).

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women into the sexual market sector which until recently had been devoted to satisfying male wishes. It becomes imperative to point out that that we are referring to the sexual desires of heterosexual women. While the sex market has known for decades how to access the heterosexual and gay male niches, lesbians, transsexuals and queer sexualities remain outsiders to a commercial logic that responds, as we try to explain below, to a masculinized and normative discourse.

Female Sexuality as the Last Conquest of the Market The fact that women’s bodies circulate as marketable goods and that female sexuality is consumed as a lifestyle can be understood as a process of democratization of sex and sexuality, in which women move from sexual objects of male pleasure to desiring subjects. However, it is important to highlight that, after this democratization, what remains is the market value that sexuality has acquired in contemporary financial capitalism. In a context dominated by self-aware and reflexive subjectivities around constructions of identity, the relations established between cultural imagery and female subjectivity are very complex. Rosalind Gill (2008)7 resorts to Michel Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to explain the way in which power, or the dominant imagery, acts on and through human bodies and behavior. This process of normativization and control does not happen through notions of “domination” in the strict sense of the word, but it functions through normative regulations and negotiations that end up assuming and performing such power. This allows women a certain agency, so that they are not presented as docile or passive subjects, but neither as the autonomous and capable people proposed by liberal humanism. Gill considers “sexual subjectification” the process through which we stop talking about the utilization of women’s bodies as objects—sexist imagery—to present the use of the body of women as a tool of empowerment—progressive imagery—understanding that media discourses have corrected the passive conduct representative of women, to admit their agency. Thus, the representation of the female body is constructed through a discourse of enjoyment, freedom and, above all, choice. Women are not presented as in need of male approval, but as satisfied with their own complacency, with the surprising spontaneous result that they achieve male admiration.

7. Gill, “Empowerment/Sexism,” 40.

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This process instrumentalizes women’s agency and power as selling points and results in a new visual regime, a new imagery from where to incite and imply women to participate, by addressing them directly. This process becomes a project of discursive self-regulation in itself. Under the institutional representation of the new femininity, what actually happens is that women are invited to participate in a free and autonomous way of the traditional male model, thus making invisible the fact that our identity has been reduced to the self-fetishization or self-objectification of our bodies. The idea of self-regulation and self-discipline responds intimately to the social model that neoliberal capitalism demands: that of the independent entrepreneurial individual, flexible, adapting to changes and to the structures of the markets. Harvey and Gill (2011) have coined the term “sexual entrepreneur”8 to describe the way in which new female subjectivities are formed following this model of hypersexualization, a type of imperative according to which women must always be ready to live their sexuality in line with the dominant discourse. Women are constantly encouraged to be sexy and to like themselves that way, always being ready to perform that sexiness. This “always be ready” idea stands as a reality that implies work, dedication, will-power, constant recycling, investment, discipline, and responsibility. What is eventually being promoted is the image of a postfeminist subject, always prepared to comply with the market’s expectations. Beauty, being and looking desirable, and the consequent sexual performativity “constitute their ongoing project and [women] are exhorted to lead a ‘spicy’ sexual life, whose limits—not just heterosexuality and monogamy—are being closely watched as well as concealed or unauthorized through discourses of enjoyment and experimentation.”9 The question remains as to which gaze or regulatory principle of the social order is responding to this self-demand through which women must always be ready. This is a question that proves crucial for two main reasons. First, because the cultural imagery has not overcome the sexist principles of its own representation, and, as much agency as is bestowed upon women from institutional representations, this not only fetishizes women’s bodies, but also female sexuality itself. Secondly, because we must take into account that gender inequality is still a reality in our society. It is only in consumer culture where the mirage of having achieved full 8. Rosalind Gill and Laura Harvey, “Spicing it Up: Sexual Entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors,” in New Femininities. Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, ed. Rosalind Gill and Christina Sharff (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 52–67. 9. Ibid., 56.

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equality is constructed, masking the need to re-establish a public debate about the inconveniences of this fetishization. Different authors from the fields of psychology and social education like Coy and Garner explain that this allegedly emancipating imagery of women means a limitation of the social expectations of girls and women.10 All in all, the constant process of individualization promoted by the cultural project of neoliberalism, which, for women, has become a celebration of the feeling of “freedom of choice,” finds in the almost compulsive experience of its sexual agencies one of its most relevant representations in the cultural mainstream. The meritocratic system of regulation of neoliberal societies promotes a culture of constant selfdiscipline and performativity that allows for a “gender subjectivity”11 in accordance with dominant discourses, which trigger the construction of a new narcissistic femininity in which the sense of self-demand and discipline are vital. From this perspective, we bear witness to the construction of a female imagery which implies a purposeful re-sexualization of women, in which women are still marketable goods. On the other hand, we cannot forget that even though the call to women appeals to their narcissism, there still exists a dominant gaze or, if preferred, a politics of control, demand and scrutiny to which the bodies and the agencies of women are continually subjected. We concur that the hypersexualized imagery of women, while somehow promoting the image of a new femininity, is nevertheless imposed as the construction of a new media imagery in which selfdemand, diligence and discipline work as new technologies of social regulation in consonance with the meritocratic project of neoliberalism.

Fifty Shades of Grey and the Neoliberal Feminine Sexual Imagery We must incorporate the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon into this context of promotion and commodification of female sexuality. The novels

10. Maddy Coy and Maria Garner, “Definitions, Discourses and Dilemmas: Policy and Academic Engagement with the Sexualisation of Popular Culture,” Gender and Education 24, no. 3 (May 2012): 285–301, http://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/abs/10.1080/09540253.2012.667793?journalCode=cgee20 (accessed August 8, 2015). 11. Rosalind Gill, “Supersexualize Me: Advertising and the ‘Midriffs,’” in Mainstreaming Sex. The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. Feona Atwood (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 93–110.

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began as fanfiction12 of the Twilight Saga, another transmedia phenomenon that includes books, movies and much marketing built around fans. Fanfics, for example, have prolonged the life of the saga thanks to its rewriting and recreation possibilities. Under the name of Snowqueen’s Icedragon, the author, at the time a TV executive living in London, married and with two teenage children, started publishing periodically an erotic tale in Fanfiction.net: Masters of the Universe. This tale transposed the conflicts and tensions of the Twilight fantastic universe and its characters (a beautiful human teenager, still a virgin, in love with her classmate, a handsome young vampire; both confronting their communities in defense of their love) to the real world. The derived story is about the relationship between Anastasia, a young college student of literature, again a virgin, and Christian Grey, a young and handsome multimillionaire entrepreneur, and an aficionado of sadomasochistic sexual practices, or BDSM. Anastasia is torn between curiosity, rejection, and the acceptance of submission, and her adventure with Grey culminates in a love story that includes marriage and children. Just as Twilight incorporates elements from fantasy and science fiction into a classic romantic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey follows the logic of romance, in this case assuming the erotic charge of initiation into BDSM, described with detail from the female protagonist’s perspective. The repercussion of James’ internet uploads of erotic tales was so impressive that they soon became an e-book published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, who specialize in digital edition of copies by demand. The commercial success brought Vintage Publishing, a brand of The Random House Group, to buy the rights to the printed edition, which resulted in the well-known trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), Fifty Shades Darker (2012), and Fifty Shades Free (2012). Unlike other erotic publications, the distribution of the volumes in supermarkets, stationeries and bookshops well away from the specialized circuits made it a best-seller and a social phenomenon. By the end of 2015, over 125 million copies had been sold around the world, especially of the e-book edition, thus initiating another phenomenon: women’s consumption of erotic literature in digital format.13 In this sense, we are analyzing a popular product that has known how to exploit a niche market addressed specifically to a female target by combining two of the main cultural discourses through which femininity is promoted nowadays. First, the traditional discourse of traditional romantic 12. An exercise of literary recreation made by fans of a specific work or topic. 13. The anonymity and discretion that the purchase and reading of an erotic book in a digital format allows has uncovered a new niche market for women, unexploited until the Grey phenomenon.

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love in which a girl meets her protective blue prince; second, the experience of a free, full and allegedly self-aware sexuality, in line with contemporary postfeminism.

The Commercialization of Female Sexual Agency A considerable part of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is due to its perfect synchrony with its contemporary cultural market. It responds to a specific niche market of women whose experience of sexuality is torn between the romantic model at the heart of women’s sentimental education—the institutional discourse—and the sexual revolution that defines womanhood nowadays—the feminist discourse. In the story, beyond the alleged transgression that the main character’s initiation into sadomasochist sexual practices may imply, sexual relationships are understood within a heteronormative framework. The main characters are consistent with the traditional stereotype of romantic narratives: Anastasia is naive and inexperienced; Grey is charismatic, domineering and obscure. In the development of the plot romantic attachment prevails over the BDSM experiences of the main characters. When Grey invites Anastasia to participate in his sadomasochistic world, he explains that she must sign a contract which binds her to take on a set of demanding rules which confer onto Grey absolute power over her sexuality, looks, hygiene, and everyday life. From that moment on, the tension is not so much centered on Anastasia’s capability to assume the risks as in the benefits that she can enjoy by doing it: gaining access to the real identity of powerful Christian Grey, from whom she gets the impression that he has a vulnerable and sweet side. In turn, if Anastasia signs the contract, Grey gives up his previous sexual life to devote himself to her, her body and her erotic education. When Anastasia discovers sex, she creates an alter ego to describe it: her “inner Goddess,” a double that is ready to put aside her traditional background in order to ask for and give satisfaction with no regrets. In this sense, the tension and the sexual relations that happen between the two protagonists are always focused on Anastasia’s pleasure: it is her orgasms that become the real protagonists. Although she seldom takes the initiative in the sexual act, she makes the decision to fellate him14 and she invents ways of giving him pleasure; the stimulation of the clitoris or the cunnilingus are frequent practices in the narrative, while masculine 14. We have to take into account that fellatio is the most common sexual practice in pornographic narratives.

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ejaculation, the sole protagonist of most pornographic narratives, almost never appears or is mentioned. It is Anastasia who experiments different sexual pleasures thanks to the many gadgets and toys that Grey shows her. However, during most of the narrative, Grey only achieves pleasure after or with her, but his actions never seek his own sexual satisfaction. This concept of “empowerment through submission” is at the core of the controversy that comes with the success of the novels. On the one hand, this is an erotic narrative written from the perspective of the female character, a college student with no sexual experience but a cultivated, intelligent, reflexive person who is aware of her acts and their consequences. In fact, as happens in all initiation stories, her challenge is to stop being so studious and self-conscious so that she can give in to the adventure of (sexual) pleasures that life may bring. On the other hand, this voluntary submission remains controversial in that she does not like these sexual practices. She is not familiar with them and she just consents to them to adapt to Grey’s wishes. In this regard, Anastasia is again divided between her wish to experiment, her rejection of physical pain and her intuition that, deep within, Grey uses these sexual practices to conceal his real emotions. In order to analyze the transition from an erotic fanfiction to a mainstream publishing phenomenon, we need to inscribe Fifty Shades of Grey within the commercial discourses that propose an experience of sexuality encoded within luxury and sophistication. Christian Grey is a wealthy businessman who showers Anastasia with presents such as refined clothing and lingerie, personal computers, a Blackberry device, and sport cars, among other things which allow her to take a peek at the lifestyle that she could lead. The theatricality of the sexual scenes responds to the porno chic aesthetics dominant in advertising and in the audiovisual contemporary reality. Set in elegant and exceptional spaces (the elevator in Grey’s opulent building, hotel rooms, the countryside, near the construction site of a house they want to buy, a garden shed in Grey’s parents’ house) and often paired with wine tasting or a soundtrack especially chosen to emphasize the moments of pleasure, all these elements work together to build up an imagery where sexual enjoyment and money go hand in hand. And access to this imagery is not open to everyone: Grey’s secret, the “red room of pain,”15 is a BDSM temple in his luxurious apartment in Seattle, decorated with first quality materials, full of sexual toys of sophisticated designs, described in detail (masks, bondage ties and leather, whips,

15. The room where Christian Grey performs its BDSM sexual encounters.

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Chinese balls, anal plugs, expensive lingerie, torn pantyhose, etc.), and thoroughly organized. This space is also furnished with sound and lighting equipment to create specific atmospheres for his sexual encounters. The representation of the romance in the saga is constructed on the basis of a process of differentiation, both in terms of gender and class. Grey’s effort goes beyond satisfying Anastasia sexually. His wealth and his domineering character allow him to offer the inexperienced student a luxurious life in which she can enjoy expensive wine, exquisite food, helicopter rides, and stays in exclusive hotels and apartments. However, this process includes a “construction” of Anastasia according to the image of the hypersexualized and sophisticated woman analyzed here: like Pygmalion,16 Grey models Anastasia according to what the dominant gaze expects from a woman: dresses, make up, lingerie, heels, cocktails, perfumes, etc., and a firm discipline to maintain her body according to his aesthetic parameters. Sexuality is described in the book narrative as a marketable lifestyle based on a contract that can be (and actually is) broken at any time, all of which adds to the impression of a harmless BDSM erotic tale that women can safely share with friends while having drinks, à la Sex and the City. In this sense, the erotic story of Fifty Shades of Grey alludes directly to the contemporary feminine ideal based on style, image and self-fashioning.

Cultural Imagery and Film Narrative In the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey, the celebration of the woman’s point of view vanishes. Following a commercial logic constructed at a time when the novel had already been spread in a large number of media platforms and social networks, and once Grey and Anastasia had already been represented via fanvids17 incarnated by actors and actresses from the cast of popular young celebrities, the industry intends to reach as wide an audience as possible. Therefore, even though the novels are thought to reach an adult female reading public, the movie tries to reach a younger audience, so it downgrades the sexual tone in order to avoid a restrictive rating.18 From this perspective, Anastasia is performed as a more childish 16. A myth that traditional feminist criticism uses as the paradigmatic explanation of how the representation of women is undertaken from and for the masculine gaze. 17. Audiovisual recreations made by fans of a specific work or topic. 18. The NC-17 rating would have forbidden admission to people under 17. The goal of the producers was to get an R, for minors accompanied by a parent or an adult guardian, which they got, according to censors due to its “strong sexual

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and innocent character than in the novels. Even in those moments when she discovers sexual pleasure, and when it seems as if she were in control of her negotiations with Grey, the empowerment in the books by referring to herself as “goddess” disappears. Instead, she is constructed as always clumsy, always waiting, always doubting, always desiring. Alternatively, despite the fact that the sadomasochistic relationship remains at the center of the complex love story and is still negotiated in the movie, the centrality of female pleasure which dominates the erotic passages in the books is also withdrawn: Grey’s desire and gaze represent in the film what in the novels appears as female imagination and subjectivity. As opposed to the text, in which Grey’s body and his lust for Anastasia are thoroughly described, in the film the male body is secondary. Following the classical codes of audiovisual representation, Anastasia’s body is exposed on screen, showing it as an object to satisfy the pleasure of the audience’s gaze. There is a whole series of technical and artistic devices (shots, lighting, editing), at the service of a (male) gaze that explores and exploits actress Dakota Johnson’s body on the screen. This shift of point of view is representative of the incapacity or impossibility of commercial cinema to subvert the hegemonic gaze, constructed on male-dominated imagery, a fact that demotes female pleasure in favor of a patriarchal fetish of erotic relations. As Laura Mulvey (1975) described, the dominance of male power requires the fetishization of gazes and representations, to the extent that even women screenwriters or producers participate more or less consciously of these codes.19 As a result, the way in which the narrative is resolved in the film organizes the sexual desire with a male viewing logic: observing and scrutinizing the female body, the symbolic passivity from which the observed object is sublimated. From an eminently textual perspective, this double denial of the female subjective eroticism or female sexual desire reassigns women to the traditional symbolic spaces historically promoted through repetition of stereotyped representations and stories: in the romantic narrative, passivity and submission; as an erotic fetish, passivity and submission as well.

content including dialogue, some unusual behavior and graphic nudity, and for language” (Ben Child, “50 Shades of Grey R rating suggests bondage sex gagged,” Guardian, August 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/08/50shades-of-grey-r-rating-suggests-bondage-sex-gagged (accessed 15 August 2015)). 19. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 833–44.

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Even though it is true that Fifty Shades of Grey is framed against an eminently male rhetoric and narrative,20 explaining the success of the literary trilogy and the first of its movie adaptations among a female audience requires the explanation of this phenomenon as a product with a clear and global marketing strategy. One that has taken advantage of those feminist principles which defend the experience of a free and powerful female sexuality by transforming them into marketable goods. However, despite its ambivalence, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon does include some transgressive aspects, which have progressively been blurred with each public representation and debate until it has become the commercially normativized phenomenon hitherto described. These aspects are related to the fanfiction origin of the novels, and allow for an explanation of women’s relationship with Christian Grey’s sadomasochism from an emotional and affective point of view.

Fanfiction as a Female Writing Practice The novelty of Fifty Shades of Grey as a mainstream novel that exposes a woman’s sexual fantasies using a first-person narrative has been neglected over time. As the public conversation focused on the commercial phenomena, critical discourses ridiculed it, comparing the trilogy with cult erotic authors and movies such as Marquis de Sade, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1980) or Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1978). Our intention here is not to vindicate the literary quality of Fifty Shades of Grey, but to explore the relevance of the printed version of a fanfiction as a predominantly female practice. In the 18th century the rewriting of canonical works with the objective of perverting and fantasizing with the narratives was a popular practice among female readers, although this activity was practiced basically in the private domestic sphere.21 We believe that it is necessary to take into account the fanfiction origins of the Fifty Shades of Grey’s phenomenon as a female subculture because the lack of respect that a considerable sector of media and cultural criticism display against it actually discloses a considerable prejudice against women and femininity. As Radway (1984)22 or Huyssen (2006)23 remind us, female taste and pleasure—sexual 20. Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Feminism and Popular Culture (London: Women’s Press, 2000). 21. Thomas Laqueur, “Credits, Novels, Masturbation,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 119–28. 22. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (London: Carolina Press, 1984).

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or not—tend to be problematized, an attitude protected by a culture and a social order that are classist, heteronormative, and patriarchal. The idea that women who read romantic novels are unsatisfied and looking for pleasure in badly written erotic fantasies belongs to a cultural imagery deeply rooted in Western societies. Referring to these novels as “porn for moms” is not only an indicator of a socially extended moral panic that equates romantic narratives with pornography, but also a direct allusion to the mother figure; that woman who, within the patriarchal discourse, has the duty to disregard her sexual desire so as to devote herself to her family’s (and her husband’s24) need for care and affection. Hidden behind the statement that Fifty Shades of Grey is “porn for moms” is an element of social anxiety in which stereotypes of gender and classist and chauvinistic attitudes are combined with popular products marketed for women, which are despised in patronizing ways. Romantic fiction has been targeted by the intellectual and cultural masculine elites since the advent of mass publishing in the 19th century. The control surrounding women’s moral education turned romantic fiction into an immoral and unhealthy practice, accused of promoting and stimulating inappropriate fantasies. What the controversy surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey actually reveals is that female fantasies are still being read today as substitutes for real romantic and sexual relationships, as a sort of amateur porn for unsatisfied women. This idea connects with a belief in the immaturity and ingenuity of women, considered unable to distinguish the cultural products appropriate to their pre-assigned morality. The moral fear that links fanfiction’s subcultural practices with the dangers that children and teenagers can face online (such as pornography, cyber-bullying or sexual harassment) is a sign of the lack of knowledge about the rules and regulations that the fanfiction communities impose upon themselves, with a clear definition of the limits and subgenres that they are ready to allow and develop. With the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon fanfiction has “come out of the closet” and has moved from being a subcultural practice limited to initiates and fanatics to becoming a profitable internet phenomenon. E.L. James chose to write an “AU het slash Twilight fanfic,” that is, a 23. Andreas Huyssen, Después de la gran división. Modernismo, cultura de masas, posmodernismo (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2006). 24. Mothers represent a category which is in high demand in contemporary porn, framed within the logic of self-fetishized and postfeminist femininity, although not as desiring subjects, but as objects of desire for men (e.g.: “MILF” = Mother I’d Like to Fuck).

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heterosexual (het) narrative that poses an alternative universe (AU) typical of a gay and lesbian creative exercise (slash) through which the latent and highly puritan sexual tension of the traditional romantic work upon which she fantasizes, the Twilight Saga, is resolved. Consequently, Fifty Shades of Grey responds to this fan logic, according to which, for Russ (1985)25 and Lamb & Veith (1986),26 the slash genre allows for a liberation for the women who write it, putting in order their sexual desires and fantasies with a clear vocation of disassociation from the masculinized pornographic narrative. As seen above, the Grey phenomenon has abandoned the communal space provided by fanfiction and must be understood within the erotic and pornographic turn of commercial popular culture, by proposing a narrative in which play and fantasy go hand in hand. Nevertheless, we should not ignore the fact that all fantasy expresses an ideology and that representations often respond to pre-established roles, which are difficult to dismiss since they belong to the hegemonic cultural imagery. The incorporation of women into the cultural industries to represent sexual contents does not imply an immediate overcoming of normative gender and cultural codes. Despite the fact that nowadays consumer culture and new technologies allow for a certain cultural democratization, this does not imply that female creativity can be disassociated from a sentimental education based on historically sexist romantic narratives, which, as is the case with Fifty Shades of Grey, exalt the “empowerment of submission.” Our critical reflection does not focus on the evaluation of the artistic value of Fifty Shades of Grey, as we have made clear. We think that the analysis of the phenomenon should reflect on the forms of production of gender identities in a moment when gender is fully constituted by sexuality. We should not forget that gender/sex relations are inscribed within existing power differences, which, simultaneously, determine the practices, acts, and identities that produce and reproduce representations, discourses and meanings. In this sense, the main questions here are: can women escape from those representations in which they are objects of a masculine desire? Or are they, as the Fifty Shade’s movie shows, (re)imagining and (re)constructing themselves as such?

25. Joana Russ, “Pornography by Women for Women with Love,” in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (New York: The Crossing Press, 1985), 79–99. 26. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diane Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence and Star Trek series,” in Erotic Universe. Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 236–55.

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Bibliography Atwood, Feona. “Fashion and Passion: Marketing Sex to Women.” Sexualities 8, no. 4 (2005): 392–406. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi /abs/10.1177/1363460705056617 (accessed August 8, 2015). —. “Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture.” Sexualities 9, no. 1 (2006): 77–94. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363 460706053336 (accessed April 8, 2017). Child, Ben. “50 Shades of Grey R rating suggests bondage sex gagged.” Guardian, August 8, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015 /jan/08/50-shades-of-grey-r-rating-suggests-bondage-sex-gagged (accessed August 15, 2015). Coy, Maddy and Maria Gamer. “Definitions, Discourses and Dilemmas: Policy and Academic Engagement with the Sexualisation of Popular Culture.” Gender and Education 24, no.3 (May 2012): 285–301. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540253.2012.667793 ?journalCode=cgee20 (accessed August 8, 2015). Huyssen, Andreas. Después de la gran división. Modernismo, cultura de masas, posmodernismo. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2006. Gill, Rosalind. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising.” Feminism and Psychology 18 (2008): 35–60. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353507084950 (accessed August 8, 2015). —. “Supersexualize Me: Advertising and the ‘Midriffs.’” In Mainstreaming Sex. The Sexualization of Western Culture, edited by Feona Atwood, 93–110. London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2009. Gill, Rosalind, and Laura Harvey. “Spicing it Up: Sexual Entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors.” In New Femininities. Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Sharff, 52–67. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Laqueur, Thomas. “Credits, Novels, Masturbation.” In Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 119–28. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995. Lamb, Patricia Frazer and Diane Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence and Star Trek Series.” In Erotic Universe. Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo, 236–55. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. McNair, Brian. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage, 2009.

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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833–44. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. London: Carolina Press, 1984. Russ, Joana. “Pornography by Women for Women with Love.” In Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts. Feminist Essays, 79–99. New York: The Crossing Press, 1985. Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Feminism and Popular Culture. London: Women’s Press, 2000.

CHAPTER TWO OF CHICKS AND GIRLS: NEW FEMININITIES IN CHICK CULTURE HEIKE MIßLER

Doctor: “You could not pay me enough to be twenty-four again!” Hannah: “Well they’re not paying me at all.”1

Introduction This essay analyzes Lena Dunham’s critically acclaimed HBO television series Girls (2012–present)2 as a recent example of so-called chick culture. In the first episode, two of the main characters, Shoshanna and Jessa, talk about the popular comedy Sex and the City, also aired on HBO between 1998 and 2004. While Jessa feigns indifference (and even ignorance), Shoshanna venerates the show, and immediately begins to analyze Jessa’s and her own personalities based on the Sex and the City characters: You know, you’re funny, because you’re definitely like a Carrie, but with some Samantha aspects, and Charlotte hair. That’s like a really good combination. I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes Samantha kind of comes out [pauses] and then I mean when I’m at school I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.3

1. “Vagina Panic,” Television, Girls, directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 2. 2. As of the writing of this paper, Girls is in its fifth season. This paper focuses on the first and second season for purposes of detailed discussion. 3. “Pilot,” Television, Girls, directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 1.

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Being in their early to mid-twenties, Shoshanna and Jessa are part of the generation which grew up in the midst of the cultural and media hype created around Carrie Bradshaw and the surge of copycat texts (both on paper and screen) which followed. Shoshanna’s analysis shows that she identifies with Sex and the City and its protagonists, and it marks her as knowledgeable in a form of cultural production which has become known as chick culture. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young have defined chick culture as “a group of mostly American and British popular culture media forms focused primarily on twenty- to thirtysomething middle-class women.”4 This definition certainly covers the format of Dunham’s show. Similarities between classic chick productions like Sex and the City and Girls are conspicuous. Girls, like Sex and the City, has four stylish, heterosexual, white, middle-class female protagonists,5 who represent different character types. Hannah is an aspiring writer, eccentric and unkempt. Marnie, who works in an art gallery, is uptight and disciplined. Jessa is a cross between a hippie/traveler and a femme fatale; and Shoshanna is the naive and innocent girl-next-door character. The show is also set in New York, though the glamorous avenues of Manhattan are replaced by the hipper parts of Brooklyn, which, just like the setting in Sex and the City, serve as contextualization of the girls’ situation in life, their social status, and to a certain extent even their mindsets. The viewers of the show could, in fact, easily perform the same analysis based on the four main characters of Girls that Shoshanna performs for Jessa and herself based on Sex and the City. Just like in the latter, the different types of young womanhood presented in the former provide the audience with multiple offers of identification within a spectrum of white, middle-class heterosexuality. As the creator of Girls, Dunham is critical of the obvious comparison with Sex and the City. In an article for the Hollywood Reporter she said that “[t]here [was] no Sex and the City revenge plot” in her series, and that

4. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 1. 5. The beauty ideals of Girls have been extensively discussed by fans and critics alike. While I agree that the female body in Dunham’s show does not underlie a strict regime of work-outs and beauty routines (as it does on Sex and the City), and that especially the character of Hannah Horvath challenges normative ideals of female beauty, I still contend that all four women represent youthful, stylish and attractive versions of femininity. Narbona’s work in this volume is an instance of this ongoing discussion in academia.

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she “revere[s] that show just as much as any girl of [her] generation.”6 Girls is certainly not shy to reference its successful predecessor. There are, however, significant differences between the two programs. The most obvious one is the de-glamorization of the narrative. Girls has adapted chick aesthetics to a post-recession, post-9/11 New York. This essay argues that Girls must be seen as both a continuation of the “chick” format and as a challenge to it. In terms of its narrative style and its contents, Girls largely remains true to the chick formula popularized by texts such as Sex and the City, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and other successful femalecentered titles of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It does, however, renegotiate and complicate the portrayal of postfeminist7 identities in contemporary U.S. popular media culture. Girls pushes the boundaries of socially accepted representations of (young) womanhood by making professional as well as romantic failure a vital part of its narrative. The show’s tagline “Living the dream. One mistake at a time” encapsulates the predicament all four female protagonists find themselves in. These are not the high-flying, well-heeled and perfectly groomed working women who take Manhattan by storm and juggle demanding careers and passionate affairs without the batting of an eye. The girls8 of Girls are insecure, selfinvolved and flail through life. It is a fact that they are neither overachievers nor bombshells, and that creates fresh perspectives on televised femininities. Curiously, in its representation of male identities, Girls takes a different approach. It also shows the strain that a postrecession workplace has on some of them, but in contrast to the rather clueless female protagonists, the male characters mostly seem to know

6. Lesley Goldberg, “TCA: Lena Dunham Says HBO’s Girls Isn’t Sex and the City,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter .com/live-feed/tca-hbo-girls-lena-dunham-judd-apatow-281483 (accessed August 23, 2015). 7. I use the term “postfeminist” in the same sense that Rosalind Gill uses it, i.e. as a “sensibility,” rather than as a political movement or a coherent sum of beliefs, cf. Rosalind Gill, Gender and The Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Other authors discussing the term in this volume include Martausová. 8. I purposely refer to the female protagonists as “girls” in analogy to the title of the show. I interpret Dunham’s choice of title as a positive re-appropriation of the term girls in a postfeminist context, rather than a term of belittlement. Note that the use of the term chick in chick lit and chick culture has undergone the same development. Its meaning evolved from a derogatory or ironic into a potentially empowering one for a collective of female readers and consumers (cf. Ferriss and Young, Chick Lit, 2006).

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what they want and are often presented as “voices of moral authority,”9 as Lauren DeCarvahlo put it. They are cast as most desirable when they assert themselves as old-fashioned alpha males, professionally and/or romantically. At first glance, the male characters of Girls thus seem to confirm what Susan Faludi has claimed for the representation of manhood in U.S. media since 9/11, namely that there is a tendency to revert to (and to celebrate) regressive, essentialist and patriarchal stereotypes in the manner of John Wayne.10 On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Faludi’s 9/11 backlash thesis is too simplistic as far as the representation of male and female identities in Girls is concerned.

Chicks vs. Girls The chick is the gender construct popularized by Carrie Bradshaw, the heroine of Candace Bushnell’s compilation of newspaper columns Sex and the City (1997) in the United States; and Bridget Jones, the heroine of Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) in the UK, as well as their respective adaptations for the small and big screen. The stereotypical chick is single, lives and works in an urban center, is surrounded by a network of friends, and struggles to find a fulfilling job and a meaningful relationship. The best-known element of chick culture is certainly chick lit—“lit” being the abbreviation for “literature.” Other media forms like movies, TV programs, advertisements, music, magazines, websites and blogs have also been grouped under the label.11 Chick lit entered mainstream popular culture almost immediately after the publication of Bushnell’s and Fielding’s books, and the label chick lit itself soon became a ubiquitous reference for all things pink, frothy, funny and generally female-centered and female-targeted. Gripping popular media culture for little more than ten to fifteen years, chick lit became an incontestable moment of the 1990s and early 2000s: entire sections in bookshops were reserved for the brightly hued novels, women got together to watch the latest episodes of Sex and the City, and words like abso-f***ing-lutely, Brazilian, singleton and smug-marrieds entered common parlance. As with any hype, the market for chick lit and its television or film adaptations reached a point of saturation relatively quickly. Chick lit’s mass success slowly petered out towards the end of the first decade of the new 9. Lauren DeCarvalho, “Hannah and Her Entitled Sisters: (Post)feminism, (Post)recession, and Girls,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 367–70. 10. Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (New York: Picador, 2008). 11. Ferriss and Young, Chick Flicks, 2.

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millennium, triggering many voices in the publishing industries to proclaim its death. Yet, the big names in the genre, whose novels have helped to spur the publishing buzz—e.g., Marian Keyes, Jenny Colgan, Sophie Kinsella in the UK; and Jennifer Weiner, Meg Cabot, or Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus in the United States—still publish roughly a novel a year (sometimes two), and they are rewarded with more than satisfying sales figures. One reason why chick lit is no longer quite as visible in mainstream media is that the original formula of the genre, encapsulated in the many single-girl-in-the-city novels, has changed considerably over time and brought forth numerous permutations. Chick lit as it once was may thus have become a residual discourse.12 Rather than calling it dead, however, I contend that it remains an eminent point of reference and an inspiration for new formats of postfeminist media culture and literature, such as Dunham’s Girls.13 The most distinguishing feature of the chick formula is its humor. Chick narratives are light-hearted, regardless of the seriousness of the issues at stake, and their tone can range from light humor to biting satire. One of the reasons why humor is compulsory for chick formats is that it is a convenient vehicle for criticism. As Bonnie Dow has pointed out with regard to feminism on popular television, comedy has “the ability to defuse the anxiety and controversy attached to social change,”14 and lends itself particularly well to transporting potentially subversive messages. Due to their use of humor and irony, chick narratives have managed to challenge the default settings of an earlier famously gendered genre: the popular romance. In the history of female-driven and female-centered popular fiction, chick fictions have successfully bridged a gap. Like the popular romance in the vein of Harlequin or Mills and Boon novels, they speak to women who want romance, but who do not want their heroines to be reduced to their love relationships. The chick formula has thus emancipated itself from the traditional pillars of the popular romance

12. Cf. Raymond Williams, Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 13. This is a claim that I discuss in depth in my study The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). This article contains passages taken verbatim from the above study. I am grateful to Routledge for allowing me to reuse previously published material. 14. Bonnie Dow, “‘How Will You Make it on Your Own?’ Television and Feminism Since 1970,” A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode .html?id=g9781405100946_chunk_g978140510094621 (accessed May 26, 2015).

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defined by the Romance Writers of America as a “central love story” and an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”15 and has debunked the master narrative of unconditional, everlasting love. Finally, chick narratives comment critically on normative discourses of femininity and satirize increasingly commercialized lifestyles. In short, they clearly offer potential for subversion and for female empowerment. However, they do so predominantly for pre-defined niches of readers/viewers, and even then, there are considerable limits to the subversive power. The chick-lit formula is modeled on a narrowly defined catalogue of desirable life aims, marked by heteronormativity and whiteness, which is why many feminist critics have found fault with the genre.16 Yet, I argue that the chick formula has changed over the course of the last ten years. One important change which predates the recession of 2008 is the beginning diversification of chick texts, i.e. the increasing number of rewritings and appropriations from and for non-white and/or queer communities. It is, of course, debatable how far these rewritings challenge the initial formula and how far they only make it more palatable to new markets, without actually modifying its cultural politics. The second development is a noticeable shift in focus in the formula from the heterosexual relationship to the heroine’s career. Indeed, the workplace has gradually emerged as one if not the new key factor in the chick’s happily-ever-after plot. In recent years, there have been numerous examples of chick texts in which the heroines’ professional efforts (and failures) drive the action forward as much as or even more than the love storyline. In chick lit, one trend is to have heroines open their own businesses. These professional efforts often occur in domains that are safely connoted as female, such as a cooking school, cupcake bakery, or sweetshop, e.g., in Melissa Senate’s The Love Goddess Cooking School (2010), Jenny Colgan’s Meet Me at the Cupcake Café (2011) and Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams (2012) respectively. Many other chick-lit heroines, however, pursue new career paths in formerly maledominated fields such as detective work or in managerial positions, e.g., Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s Citizen Girl (2004), Lynn Harris’s Death by Chick Lit (2007), Amy Silver’s Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (2009), Erica Kennedy’s Feminista (2009), and Marian 15. “About the Romance Genre,” Romance Writers of America, www.rwa.org/ p/cm/ld/fid=578 (accessed August 08, 2015). 16. Cf. for instance Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009) or Ferriss and Young’s Chick Lit (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), which have critically analyzed selected chick lit texts and discussed the representational shortcomings of the genre.

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Keyes’s The Mystery of Mercy Close (2012). On the screen, another evident trend is the introduction of female slacker characters. The slacker is a stereotypically male gender construct, who, while trying to figure out what he wants from life, spends most his time following his most puerile impulses and generally enjoying life and avoiding the treadmill of corporate capitalism. In many romantic comedies of the early 21st century, the so-called “slacker-striver dynamic,”17 in which the male slacker is paired with a highly driven female character, was a very common plot structure. Examples for female slackers are Kristen Wiig’s character in the romantic comedy Bridesmaids (written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo), Tina Fey’s character in the comedy sitcom satire 30 Rock (HBO, 2006–2013), Zooey Deschanel’s in New Girl (Fox, 2011–present), the two protagonists, Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, of Michael King’s and Whitney Cumming’s 2 Broke Girls (CBS, 2011–present), and finally, of course, the ultimate slacker: Hannah Horvath in Girls. Work has thus become an increasingly important part of postfeminist female identities, and with this shift in focus there has also been a shift in pressure. So far, there has been very little space in the chick formula for heroines who want to take time off work, reconsider their options, or who simply have no wish to work and enjoy financial independence. The discourse of what Angela McRobbie has termed “top girls”18 seems to have supplanted, or at least juxtaposes, earlier retreatist discourses, such as Diane Negra identified in a number of films and TV series in the decade before the recession.19 Top girls are the model subjects of neoliberalism. McRobbie explains that [i]ndividuals must now choose the kind of life they want to live. Girls must have a life-plan. They must become more reflexive in regard to every aspect of their lives, from making the right choice in marriage, to taking responsibility for their own working lives and not being dependent on a job for life or on the stable and reliable operations of a large scale bureaucracy, which in the past would have allocated its employees specific, and possibly unchanging, roles.20 17. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, “Neoliberal Frames and Genres of Inequality: Recession-Era Chick Flicks and Male-centred Corporate Melodrama,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 344–61. 18. McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism, 54. 19. As one “master narrative of postfeminism,” retreatist texts typically lead their protagonists out of urban, professional centers and thereby “out of the public sphere,” cf. Negra, What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 5. 20. McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism, 19.

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Individualism, having a life project, and believing that success can be achieved if only the right decisions are made are the basis for what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker have identified as the conflation of postfeminism and neoliberalism: “Indeed, post-feminism proclaims for gender what neoliberalism advocates in a broader sense: both assert that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for their social status.”21 Some chick texts have already started to question these very linear narratives of female success and responsibility, but up to now few have challenged the logics of the neoliberal workplace as explicitly as Girls. Girls does not offer solutions, but by normalizing failure and bad decisions as inevitable parts of life, it not only defuses anxieties, it also affords young women the freedom not to be “top girls.”

Post-Recession Gender Identities in Girls The economic recession serves as a visible backdrop for the storyline of Girls. Unlike its glamorous predecessor Sex and the City, where shots of trendy, expensive restaurants and designer stores, stylish apartments or brownstones in upmarket neighborhoods were the norm, Girls rarely uses tourist-brochure images of New York, and if it does, it is to contrast them to the humble abodes of the protagonists. Despite being from middle to upper-middle class families, they live in very small studio apartments or flatshares, go to inexpensive restaurants (unless they are invited), cafés and semi-legal warehouse parties, or meet up for drinks and dinner at Hannah’s flat. None of them work in chic or well-paid environments. The only exception is Marnie, who is an assistant in an art gallery in the first season, only to be downsized, i.e. fired, at the beginning of season two because her employer is facing financial difficulties.22 Most of the protagonists rely on support from their families in order to afford their lives in the city. As Emily Nussbaum has pointed out, Girls lays open “the financial safety nets that most stories about NY—and many New Yorkers—prefer to leave invisible.”23 The show starts with that very act, i.e. with Hannah’s parents announcing that they will cut off the financial support for their daughter, who, since graduating from Oberlin College

21. Negra and Tasker, “Neoliberal Frames,” 348. 22. “It’s about Time,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 1. 23. Emily Nussbaum, “Hannah Barbaric,” The New Yorker, February 11, 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/hannah-barbaric (accessed August 23, 2015).

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two years prior, has dabbled at writing a memoir.24 Despite Hannah’s famous drug-infused protest that she “may be the voice of [her] generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation,”25 her parents are convinced that it is time for her to take up a proper job, so that they, in turn, can save towards their dream of a lake house. Hannah’s reluctance to turn her liberal arts education into paid work cannot only be ascribed to her slackerdom, but rather to a general reluctance to take on responsibility for her own actions and, to a no lesser extent, to her anxiety issues. The second episode of the first season shows Hannah at the gynecologist, being examined for STDs. She explains to the doctor that she has a “Forrest Gump based fear” of AIDS and then begins to ruminate: The thing is that, these days if you are diagnosed with AIDS, it’s actually not a death sentence. There are so many good drugs and people live a long time. Also, if you have AIDS, there’s a lot of stuff people aren’t going to bother you about. Like, for example, no one is going to call you on the phone and say “Did you get a job?” or “Did you pay your rent?” or “Are you taking an HMTL course yet?” because all they’re going to say is “Congratulations on not being dead.” You know, it’s also a really good excuse to be mad at a guy. It’s not just something dumb like, “You didn’t text me back,” it’s like “You gave me AIDS. So deal with that. Forever.” Maybe I’m actually not scared of AIDS. Maybe I thought I was scared of AIDS, but really what I am is... wanting AIDS.26

The absurdity of this semi-ironic monologue—wanting AIDS in order to have a salient excuse for all of life’s trickier moments—shows that Hannah is more than aware of all the social expectations directed at her, even if they relate to supposedly normal things like finding a job, paying rent or being in a functional relationship. Her fears of not performing adequately in any of these compartments are coupled with an unequalled sense of self-entitlement and a distinct need for attention (“Congratulations on not being dead”). The social criticism inherent in Hannah’s wish to eschew responsibility may be somewhat pre-empted by her unfeeling stylization of AIDS as an easy solution to her everyday problems. On the other hand, Hannah’s deep self-involvement is also the only protection mechanism she knows. Her anxiety issues are partly about her fear of making the wrong decisions, and the scene at the gynecologist clearly shows that Hannah would go to some lengths in order not to be held accountable for her own actions. In this sense, Girls criticizes postfeminist 24. ”Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1. 25. Ibid. 26. “Vagina Panic,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 2.

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notions of choice as a “modality of constraint”27 as McRobbie put it, because it shows a young woman clearly influenced by a neoliberal discourse of femininity, in which “new lines and demarcations are drawn between those subjects who are judged responsive to the regime of personal responsibility, and those who fail miserably.”28 While Hannah may not have professional ambitions in the conventional sense, she clings on to her dream of becoming a writer. However, her eagerness is taken to extremes and ridiculed when she begins to live her life doing things “for the story.”29 She recklessly looks for exciting things to write about by, e.g., propositioning her slightly lecherous boss at a law firm and then quitting when he refuses her, watching her boyfriend Adam masturbate, and taking cocaine which she procures from her neighbor Laird, a former drug addict with whom she has sex at the end of the same episode.30 Adam calls her out on her obsessive search for inspiration when he tells her that she is too self-involved to distinguish between their relationship and her memoir. When she is concerned about their lack of communication because Adam did not tell her that he is in AA, he yells: “You don’t want to know me, you want to come over in the night and have me fuck the dog shit out of you and then leave and write about it in your diary.”31 Hannah’s egocentrism and her quest “to achieve actual things”32—by which she means something other than just having a relationship with Adam—are also the cause for their break-up at the end of season one. Hannah’s character is thus exemplary for a shift of focus from young women’s romantic to their professional endeavors: pursuing her dream of becoming a writer turns all other social interactions into a means to an end. Her career, which for Hannah is intricately linked to her search for identity, is her fundamental motivation in life. “I’m busy trying to become who I am,”33 she tells her parents when they ask her what she does all day. It is ironic that although Hannah’s wish to write makes up such a significant part of her identity, she cannot write an account of herself. When her parents keep probing her about her plans, Hannah explains that 27. McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism, 19. 28. Ibid. 29. “Hard Being Easy,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 5. 30. Ibid. 31. “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 7. 32. “She Did,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 10. 33. “Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1.

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since she is writing a memoir, she will have to live a little first before she can finish it. Whether these are just dilatory tactics on Hannah’s side remains open to speculation, but the parallel between the state of Hannah’s memoir and her sense of self is obvious: both are still in the process of formation.34 Hannah is by far not the only insecure, self-involved and irresponsible character in the show, nor is she the only one who frequently makes the wrong decisions. Her friend Jessa also avoids all social duties, be it work or stable relationships. In the second episode of season one, she purposely misses an appointment for an abortion of her unwanted pregnancy, while drinking and making out with a stranger in a bar—and conveniently miscarrying in the process.35 At the end of season one, her impromptu marriage with Thomas-John, a wealthy venture capitalist—or, to use his words: “the only fucking finance guy who actually made a profit from the recession”36—effectively allows her to delay working for her livelihood. Thomas-John represents the ultimate caretaker who lets her indulge in her painting and wants to give her time to develop her art, while she enjoys the comforts of his Williamsburg loft. When their relationship falters after only a few weeks, Jessa is not ashamed to bargain her way out of their marriage by asking him for a payment of several thousand dollars in exchange for an annulment.37 In a post-recession climate, gold-digging seems to be preferable still to working menial jobs, because, as Jessa stated with dismay when she started a job as a babysitter: “You know what the weirdest part about having a job is? You have to be there every day even on the days you don’t feel like it.”38 It is easy to dismiss Jessa’s comment as that of a privileged white middle-class girl, but on the other hand it also provides a Marxist critique in a nutshell: Jessa feels alienated by work, because it does not hold much promise for her. Neither do relationships, and even with regard to friendship, she seems to lack genuine interest and recoils from any real commitment. On a visit to her father’s new home in the countryside, she abandons Hannah and disappears without a word or trace, leaving Hannah to find out in season

34. I am indebted to Eva Michely for this remark. 35. “Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1. 36. “It’s a Shame about Ray,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 4. 37. Ibid. 38. “Hannah’s Diary,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 4.

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three that Jessa is in rehab.39 Both Hannah’s and Jessa’s self-involvement thus has destructive tendencies—Jessa is a drug-addict, and Hannah suffers from stress-induced obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as is revealed towards the end of season two when Hannah is given a deadline of one month to write an e-book.40 The characters of Shoshanna and Marnie are often put into contrast with Jessa and Hannah because they appear to be more in charge of their own lives. Nevertheless, Shoshanna also shies away from responsibility. She advocates discourses of choice and empowerment without actually making any choices. Katherine Bell has called her a near-caricature of the uptalking college girl who has reverently ingested all the life lessons presented by Sex and the City. “I may be deflowered, but I am not devalued”41 is one of the gems she produces after she has lost her virginity. A “postfeminist pedagogue,”42 Shoshanna hides behind selfhelp-book slogans rather than practicing her self-proclaimed postfeminist freedom. Her defense of the fictional self-help text Listen Ladies! A Tough-Love Approach to the Tough Game of Love is absurd because she is the only of the four protagonists who is not sexually active. Elaine Blair has summed up her predicament highlighting the difference between Shoshanna’s favorite show and Girls: Sex and the City trades in coarse satirical categories; everything that happens to the main characters turns out to be an example of some contemporary social or sexual phenomenon, every man or woman they meet is caught, chloroformed, pinned, and labelled as a particular urban type. Girls, on the other hand, shows a young woman deep under the influence of coarse categories.43

Since Shoshanna is still a student, she is not immediately affected by the recession. Marnie, on the other hand, the most responsible and disciplined of the four, experiences a number of setbacks in her career. After being downsized at her old art gallery, she has a shameful interview with a 39. “Truth or Dare,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 3, Episode 2. 40. “On All Fours,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 9. 41. “It’s about Time,” Girls, Season 2, Episode 1. 42. Katherine, Bell, “‘Obvie, We’re the Ladies!’ Postfeminism, Privilege, and HBO’s Newest Girls,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 364. 43. Elaine Blair, “The Loves of Lena Dunham,” The New York Review of Books, June 7, 2012, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/loves-lena -dunham/ (accessed August 23, 2015).

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curator who tells her that she does not see Marnie and her Ann Taylor suit in the hip world of art, despite her qualifications. Dejected, she eventually decides to take on a demeaning but well-paid job as a hostess at a gentlemen’s club.44 Encouraged by one of her friends, Ray, to do something that she really wants to do, she decides to pursue a career as a singer, only to painfully embarrass herself and all of her friends when she performs a tasteless song at her ex-boyfriend’s office party.45 Even though Marnie is much more willing to assume responsibility than Hannah, and has more qualifications than her, she still fails to secure a job in the inhospitable workplace that is New York. Both Hannah’s and Marnie’s pursuits of their dreams only entail disastrous experiences and thus demonstrate that the discourse of the top girl and the young woman as icon of social change are dangerously deceptive ideals. In effect, the young women of Girls are all part of what Ross Perlin called generation “intern nation” in his 2011 book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, in which he describes how “there is an undeniably ubiquity of unpaid work, youth exploitation, and often insurmountable barriers to entry level positions in the U.S. and in other capitalist economies.”46 Admittedly, Girls utters criticism of these developments on a limited scale only, that is only for a privileged group of individuals. Many detractors of the show have berated its whiteness and heteronormativity. In this respect, Girls is little better than Sex and the City, in its exclusion and/or stereotyping of ethnic or queer characters. Its criticism is contained. However, it needs to be noted that Girls at least shows, as Samuel Chambers remarked, that the “crucial point about normalisation [is that] it produces effects even on those it marks as ostensibly ‘normal.’”47 While this does not justify the show’s lack of diversity, it does at least point to the power of normative discourses. Curiously, the young men of Girls seem to fare much better in the post-recession economy than their female counterparts. This is interesting given that, as Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker have pointed out in their

44. “I Get Ideas,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 2. 45. “It’s Back,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 8. 46. Bell, “Obvie,” 365. 47. Samuel Chambers, The Queer Politics of Television (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 123.

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work on gendered representations of the recession,48 media accounts of the impact of economic hardship on men and women have been rather imbalanced. One ubiquitous image, they claim, is that of the recessionary man who has to carry most of the burden of the downturn, whereas “[r]ecessionary femininity is not routinely associated with crisis in the manner of masculinity; rather, it is presented often as adaptive and resourceful, if typically in domestic and consuming, rather than public or professional contexts.”49 Current statistics on unemployment, the gender inequity in the minimum-wage sectors, the quota of women on management boards, and the gender pay gap obviously paint a very different picture of the impact of the recession on men’s and women’s economic situation, and counter the idea that men suffer disproportionately more.50 Girls also contradicts this image of a post-recession crisis of masculinity and instead presents its male characters either as “voices of moral authority”51 or as ultimately desirable only if they possess certain assets. Jessa’s marriage to a successful, if ridiculous, businessman is a case in point for the latter, as is Marnie’s rekindling her relationship with her (formerly) too-nice boyfriend Charlie after he has successfully set up his own company, and also Hannah’s short fling with a divorced doctor, who owns a refurbished brownstone. In all three examples, the camera lingers on the stylish and expensive interiors of the apartment, office complex, or house in the respective episodes, fetishizing the comfortable features of a certain standard of life. At least for some of the relationships it presents, Girls replaces romantic feelings with neoliberal gestures: its heroines choose partners for their capitalist benefits, even if they only stay with them for a short time. This transposition of neoliberal logics onto the protagonists’ emotional lives further suggests that the real challenge for the female protagonists of Girls is no longer to find romantic love, but rather to achieve professional and personal success, even if it is only by their alliances with successful men. When Hannah pulls on one of the doctor’s cashmere sweaters the morning after, she jokes: “Okay, I think

48. Cf. Negra and Tasker, “Neoliberal Frames” and Negra and Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 49. Negra and Tasker, “Neoliberal Frames,” 347. 50. Cf., for instance, Julia Kollewe. “Gender Pay Gap: Women Effectively Working for Free until End of Year.” The Guardian, November 8, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/09/gender-pay-gap-women-working-free -until-end-of-year (accessed February 24, 2016). 51. Lauren DeCarvalho, “Hannah,” 369.

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your sweater costs more than my rent”52 and seems to be oddly at ease with this. She later weepingly confesses to him that she is tired of living “for the story”: I made a promise, such a long time ago, that I was going to take in experiences, all of them, so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them. But it gets so tiring, trying to take in all the experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here, and I see you, and you’ve got the fruit in the bowl in the fridge with the stuff. […] I realize I’m not different. I want what everyone wants. I want all the things. I just want to be happy.53

Hannah’s usual theatricality in her confession and the foolish assumption that other people would benefit from her recounting her experiences only slightly lessen her insight that she is attracted to a conventionally comfortable life, such as she also knows it from her home in not-so-hip Michigan. Despite this realization, Hannah continues to stumble through her Brooklyn life throughout the rest of the second season, not achieving any of her aims, and not coming much closer to paid employment. The two male protagonists of the show who are not presented as desirable in material terms, but rather thanks to their emotional or intellectual promise, are Ray and Adam. They are not conventionally successful in the post-recession economy (nor conventionally likeable at first, either), but are nevertheless presented as two of the most witty and assertive characters. Ray, who is older than the other characters and therefore seems to exude a natural authority, dishes out career advice to Marnie and comments on Hannah’s choice of dress and her writing, and both girls heed his advice. Adam, on the other hand, could almost be called the quintessential romantic hero. Tall, muscular, dark and brooding (Jessa describes him as “the original man,”54 which his name also points at), he grows from a mean commitment-phobe at the beginning of the first season into a savior figure at the end of season two. Even after Hannah has broken up with him and rejected his attempts to revive their relationship, he runs, bare-chested, across the city from his apartment to Hannah’s when she can no longer cope with her OCD in the finale of the second season. Scooping her up in his arms, he tells her that he has always been

52. “One Man’s Trash,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 5. 53. Ibid. 54. “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO), Season 1, Episode 7.

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there for her, even while they were broken up.55 This gesture, a staple of romance fiction, is not triggered by Hannah’s realization that she loves him, but by her need to have someone to look after her when she is not well. Although Adam does not have the financial means to take care of Hannah, he can at least provide for her emotionally. At first glance, then, the male characters of Girls seem to confirm Susan Faludi’s claim that after 9/11, U.S. media outlets celebrated images of a “new John Wayne masculinity,”56 heroic and determined, and that they did so to the detriment of feminism, because these resurgent images of essentialist manhood went hand in hand with images of “redomesticated femininity.”57 However, Girls’ portraits of gender are much more complicated than that, because while the show plays with the stereotypes of the gold-digger, the provider, the naive girl, the overambitious female and the intellectual male, it never allows them to fully unfold. For instance, the male characters of Girls are shown to suffer just as much as the girls while trying to live up to the gendered ideals of their time. Both Charlie and Ray, for instance, are left by their respective girlfriends Marnie and Shoshanna because they are not manly enough. Marnie despairs of Charlie’s niceness and his feminist attitude (“He’s so busy respecting me that he looks right past me and everything I need from him”58), while Shoshanna belittles Ray’s lack of ambition. When she finds out that Ray does not have a place to live despite the fact that he is the manager of a coffee shop, their relationship begins to crumble.59 Similarly, Jessa, Hannah and Marnie all briefly enjoy relationships with men who represent traditionally desirable masculinity because they are either wellheeled and/or famous (e.g. Marnie’s short-lived love interest in season two, artist Booth Jonathan), but of course these relationships are neither satisfying nor are the male partners portrayed as particularly likeable. Girls’ gender politics cannot be crudely categorized as progressive or regressive, feminist or anti-feminist—the term that comes closest to describing it is still postfeminist.

55. “Together,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2012), Season 2, Episode 10. 56. Susan Faludi, Terror Dream, 5. 57. Ibid. 58. “Vagina Panic,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 2, 59. “It’s a Shame about Ray,” Girls, Season 2, Episode 4.

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Conclusion: Successful Failures As the above analysis has shown, Girls has incorporated many of the elements of chick culture, but it has also elevated them to a new level. Using the same techniques as many of its predecessors, e.g., multiple offers of identification and humor, Girls delves into postfeminist discourses and complicates them further by emphasizing the precarious economic situations of its protagonists and the effect these have on their relationships. Whereas earlier chick heroines rarely had to worry about their careers—it was Mr. Right that gave them trouble—Girls turns the tables on this feature of romantic comedies and introduces a new perspective by making its female protagonists’ professional endeavors the center of their personal development. Instead of confirming the predominant discourse of top girls, Girls’ slacker characters effectively criticize the neoliberal workplace by refusing to take part in it. As Catherine Driscoll and Sean Fuller poignantly stated: “The girls of Girls are, in fact, not the postfeminist ‘new package’ of ǥyoung female success’ […]. But they invoke it by failing to measure up to it.”60 This reluctance to take on responsibility may be considered by some as a consequence of a postfeminist backlash, a failure on the side of young women to recognize that they are fortunate in that their mothers’ and grandmothers’ struggle for workplace equality has endowed them with the right to go to work. Serena Daalmans, for instance, has uttered criticism of the characters’ excessive self-entitlement and self-involvement, chiding the “unwillingness on the part of the over-educated twenty-something upper-middle class girls to face the reality of the contemporary post-recession-tarnished workplace.”61 I believe, however, that the girls’ self-involvement and haplessness can also be seen as a consequence of their being exposed to neoliberal discourses of female success—and the only way to escape the pressure is to refuse to join the system in the first place. In this sense, Girls very much embodies the definition of postfeminism that Catherine Driscoll and Sean Fuller have brought forward in their discussion of the show, namely: “postfeminism is one word for a productive irritation that helps keep feminist discourse alive in contemporary popular culture.”62 Girls’ ambiguous representation of postfeminist identities invites discussion—just like the chicks have done before them. 60. Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll, “HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2015): 258. 61. Serena Daalmans, “‘I’m Busy Trying to Become Who I Am’: Self-entitlement and the City in HBO’s Girls,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 359–62. 62. Fuller and Driscoll, “HBO’s Girls,” 253.

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Bibliography 2 Broke Girls. Television. Created by Michael King and Whitney Cumming. CBS, 2011–present. 30 Rock. Television. Created by Tina Fey. HBO, 2006–2013. “About the Romance Genre.” Romance Writers of America. www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=5782015. (accessed August 23, 2015). Bell, Katherine. “‘Obvie, We’re the Ladies!’ Postfeminism, Privilege, and HBO’s Newest Girls.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 363– 66. Blair, Elaine. “The Loves of Lena Dunham.” The New York Review of Books. June 7, 2012. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/ loves-lena-dunham/ (accessed August 23, 2015). Bridesmaids. Directed by Paul Feig. Universal, 2011. Bushnell, Candace. Sex and the City. New York: Warner Books, 1997. Chambers, Samuel A. The Queer Politics of Television. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Colgan, Jenny. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café. London: Sphere, 2011. —. Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams. London: Sphere, 2012. Daalmans, Serena. “‘I’m Busy Trying to Become Who I Am’: Selfentitlement and the City in HBO's Girls.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 359–62. DeCarvalho, Lauren. “Hannah and Her Entitled Sisters: (Post)feminism, (Post)recession, and Girls.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 367–70. Dow, Bonnie. “‘How Will You Make it on Your Own?’ Television and Feminism Since 1970.” A Companion to Television, edited by Janet Wasko. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode.html?id=g97814051 00946_chunk_g978140510094621 (accessed May 26, 2015). Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. New York: Picador, 2008. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit. The New Woman’s Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. —. Chick Flicks. Contemporary Women at the Movies. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’ Diary. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Fuller, Sean, and Catherine Driscoll. “HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2015): 253–62.

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Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Girls. Television. Created by Lena Dunham. HBO, 2012–present. Goldberg, Lesley. “TCA: Lena Dunham Says HBO’s Girls Isn’t Sex and the City.” The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2012. www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tca-hbo-girls-lena-dunhamjudd-apatow-281483 (accessed August 23, 2015). Harris, Lynn. Death by Chick Lit. New York: Berkley Books, 2006. Kennedy, Erica. Feminista. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009. Keyes, Marian. The Mystery of Mercy Close. London: Michael Joseph, 2012. Kollewe, Julia. “Gender Pay Gap: Women Effectively Working for Free until End of Year.” The Guardian, November 8, 2015. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/09/gender-pay-gap-womenworking-free-ntil-end-of-year (accessed February 24, 2016). McLaughlin, Emma, and Nicola Kraus. Citizen Girl. 2004. New York: Washington Square Press, 2005. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009. Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Negra, Diane, and Yvonne Tasker. “Neoliberal Frames and Genres of Inequality: Recession-Era Chick Flicks and Male-centred Corporate Melodrama.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 344–61. Negra, Diane, and Yvonne Tasker, eds. Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. New Girl. Television. Meriwether, Created by Elizabeth. Fox, 2011– present. Nussbaum, Emily. “Hannah Barbaric.” The New Yorker, February 11, 2013. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/hannah-barbaric (accessed August 23, 2015). Perlin, Ross. Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. New York: Verso Books, 2011. Senate, Melissa. The Love Goddess’ Cooking School. New York: Gallery Books, 2010. Sex and the City. Television. Created by Darren Star. HBO, 1998–2004. Williams, Raymond. Literature and Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

CHAPTER THREE RETHINKING THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY MASS MEDIA: THE CASE OF THE TV SERIES GIRLS MARÍA DOLORES NARBONA CARRIÓN1

Our society is witnessing obvious changes in women’s lives, which are reflected not only in history texts, but also in artistic productions such as literary works, plays, paintings, films, and television programs, among others. From all these options, I will focus here on the analysis of the above-mentioned transformations as portrayed in television, which is also one of the most influential areas of popular culture. Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones consider that television is in the forefront of the changes that affect the creation of one’s own self, even if they recognize that the media industry in general is “an important mediating force in the way that individuals make sense of their own lives and identities.”2 Dealing more concretely with the core subject of this essay, Chris Baker states that “television plays a significant part in the regulation of gender.”3 However, as Deborah Philips4 and Robin Nelson5 explain in their respective 1. The present essay has been developed in framework of the research project El rol de la ficción televisiva en los procesos de construcción identitaria en el siglo XXI, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivenes. Grant #FFI2014-55781-R. 2. Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity within Drama (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 1. 3. Chris Barker, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999), 91. 4. Deborah Philips, “Medical Soap: The Woman Doctor in Television Medical Drama,” in Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity within Drama, ed. Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 50௅61. 5. Robin Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres: The Progress of Gendering in TV Drama,” in Frames and Fictions on Television. The Politics of Identity within

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articles analyzing female roles on the screen, there is still a male dominance of TV institutions that obstructs the production of daring images of women that may represent their progress. In any case, it seems that the situation is changing, as notable scholars like Nelson also admit.6 But she assumes a cynical view when trying to explain the new images of women on television: she attributes these innovations to the industry’s interest to improve ratings, as media companies are aware of the contemporary shifting cultural values that affect the audience.7 Accordingly, with the purpose of analyzing the importance of television in the changing image of women and focusing on a concrete case, I have chosen the American TV series Girls, which stars Lena Dunham, who has also created, written and frequently directed the show. In this particular study, centered on the novelties present in the representation of women in the mass media, the fact that Girls belongs to the comedy genre, leads me to think that it is going to be easy to find examples and proposals of change. This connection between comedies and the portrayal of social changes is highlighted by leading specialists such as Llewellyn-Jones, Bonnie J. Dow, Patricia Mellencamp, Kathleen Rowe and Lauren Rabinovitz, as Amanda Lotz explains.8 They are also to be expected because Girls is broadcast by Home Box Office (HBO), which is characterized by the few limits that it imposes to its contents. I also consider this show interesting because it deals with current issues. Hence, the spectators are most surely familiar with the changes that the series portrays—“Much of what Girls is about is common to all of us”9—and they may identify with them more easily than with those present in older programs (even if there are many voices claiming that they do not feel represented at all by Girls).10 The current quality of the series also Drama, ed. Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 62–74. 6. Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres,” 62. 7. Ibid., 71. 8. Amanda Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,” Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 111. In this volume, Mißler tackles the same series that I approach in the following lines, and she also discusses humor as one of the narrative and critical strategies used by its creator. 9. Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, eds., Girls and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2015), xi. 10. In the comments on Andreeva’s article, several participants criticize the lack of realism of the series, for example, because it portrays twenty-something girls who live comfortably in New York apartments that are difficult to pay with the salaries provided by their low-earning, unstable and even inexistent jobs. Comments on

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facilitates an analysis that may include innovative themes and ideas (connected, for example, to the consequences of the worldwide economic crisis or to the strong influence of social networks in our everyday lives), a fact that makes Girls a frequent object of debate in conferences, articles, and online publications, as Stefania Marguitu and Conrad Ng.,11 and Alberto Rey12 recognize. This paper discusses the images of women offered by Girls, and it explores whether the female protagonists reflect the changes that are affecting contemporary women. At the same time, it tries to relate those possible modifications—derived from the freedom and wide range of opportunities open women thanks to the efforts of previous generations of feminists—with the historical and sociocultural context in which they are immersed. Thus, with respect to the methodology, I have taken into account the theories of influential scholars (from the areas of cultural, media, and feminist studies) that try to explain the situation and the image of women that are commonly held by our contemporary society and spread by the mainstream mass media. I have paid special attention to the writings of different specialists and researchers who describe the situation of women and of the most recent feminism—that which has appeared after the so-called “Second Wave Feminism”—and its influence and reflection in the mass media. Before situating this TV series in its sociocultural milieu and detailing the theoretical background that I have used for my analysis, focusing principally on the female sphere, I have to recognize, as many specialists hint, that the current situation of feminism and of women in general is quite complex. Among those experts is Lotz, who, making reference to our century and circumscribing the subject to U.S. territory, categorically declares: “Confusion and contradiction mark the understandings of feminism in U.S. popular culture.”13 Rachel Robinson-Greene is even more radical Nellie Andreeva, “HBO Picks Up Lena Dunham Pilot to Series,” Deadline, January 7, 2011, http://deadline.com/2011/01/hbo-picks-up-lena-dunham-pilot-to -series-94685/ (accessed May 23, 2015). 11. Stefania Marghitu and Conrad Ng, “Body Talk: Reconsidering the PostFeminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls,” Gender Forum. An International Journal for Gender Studies 45 (2013), www.genderforum.org/issues/special-issue-early-career-researchers-i/body-talk -reconsidering-the-post-feminist-discourse-and-critical-reception-of-lenadunhams-girls/ (accessed March 2, 2015). 12. Alberto Rey, “La nueva Woody Allen (con perdón),” El Mundo, January 25, 2014, www.elmundo.es/blogs/elmundo/asesinoenserie/2013/01/25/la-nueva-woody -allen-con-perdon.html (accessed May 25, 2015). 13. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 106.

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when she explains that it is easier to make a list of what feminism is not.14 That is the reason why, as Lotz asserts, we have reached such a level of uncertainty that, even the same words referring to feminism might convey one meaning and its opposite at the same time,15 depending on the person who uses them and even on their nationality. Lotz justifies her declaration with a whole litany of terms used to make reference to current feminism, such as “anti-feminism,” “postfeminism,” “third-wave feminism,” “womenof-color feminism,” “radical feminism,” “cultural feminism,” “socialist or Marxist feminism,” and many others, which are collected in critical dictionaries such as Sarah Gamble’s.16 On the other hand, there are authors who show disapproval towards the labeling and classification of feminism. As a consequence, they are also against the distinction of different generations of feminists. Among them is Lisa Jervis, who declares that the most relevant aspect in the debate about feminism is whether a person is in favor or not of the defense of women’s rights, because labeling and classification do not benefit this movement, considering that one of its main characteristics is precisely its diversity.17 On the contrary, Lotz interprets this terminological profusion as a logical consequence of the evolution of the theoretical perspectives that emerged after Second Wave Feminism, which tried to incorporate and take into account the changes that women were experiencing at that time. In any case, Lotz also admits that the great diversity illustrated by current feminism, both in the theoretical field and in its practical facet (when the former is applied to its reflection in the mass media, for example), has led to the current confusion affecting the meaning of the term “feminism” and more concretely “postfeminism,” as well as their correspondent objectives.18 14. Rachel Robinson-Greene, “Don’t Get Mad at Girls,” in Girls and Philosophy, ed. Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson Greene (Chicago: Open Court, 2015), 18. 15. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 106. 16. In this respect, I highly recommend chapter 2 of Sarah Projanski’s book Watching Rape, which she dedicates to the analysis of the feminism of the last decades. It is titled “The Postfeminist Contexts: Popular Redefinitions of Feminism, 1980–Present” (Sarah Projanski, Watching Rape. Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001)). For more information, see also: Susan Archer and Douglas J. Huffman, “The Decentering of the Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave,” Science & Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 56–91. 17. Lisa Jervis, “The End of Feminism’s Third Wave,” Ms Magazine (Winter 2004), www.msmagazine.com/winter2004/thirdwave.asp (accessed May 20, 2015). 18. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 113.

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This complex panorama notwithstanding, in a study like the current one it is necessary to take into consideration these new discourses and theories and the way in which they have been reflected in the cultural products that, simultaneously, have been changing with their portrayal of the variations that are occurring in women’s lives. In this line of work, Lotz explains how feminist criticism of TV programs has been redesigned because notable dissimilarities can be discerned, for example, between the images of female characters from diverse periods. Thus, in the 1970s, in sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977), Maude (CBS, 1972–1978), or Rhoda (CBS, 1974–1978), a distinct feminist discourse can be easily identified. This appealed to the women that identified themselves with the predominant status of independent workers depicted by those programs, which fell in the line with the feminism of the Second Wave, and more concretely with its liberal branch,19 connected to the defense of equal rights for women. After the 1980s, even if this same female model continued to appear on TV series, others that represented the combination of working activities with family tasks were incorporated. These female characters, as Lotz specifies, could be classified into two big groups: the first one incarnated superwomen who seemed to be able to combine successful professional careers and happy families without great effort—for example, the protagonists of series such as The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–1992), Growing Pains (ABC, 1985–1992), Scarecrow & Mrs. King (CBS, 1983–1987), and Who’s the Boss (ABC, 1984–1992); the other illustrated the difficulties of wanting to have it all—as can be noticed in Thirtysomething (ABC, 1987–1991), Baby Boom (NBC, 1988–1989), and Roseanne (ABC, 1988–1997).20 Lotz’s references to U.S. television series end here; they do not include those of our new millennium because her article is from 2001. However, she offers useful elucidations referring to the feminist theoretical frame that was emerging in that period, and about how it lands in the field study of the cultural products, while explaining new methods to analyze them from a feminist perspective. And it is precisely in this new period in which Girls is situated; hence the convenience of taking into account Lotz’s ideas. The series is located in a historical moment in which, especially in our Western—supposedly—developed world, some people may have the 19. Lotz recognizes that many scholars consider that the type of feminism that predominates in television U.S. texts is liberal feminism. Among them, she mentions Linda Blum, Bonnie Dow or Lauren Rabinovitz (Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 109). Nevertheless, I have to highlight the fact that the writings of these authors are based on the last years of the 1980s until the end of the 1990s. 20. Ibid., 107௅8.

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impression that feminism is no longer necessary or, at least, that it is not needed in the same way as it was by previous generations. This notion has been quite frequently fomented by the mass media, with outstanding examples like the famous publication of Time, 26th June, 1998, whose cover title included the question “Is Feminism Dead?”21 This situation has been studied by renowned scholars, some of whom have identified it with the term “postfeminism,” focusing on the time connotations of the prefix post-, and implying, thus, that postfeminism is what appeared after feminism.22 To a large extent, due to the influence of the mass media, this interpretation has been the most frequent and popular one of the term “postfeminism.” Lotz associates this tendency especially with the U.S. context and with authors like Susan Faludi, Andrea Press or Tania Modleski—despite the differences among them.23 In short, it might be asserted that, from this perspective, the authors that analyze postfeminist tendencies associate them specifically to those present in young women, the daughters of the Second Wavers, who are benefitting from the achievements of their predecessors, but who do not consider that it is necessary to call themselves feminists, and who might even reject what they consider as impositions of the previous feminism.24 According to Suzanna Danuta Walters, this type of postfeminism conveys not only the depoliticization of this movement, but it can also reach the level of considering feminism dead. The two possible reasons why these postfeminists judge the movement pointless are: either because they think that its objectives have already been achieved and, so, it is no longer necessary to keep on fighting for them; or because they consider that it has already failed, equally demonstrating its futility.25 As I pointed out above, the popular conception of feminism and the prevalent image of women shown on television tend to come to terms with 21. To see this Time cover, visit: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641, 19980629,00.html. To read comments on this publication, see, for example: Jess Butler, “For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 35௅58. 22. Esquirol-Salom and Pujol-Ozonas discuss postfeminism from a theoretical point of view in the first part of their contribution to this volume. Other authors like Gerhards apply it to TV series other than Girls in this book, too. 23. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 111௅12. 24. Many examples and comments of this type of women can be found in the article: Susan Bolotin, “Voices from a Postfeminist generation,” The New York Times, October 17, 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/magazine/voices-from -the-post-feminist-generation.html (accessed May 20, 2015). 25. Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Premature Postmortems: ǥPostfeminism’ and Popular Culture,” New Politics 3, no. 2 (1991): 106.

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the vision of feminism that I have just described and which obliges researchers to change the feminist theoretical perspectives required for an exhaustive analysis of mass media. These new points of view have to be recognized as different from those derived from Second Wave Feminism that were commonly used in previous decades. Lotz associates these novel positions with theorists writing in the Unites States. She distinguishes them from those of feminist scholars writing in Britain (like Angela McRobbie) and New Zealand (like Anne Brooks), whose notion of postfeminism deviates significantly from the U.S. scholars’ negative valuation of the same term.26 This version of postfeminism connected to McRobbie and Brooks—among other specialists—is closely connected to postmodernism as it puts the emphasis on the wide variety of new circumstances, attitudes, experiences and personal options of modern women; and this postfeminism is characterized, consequently, by its diversity and variability. In this line, Lotz suggests that, in the feminist analysis of popular culture texts, the focus should not be on how they show a postfeminist context in the former popular sense, which brings to light examples of characters and discourses that do not correspond to feminist goals. She defends that feminist researchers should highlight, instead, the new contributions in favor of women that those products may also contain.27 Hence her recommendation: “We must explore what is in these texts with an eye to their complexity instead of quickly dismissing them as part of a hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalist system.”28 However, maybe betraying Lotz’s spirit, and considering the theoretical background I have been referring to up to this point, my intention now is to analyze the female characters present in Girls as closely as possible. I suspect that, in this process, it will be possibly easy to see many of the characteristics connected to the complexity and variety of contemporary women. If this happens, it may be interpreted as evidence to support the assertion defended by many critics that Girls is novel, original, confusing, ambivalent, diverse, changing, and maybe—because of all these characteristics—postmodern and, perhaps, postfeminist. The previous explanation of the conceptual ambiguity that affects the term “postfeminism” enables me to write now with precision about the types of female characters that appear in the series, since a clearer notion of the denotative meaning of the terms to be used has already been offered. Even before watching it, the very fact that the person who moves its threads is a woman, and not a common one, but one who usually boasts 26. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 111௅13. 27. Ibid., 114. 28. Ibid.

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about her rebelliousness and originality with respect to societal conventions and impositions, leads anyone to suspect that Girls, at least, could be quite removed from typically patriarchal parameters. When you actually see it, the first impression corroborates its female if not feminist tendencies. Its very title appears without being preceded by credits, in giant letters: “GIRLS,” which makes viewers think immediately of female prominence and leads them to situate the protagonists in the context of the younger generation that is commonly associated with postfeminism in its popular sense. The first shots confirm this impression: four twenty-something girls (Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna) trying to make a living in Brooklyn.29 This series is not the only one that has considered number four as the perfect amount of women protagonists, as Irene Chaparro explains in her article, which mentions others like Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004), Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012) or Pretty Little Liars (ABC, 2010–present).30 This tendency to use a female assortment could be connected to the insistence on variety and differentiation defended by the theorists who relate postfeminism with postmodernism, as I have already described.31 But this appearance of a range of female types could also be explained by the producers’ economic interest in reaching the largest possible audience, because, thus, different (and more) groups of girls might identify with the female characters of their shows. In effect, as Nelson manifests, television executives “have learned from everyday versions of contemporary theory that ambiguity and ambivalence afford a diverse range of viewing positions.”32 Gail Coles underlines the television industry’s increasing recognition of the fragmentation and diversity of the audience and their conscious effort to “appeal to as wide an audience as 29. According to Alan Sepinwall, Lena Dunham’s series stands out because it shows on the screen imperfect female characters, which were very infrequent up to the present moment (Alan Sepinwall, “Review: HBO’s Girls Brilliantly Channels Lena Dunham’s Comic Voice,” Hitfix, April 12, 2012, www.hitfix.com/blogs/ whats-alan-watching/posts/review-hbos-girls-brilliantly-channels-lena-dunhamscomic-voice (accessed April 9, 2015)). 30. Irene Chaparro, “¿Es 4 el número perfecto para las series femeninas?” Vanidad (2013), www.vanidad.es/mixedup/es-4-el-numero-perfecto-para-las-series-femeninas (accessed May 25, 2015). 31. It would not be far from truth that the plurality of identities defended by postfeminism is taken to extremes in Girls with the character of Shoshanna, who declares that she has in herself part of the four protagonists of Sex and the City (“Pilot,” Television, Girls, directed by Lena Dunham, (New York: HBO 2012), Season 1, Episode 1). 32. Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres,” 71.

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possible when the audience is perceived as increasingly fragmented.”33 However, at least in the case of Girls, it must be recognized that certain female life options are not present in the series, as a number of viewers have expressed on diverse internet sites. The feminist aspect of the series is also nourished by the presence not only of these young girls who are—apparently—independent and liberal, but also of underlying typically feminist matters such as abortion, controversies related to sexual harassment, or freedom in sexual relations. With respect to this last subject I have to clarify that, even if a first impression might lead the audience to consider the inclusion of explicit sex in the series as evidence of its feminist essence, some feminist authors, such as Ginia Bellafante, criticize the postmodern insistence on this sexual exposure and declare that there are many more important aspects for which feminism should fight.34 Another aspect that contributes to the feminist impression given by the series is the fact that the protagonist shows her naked body as if boasting about her freedom. Nevertheless, she does it so frequently that this fact has become, besides a typecast cliché, one of the core objectives of the criticism against Girls.35 Many viewers complain that nudes in the series normally lack purpose or sense, especially if compared with those of other TV programs, where their creators make them provide at least a symbolic meaning to their narrative content.36 We can illustrate this with an example of one of these above mentioned criticisms: “The exacerbated obsession of its protagonist with appearing as she was born, seems more a way of filling time slots than a resource to give authenticity to its fiction.”37 In effect, one gets the impression that Lena Dunham does not contemplate any particular purpose 33. Gail Coles, “Docusoap: Actuality and the Serial Format,” in Frames and Fictions on Television. The Politics of Identity within Drama, ed. Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 38. 34. Ginia Bellafante, “It’s All about Me!” Time, June 24, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,139446,00.html# (accessed May 20, 2015). 35. CazadorDeSeries, “Girls: la serie más sobrevalorada de la televisión” (Girls: the Most Overvalued Series of Television) [my translation], Vertele, February 26, 2013, www.vertele.com/elcazadordeseries/2013/ (accessed May 16, 2015). 36. Marina Such, “Los desnudos de Girls y otros clichés de series a superar,” ¡Vaya tele!, January, 15, 2014, www.vayatele.com/ficcion-internacional/los -desnudos-de-girls-y-otros-cliches-de-series-a-superar (accessed May 15, 2015). 37. My translation. CazadorDeSeries, “Girls: la serie más sobrevalorada de la televisión” (Girls, the Most Overvalued Series of Television), Vertele, February 26, 2013, www.vertele.com/elcazadordeseries/2013/02/26/girls-la-serie-massobrevalorada-de-la-television/ (accessed May 16, 2015).

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for those scenes because, when she is offered the opportunity of justifying them, she gives, for example, this vague and empty answer: “Life is too short to explain why I appear naked in the series.”38 As this essay develops, I am verifying that Girls, for almost all intents and purposes, portrays many of the contradictions representative of the time in which it is set. Its characters are as paradoxical and complex as the very concept of postfeminism is. As Noel Ramírez asserts, they incarnate intelligent beings, but they do totally irrational things; although they are ambitious, they never find good jobs; even if sometimes they know what they should do, they always end up choosing the wrong option; and in spite of their supposed independence, they tend to depend on their sentimental relations to the point of being presented in a position of submission that is unacceptable from all perspectives.39 In this respect, I have to highlight the negative criticism that the character of Hannah has received due to the despotic treatment that she receives—and accepts— from her intermittent lover Adam. Jorge Barbó explains this very explicitly with this assertion: “Critics […] assure that the stormy relation of sordid submission that she maintains with Adam offers a denigrating image for women.”40 Hannah’s increasing dependence on sexual or love relations is made symbolically evident in the series with the first shots that inaugurate each season: in the first one, she appeared sleeping with her friend Marnie,41 while in the second one she did the same but with Elijah—her previous lover,42 and in the third with Adam, her abusive boyfriend.43 This visual parallelism cannot be interpreted as a coincidence and leads audiences to reasonable doubts about Hannah’s supposed independence. She confirms this interpretation herself when she declares: “I have realized that I have been very lonely. I just want a person that

38. My translation. Sheila Heti, “Lena Dunham sobre Girls, talento y curvas”, Glamour, May 28, 2014, www.glamour.es/celebrities/it-girls/articulos/lenadunham-una-chica-con-las-ideas-claras/19931 (accessed May 22, 2015). 39. Noel Ramírez, “Girls: Postfeminism on TV,” Borderzine, August 8, 2013, http://borderzine.com/2013/08/girls-post-feminism-on-tv/ (accessed May 22, 2015). 40. My translation. Jorge Barbó, “Por qué Girls no es una serie sólo para chicas,” El Correo, January 22, 2014, www.elcorreo.com/vizcaya/ocio/201401/22/serie-ir -girl.html (accessed May 23, 2015). 41. “Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1. 42. “It’s about Time”, Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2013), Season 2, Episode 1. 43. “Females Only,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2014), Season 3, Episode 1.

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wishes to stay by my side until I die.”44 Lena Dunham reinforces this idea when she comments on her protagonist’s reaction: “There is a moment when she realizes that what she really wants in her life is to be happy: more than a successful career as a writer, more than her life in Brooklyn,”45 to which she adds, considering that she is giving voice to “her whole generation”46 and even to all human beings: “What she wants is what everybody wants, what Marnie wants, what Jessa wants, and that is to discover a sensation of home and satisfaction.”47 Much in line with the popular interpretation of postfeminism, these girls essentially live looking out for their own interests, in a very selfish and narcissistic way, benefiting from the equality achievements—among others—attained by the Second Wave feminists. They show no solidarity with their closest friends or society in general. Considering Carson and Llewellyn-Jones’s reflection about selfishness, the protagonists’ attitude might be excused as an inevitable legacy derived from previous epochs: “This emphasis on the individual, rather than overt ideological and communal concerns, can be linked to the zeitgeist mood of the 1980s represented by Mrs. Thatcher’s notorious statement, ‘There is no such thing as society.’”48 I tend to think instead that egocentricity does not belong to a particular historical period, but that it is simply part of human nature. Nevertheless, this approach reflects a contradiction between the theoretical discourse of the protagonist—or of Lena Dunham herself—and what is actually shown in the series. On the one hand, Hannah uses assertions promoting female connections that seem copied from famous feminist volumes like Nancy J. Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering,49 Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women,50 or Janice G. Raymond’s A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection.51 We can observe 44. “Girls 3: Entrevista a Lena Dunham,” Canal Plus, October 4, 2014. http://canalplus.es/Girls (accessed June 13, 2015). 45. Ibid. 46. In this expression I echo the words that Hannah addresses to her parents in the pilot episode: “I do not want to scare you but it is possible that I am the voice of my generation.” It is also true that just after this assertion, she adds a more correct statement: “Or, at least, a voice of a generation” (“Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1). 47. “Girls 3,” Canal Plus. 48. Carson and Llewellyn-Jones, Frames and Fictions on Television, 1. 49. Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 50. Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1978). 51. Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

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this, for example, in the following sentence taken from the book that she is writing: “A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance.”52 In addition, Dunham has explained: “The girls not always like each other, they do not get on well all the time, but there is a tie joining them which is unbreakable.”53 However, in my opinion, the allegedly indestructible nature of this tie does not automatically imply the existence of authentic friendship or sisterhood among these girls. Besides, there are many events in the series which make the lack of genuine female bonds evident. Some of them are present in the pilot: for example, Hannah explains to her parents that one of her ex-partners has had two consecutive abortions alone; and Marnie, the friend with whom Hannah shares a flat and to whom she confesses that her parents are about to stop providing for her, instead of offering her help, tells Hannah that if she is not able to pay her part of the flat rental, she will have to leave it. Additionally, Dunham confirms my interpretation when she declares: “It is always fun to see two women in a cat fight.”54 Besides, to finish this list of examples, Allison Williams’s words—Marnie in the show—go in the same line, as she has declared that she would not like to be stranded on a desert island with these girls.55 Lotz considers that the portrayal of current women as quite independent persons who do not give much importance to the sisterhood that Second Wave Feminism used to defend is consistent with postfeminism. She deems their manifest autonomy as a logical consequence of the increasing attention that postfeminism pays to the diversity of circumstances and experiences of different types of individual women to the detriment of the aspects that contribute to their bonding.56 I agree with Lotz partially, in the sense that I think that it is necessary to recognize and accept the differences that exist among women, without trying to homogenize them with the pretext of increasing sisterhood; but I also think that in order to recognize a person as a feminist—of any kind—she should manifest at least a certain amount of concern for what happens to other women, and should consequently try to help them to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, I assume that it could be asserted that the series presents a cast of women 52. “Together,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2013), Season 2, Episode 10. 53. “Girls 3,” Canal Plus. 54. Ibid. 55. Lourdes Gómez, “Las chicas guerreras de Lena Dunham maduran,” El Mundo, February 1, 2014, www.elmundo.es/television/2014/02/01/52ebfb73e2704e643c 8b457f.html (accessed May 26, 2015). 56. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television,” 115.

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who occasionally show traces of an authentic friendship that tends to be suffocated by their own particular interests. Consequently, Girls offers a very individualistic image of women, who appear in the program competing with each other very frequently, in a fight to reach their own objectives that resembles the almost aggressive attitudes that are traditionally and stereotypically associated with men. In this analysis of Girls, it seems as if Nelson’s inferences about TV series in 2000 were still in force. As she explained then, “[w]here males once dominated the narrative, women may have taken their place in the driving seat, but the underlying issue of a ‘masculine’ culture of aggressive, goal-oriented individualism has not been addressed.”57 For instance, at the beginning, Hannah is shown as a brave woman who fights for her rights when she decides to reject her unpaid position as an intern.58 But later on, in her obsession with becoming a famous writer, she reaches unimagined limits when she obeys her boss’s unjust orders and whims, such as getting high on cocaine and having sex with her ex-drug-addict neighbor Laird with the only intention of writing about those experiences.59 The fact that Hannah accepts changing the subject of friendship among women for her own sexual life as the main focus of her book can also be considered out of the margins of a feminist attitude.60 These examples illustrate how the protagonist is not really an independent woman who follows her own route; she is rather a person whose main purpose in life is to have something to write about. Besides, if at least the audience had the impression that these girls’ attitudes made them happy, it could be inferred that their lifestyle may be worth the pain. But these characters, instead of seeming joyful, look exactly the opposite: they are portrayed even as victims of psychological problems (consider, for example, Hanna’s obsessive-compulsive disorder) and damaging addictions (Tessa’s drug problems) which prevent them from enjoying circumstances and privileges which many people might envy.61 Apart from these examples, there are many other aspects in Girls which lead me to consider that the series does not take into account most feminist or postfeminist proposals and considerations—in the way that 57. Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres,” 72. 58. “Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1. 59. “Bad Friend,” Television, Girls directed by Jesse Peretz (New York: HBO 2013), Season 2, Episode 3. 60. “On All Fours,” Television, Girls directed by Lena Dunham (New York: HBO 2013), Season 2, Episode 9. 61. In the pilot episode, a beggar reaches the point of asking Hannah: “Why don’t you smile? Does your heart ache?” (“Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1).

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Lotz understands the latter. For example, feminism is supposed to fight for the acceptance and defense of the rights of all types of women collectively, but the series does not really pay attention to female characters from different ethnic groups or different social classes.62 Another controversial aspect is the fact that Lena Dunham considers herself—and the protagonist of Girls—as a standard bearer of the acceptance and exposition of the female body just the way it is, without any kind of restrictions connected to beauty canons. But Hannah, on many occasions, overtly expresses that she does not like her looks. For example, in the pilot, when Charlie compares her and Marnie to two angels, the protagonist answers, complaining, that Marnie is a Victoria’s Secret one, whereas she is a “fat baby angel.”63 In this same episode, Hannah confesses to Adam that she started to tattoo herself after realizing that she was becoming fatter: as she could not stop that physical process, she decided to stain her body indelibly as an alternative way of controlling it. Watching her eating compulsively—she devours food even in the bathtub—and considering the frequency with which she protests about her plumpness, one gets the impression that she does not really embrace her body as it is, but she rather represents a character lacking the will power required to change what she declares to dislike. In addition, considering the series as a whole, it is necessary to point out that it does not ignore the current models of beauty, because Hannah’s friends pay a lot of attention to the mainstream standards. Dunham seems to follow what Nelson describes as “the traditional heterosexual, not to say heterosexist, gender assumptions of predominantly male TV network executives, particularly in the U.S.A.”64 Barbó’s article, precisely titled “Por qué Girls no es sólo una serie para chicas,” supports this idea.65 Here, the author explains that one of the reasons to watch the series is the 62. Hollie McKay’s article analyzes the criticism that the series has received because of controversial matters such as the absence of ethnic minorities. See Tambay A. Obenson’s article to read some of the answers given by Dunham about this problem (Hollie McKay, “Criticism of HBO’s Girls for Being about ǥWhite Girls, Money, Whining’ Justified?” Fox News, April 18, 2012, www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/04/18/criticism-hbo-girls-for-being-aboutwhite-girls-money-whining-justified/ (accessed March 28, 2015); Tambay A. Obenson, “Lena Dunham Addresses Girls Diversity Criticism & Why I Just Don’t Care,” Indiewire, May 8, 2012, http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/ 2c060de0-993b-11e1-bcc4-123138165f92 (accessed March 15, 2015). 63. “Pilot,” Girls, Season 1, Episode 1. 64. Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres,” 71. 65. “Why Girls Is Not a Series Only for Girls” [my translation]. Barbó, “Por qué Girls.”

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portrayal of a lot of dirty sex, and the presence, not of Hannah, but of her sexy friends.66 Taking these considerations into account, it is easy to agree with Coles that “the boundaries between programming that was traditionally considered male and traditionally considered female have become more fluid.”67 And they also lead to infer that the type of woman that Hannah represents does not have an authentic feminist foundation, but it is instead designed with the intention of showing on television something new that may attract the attention of the viewers due to its originality with respect to the beautiful and alluring girls that surround her. This is even more pronounced when the audience notices that Lena Dunham—whose identity is difficult to distinguish from that of her fictional character, Hannah—has appeared in photographs yielding to the dictates of current vogue despite her numerous declarations defending her independence with respect to fashion and other bodily restrictions. Further evidence can be found in the article written by Sheila Heti titled “Lena Dunham sobre Girls, talento y curvas,”68 published in the women’s magazine Glamour, where Dunham appears with a perfect fashionable outlook, wearing clothes of renowned designers such as Marc Jacobs, or by Gucci or Dolce & Gabbana; accessories by Solange Azagury-Patridge, and shoes by Saint Laurent. If this were not enough, she herself recognizes in this article that she has become an icon of personal acceptance both deliberately and because that is what people wanted to see.69 To this assertion she adds that, after admitting that her body revealed her lack of will power and elegance, she decided to change her relation with it so that she started to use it as a useful tool for her job, “giving it a value that she could not find in it previously.”70 This utilization of the physique for the benefit of its owner, as a work tool or as a means for being successful, resonates with the

66. Barbó, “Por qué Girls.” Barbó’s comments are, certainly, very different form the reasons given by Dunham to watch series by men: she considers that her show might represent a unique window through which they might get into women’s psyche (quoted in: Lesley Goldberg, “TCA: Lena Dunham Says HBO’s Girls Isn’t Sex and the City,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2013, www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tca-hbo-girls-lena-dunham-judd-apatow -281483 (accessed May 20, 2015), 67. Coles, “Docusoap: Actuality and the Serial Format,” 38. 68. “Lena Dunham on Girls, Talent and Curves” [my translation]. Sheila Heti, “Lena Dunham sobre Girls, talento y curvas,” Glamour, May 28, 2014, www.glamour.es/celebrities/it-girls/articulos/lena-dunham-una-chica-con-las -ideas-claras/19931 (accessed May 22, 2015). 69. Sheila Heti, “Lena Dunham sobre Girls.” 70. Ibid.

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concept of “post-feminist masquerade,”71 according to which women use their bodies to gain power. In this latter case, it would be the beauty of the body which leads to that objective, whereas in the case of Dunham it is precisely the distancing from current beauty standards that helps her in reaching her goals. Additionally, this utilitarian use of the female physique reminds me also of the one described by Catherine Hakim in her book Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital (2011),72 which is critically rejected by feminist scholars like Isabel Menéndez-Menéndez, who warns readers about the patriarchal and anti-feminist connotations of that attitude.73 Bearing in mind this analysis of the female characters of the series, I come to the conclusion that many of their attitudes and behaviors can be considered postfeminist in the popular sense of the term, which has been associated with U.S. theorists, as I previously exposed. Likewise, they remind us of the women who were interviewed by Susan Bolotin in her famous article “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation.”74 However,

71. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009). 72. Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital (London: Penguin Books, 2011). 73. María Isabel Menéndez Menéndez, “Alianzas conceptuales entre patriarcado y postfeminismo: A propósito del Capital erótico,” Clepsydra 13 (March 2015): 45௅64. 74. Susan Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation,” The New York Times, October 17, 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/magazine/voices-fromthe-post-feminist-generation.html (accessed May 22, 2015). The confusion that exists nowadays about what feminism actually is—which Bolotin made evident with her search—is especially evident in the words of Zosia Mamet—Shoshana in the series—who has declared: “I would not define myself as a feminist. I think that feminism as we conceive it today has fucked us a lot. The women who decided that the means to get what they wanted consisted on hating men, did not do themselves any favor. I support equality, but I also consider that genders are important and that they exist for a reason. Those girls who simply want to have children and enjoy them are very harshly criticised, as if their attitude was negative or as if they lack ambition. I don’t think that is bad. Thinking that a woman is inferior is clearly a problem” [my translation] (Ana Fuentes and Jen Patryn, “Zosia Mamet busca su sitio,” El País, February 1, 2014, http://smoda.elpais.com/articulos/zosia-mamet -la-titulacion-universitaria-esta-sobrevalorada-la-gente-seria-feliz-con-un-trabajo -corriente/4421 (accessed May 20, 2015)). This type of opinions can be clearly associated to what Claudia Wallis calls the “‘no, but...’ generation,” who, in Projansky’s words “are not feminists, ‘but’ they expect to be treated ‘equally’ in their professional lives” (Claudia Wallis, “Onward, Women!,” Times. June 24,

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both the former and the latter take advantage of the achievements obtained by previous feminists, because, for example, many of them are either students or graduates and they search for jobs where they might receive pay equal to that of men. Thus, they hoist one of the core premises of Second Wave Feminism, which espouses equal rights for men and women, as Bolotin also explains.75 Furthermore, the series can be classified as postfeminist in the sense that it reflects how young women adapt themselves to what they need as times also change, but it should not be forgotten, as Ramírez highlights, that this attitude was precisely promoted by that radical movement called “feminism.”76 In any case, from the moment when women started to fight for their rights, they did so with the intention of creating a more just world, and with the hope of living in better conditions and being happier. This is what some outstanding activist feminists have manifested in the past. Among them is Emma Goldman (1869–1940), with her famously attributed assertion: “If I cannot dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”77 Another reason that explains the difficulty of identifying genuine feminist thought in Girls is the fact that the protagonists give the impression of lacking a plan, a sense for their lives—even if only theoretical: they seem to live aimlessly, adrift, simply following their instincts. As John Kubicek remarks, “the problem is that none of them seem to want to do anything. There’s nothing particularly special about Hannah’s life, no reason that her memoirs would be remotely interesting.”78 It is almost impossible to connect this attitude with that of feminist women who, more or less concretely and with certain differences among them, at least contemplate objectives and goals in their lives and try to extend them to other women, with the intention of improving their life conditions. Because of this, I sympathize with Bellafante, who declares that she understands the 2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,150717,00.html (accessed May 13, 2015); Sarah Projanski, Watching Rape, 77௅78). 75. Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation.” 76. Ramírez, “Por qué Girls.” 77. I say “attributed” because I have recently discovered that this famous assertion cannot be found in any of Emma Goldman’s writings, even if there are reasons to associate it with her feminist proposals and life style. See Shulman’s article for more information: Alix Kates Shulman, “Dances with Feminists,” The Emma Goldman Papers. Berkeley Library: University of California, www.lib .berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/danceswithfeminists.html (accessed August 1, 2015). 78. John Kubicek, “Girls’ Review: The Voice of the Worst Generation,” BuddyTV, April 16, 2012, www.buddytv.com/articles/girls/girls-review-the-voice-of-the45043.aspx (accessed May 20, 2015).

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disenchantment of the feminists that she calls “the Old Guard” when, observing their legacy, they discover this type of behavior,79 which, I add, may give a very distorted image of what a feminist is. Likewise, apart from this theoretical lack of principles, as I may call it, I do not detect a practical feminist attitude in the protagonists of Girls either, not even a vague or unconscious wish to improve women’s lives. They are merely contemporary women who are frittering away the triumphs that their predecessors obtained with a lot of effort. Besides, as they also take them for granted, they do not seem to appreciate and value these achievements and, as a consequence, they do not maintain or share them with other women. They rather give the impression of misusing those advances, showing shocking and unusual aspects that may attract the attention of viewers, but without a clear purpose, what leads me to suspect that their presence is basically founded on audience ratings, on the searching of—in Lena Dunham’s words—what people wants to see, or at least a certain type of people (others are shocked and criticize it). But, it appears that Dunham agrees with Oscar Wilde’s popular quote: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,”80 which Alberto Rey seems to have adapted to the field of television when he asserts: “The worst thing that may happen to a series […] is to be unnoticed.”81 Girls, of course, has not been disregarded, thanks to the ways in which it portrays shocking scenes that try to attract the audience’s attention, and to the great amount of criticism that it has generated precisely due to its difficult classification and labeling of purposes or socio-political orientations. However, despite this hardship, it is necessary to reflect about the series and its creator’s possible intentions, objectives and interests, as I have been trying to do throughout this essay. Accordingly, in the viewers’ rethinking of the female images that TV series portray in general, and in order for them not to be easily influenced or even psychologically manipulated, I would recommend to heed Fiske’s assertion that “characters on television are not just representations of people but are encodings of ideology.”82 In this context, the highly 79. Ginia Bellafante, “It’s All about Me!,” Time, June 24, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,139446,00.html# (accessed May 15, 2015). 80. Oscar Wilde, BrainyQuote. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/ oscarwilde128481.html (accessed March 2, 2016). 81. My translation. Alberto Rey, “La nueva Woody Allen (con perdón)”, El Mundo, January 25, 2013, http://www.elmundo.es/blogs/elmundo/asesinoenserie/ 2013/01/25/la-nueva-woody-allen-con-perdon.html (accessed May 16, 2015). 82. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987), 9.

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influential and transformational power of television should not be forgotten, because—using Nelson’s words—even if “changing the mindsets and practices of everyday life is not a simple matter of new representations […], despite all these reservations, a gradual but persistent challenge to conceptual frameworks may slowly be contributing in ‘new terms.’”83 Viewers should at least be conscious of this; then, it is their decision whether to react against or for those “new terms.”

Bibliography Andreeva, Nellie. “HBO Picks Up Lena Dunham Pilot To Series.” Deadline. January 7, 2011. http://deadline.com/2011/01/hbo-picks-uplena-dunham-pilot-to-series-94685/ (accessed May 23, 2015). Archer, Susan, and Douglas J. Huffman. “The Decentering of the Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave.” Science & Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 56௅91. Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. Barker, Chris. Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999. Barbó, Jorge. “Por qué Girls no es una serie sólo para chicas.” El Correo. January 22, 2014. www.elcorreo.com/vizcaya/ocio/201401/22/ serie-irgirl.html (accessed May 15, 2015). Bellafante, Ginia. “It’s All about Me!” Time. June 24, 2001. http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,139446,00.html# (accessed May 20, 2015). Blum, Linda. “Feminism and the Mass Media: A Case Study of The Women’s Room as a Novel and Television Film.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 27 (1983): 1௅26. Bolotin, Susan. “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation.” The New York Times. October 17, 1982. www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/magazine/ voices-from-the-post-feminist-generation.html (accessed May 20, 2015). Butler, Jess. “For White Girls Only?: Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion.” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 35௅58. Carson, Bruce, and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, eds. Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity within Drama. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. CazadorDeSeries. “Girls: la serie más sobrevalorada de la televisión.” Vertele. February 26, 2013. www.vertele.com/elcazadordeseries/2013/ 83. Nelson, “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres,” 73.

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02/26/girls-la-serie-mas-sobrevalorada-de-la-television/ (accessed April 15, 2015). Chaparro, Irene. “¿Es 4 el número perfecto para las series femeninas?” Vanidad. May 25, 2013. www.vanidad.es/mixedup/es-4-el-numeroperfecto-para-las-series-femeninas (accessed April 23, 2015). Chodorow, Nancy J. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Coles, Gail. “Docusoap: Actuality and the Serial Format.” In Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity within Drama, edited by Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, 27௅39. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. Dow, Bonnie J. Prime Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement Since 1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Fuentes, Ana and Jen Patryn. “Zosia Mamet busca su sitio.” El País. February 1, 2014. http://smoda.elpais.com/articulos/zosia-mamet-latitulacion-universitaria-esta-sobrevalorada-la-gente-seria -feliz-con-un-trabajo-corriente/4421 (accessed April 24, 2015). Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999. Girls. Television. Created by Lena Dunham. HBO, 2012–present. “Girls 3: Entrevista a Lena Dunham.” Canal Plus. http://canalplus.es/Girls (accessed October 4, 2014). Goldberg, Lesley. “TCA: Lena Dunham Says HBO’s Girls Isn’t Sex and the City.” The Hollywood Reporter. January 13, 2013. www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tca-hbo-girls-lena-dunhamjudd-apatow-281483 (accessed May 15, 2015). Gómez, Lourdes. “Las chicas guerreras de Lena Dunham maduran.” El Mundo. February 1, 2014. http://www.elmundo.es/television/2014/02/ 01/52ebfb73e2704e643c8b457f.html (accessed May 17, 2015). González, Sandra. “Girls’ Producers Go on ǥRage Spiral’ Defending Nudity.” January 9, 2014. http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/01/09/ girlsproducers-defend-nudity (accessed May 18, 2015). Greene, Richard and Rachel Robinson-Greene, eds. Girls and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 2015. Hakim, Catherine. Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. London: Penguin Books, 2011. Heti, Sheila. “Lena Dunham sobre Girls, talento y curvas.” Glamour. May 28, 2014. www.glamour.es/celebrities/it-girls/articulos/lena-dunhamuna-chica-con-las-ideas-claras/19931 (accessed May 29, 2015).

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Huffman, Douglas J. “The Decentering of the Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave.” Science & Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 56௅91. Jervis, Lisa. “The End of Feminism’s Third Wave.” Ms Magazine (Winter 2004). www.msmagazine.com/winter2004/thirdwave.asp (accessed May 20, 2015). Kubicek, John. “Girls’ Review: The Voice of the Worst Generation.” BuddyTV. April 16, 2012. www.buddytv.com/articles/girls/girls-reviewthe-voice-of-the-45043.aspx (accessed March 30, 2015). Larraburru, Isabel. “Las feministas del pintalabios.” Magazine La Vanguardia. www.isabel-larraburu.com/articulos/psicologia-ocial/144las-feministas-del-pintalabios.html?lang= (accessed August 4, 2015). Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret. “The Grotesque and the Ideal: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Popular Comedy Programmes on British TV.” In Frames and Fictions on Television: The Politics of Identity Within Drama, edited by Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, 113௅25. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. Lotz, Amanda D. “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes.” Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1, 2001. Marcos, Natalia. “Girls: ¿Sí o no?” El País (blog). February 14, 2013. http://blogs.elpais.com/quinta-temporada/2013/02/girls-si-o-no.html (accessed January 12, 2016). Marghitu, Stefania, and Conrad Ng. “Body Talk: Reconsidering the PostFeminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls.” Gender Forum. An International Journal for Gender Studies 45 (2013). www.genderforum.org/issues/special-issue-early-career-researchersi/body-talk-reconsidering-the-post-feminist-discourse-and-criticalreception-of-lena-dunhams-girls/ (accessed February 2, 2016). McKay, Hollie. “Criticism of HBO’s Girls for being about ‘White Girls, Money, Whining’ Justified?” Fox News. April 18, 2012. www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/04/18/criticism-hbo-girls-forbeing-about-white-girls-money-whining-justified/ (accessed March 28, 2015). McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage Publications, 2009. Mellencamp, Patricia. “Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy.” In Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, edited by Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel, 60௅73. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Menéndez Menéndez, María Isabel. “Alianzas conceptuales entre patriarcado y postfeminismo: A propósito del capital erótico.” Clepsydra 13 (March 2015): 45௅64. Nelson, Robin. “Performing (Wo)manoeuvres: The Progress of Gendering in TV Drama.” In Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity Within Drama, edited by Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, 62–74. Exeter: Intellect Books. Obenson, Tambay A. “Lena Dunham Addresses Girls Diversity Criticism & Why I Just Don’t Care.” Indiewire. May 8, 2012. http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/2c060de0-993b-11e1 -bcc4-123138165f92 (accessed March 15, 2015). Ordoñez, Marcos. “Esperando a Lena Dunham.” El País, December 5, 2013. http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/12/04/actualidad/1386163 658_968902.html (accessed 24 March, 2015). Philips, Deborah. “Medical Soap: The Woman Doctor in Television Medical Drama.” In Frames and Fictions on Television; The Politics of Identity within Drama, edited by Bruce Carson and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones, 50–61. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. Poniewozik, James. “Dead Tree Alert: Brave New Girls.” Time. April 5, 2012. http://entertainment.time.com/2012/04/05/dead-tree-alert-bravenew-girls/ (accessed March 17, 2015). Projanski, Sarah. Watching Rape. Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2001. Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Sitcoms and Single Moms: Representations of Feminism on American TV.” Cinema Journal 29 (1989): 3௅19. Ramírez, Noel. “Girls: Postfeminism on TV.” Borderzine. August 8, 2013. http://borderzine.com/2013/08/girls-post-feminism-on-tv/ (accessed May 22, 2015). Raymond, Janice G. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Rey, Alberto. “La nueva Woody Allen (con perdón).” El Mundo. January 25, 2013. www.elmundo.es/blogs/elmundo/asesinoenserie/2013/01/25/ la-nueva-woody-allen-con-perdon.html (accessed May 3, 2015). Robinson-Greene, Rachel. “Don’t Get Mad at Girls.” In Girls and Philosophy, edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, 15௅25. Chicago: Open Court, 2015. Rodríguez, Noel. “Girls: Post feminism on TV.” Borderzine. August 8, 2013. http://borderzine.com/2013/08/girls-post-feminism-on-tv/ (accessed April 9, 2015). Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

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Sepinwall, Alan. “Review: HBO’s Girls Brilliantly Channels Lena Dunham’s Comic Voice.” Hitfix. April 12, 2012. www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/review-hbos-girlsbrilliantly-channels-lena-dunhams-comic-voice (accessed April 9, 2015). Shulman, Alix Kates. “Dances with Feminists.” The Emma Goldman Papers. Berkeley Library: University of California. www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/danceswithfeminists.html (accessed August 1, 2015). Such, Marina. “Los desnudos de Girls y otros clichés de series a superar.” ¡Vaya tele!. January 15, 2014. www.vayatele.com/ficcion-internacional/ los-desnudos-de-girls-y-otros-cliches-de-series-a-superar (accessed April 15, 2015). Wallis, Claudia. “Onward, Women!” Times. June 24, 2001. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,150717,00.html (accessed May 13, 2015). Walters, Suzanna Danuta. “Premature Postmortems: ǥPostfeminism’ and Popular Culture.” New Politics 3, no. 2 (1991): 103௅12. Wilde, Oscar. BrainyQuote. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/ oscarwilde128481.html (accessed March 2, 2016).

CHAPTER FOUR THE VIRTUOSIC LABOR OF FEMININITY IN MAD MEN LEOPOLD LIPPERT

“The Other Woman,” a much-discussed fifth-season episode of the AMC hit series Mad Men (2007–2015) opens with an unscrupulous proposition: Herb Rennet (Gary Basaraba), head of the dealer’s association at Jaguar automobiles, and thus a powerful prospective client for the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP) ad agency that is at the center of the series, expresses his sexual interest in Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), office manager at SCDP. “I sure would like the opportunity to get to know her better,”1 he euphemistically informs the male accountants who woo him (and his company money) over dinner, and grins mischievously. By the end of the episode, Herb and Joan have spent a night in bed together, and SCDP has landed the Jaguar account. For Joan, getting to know Herb better means professional advancement: for her efforts, she receives a five percent partnership stake in SCDP—in all likelihood a substantial amount of money—plus voting rights in all management decisions. Between Herb’s proposal and Joan’s compensation lies labor that has no name: accountant Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), who first approaches Joan with the proposition, calls it “business at a very high level,”2 for Roger Sterling (John Slattery), one of SCDP’s senior partners (and former lover of Joan’s), it is “some very dirty business,”3 and Joan herself, finally, labels it simply “prostitution.” In this chapter, I want to examine the meaning and cultural significance of the labor that Joan Holloway performs in “The Other Woman,” and discuss the relevance of its representation in the context of 1. “The Other Woman,” Mad Men. Season 5, DVD, directed by Phil Abraham (Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2012), Episode 11. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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contemporary media culture, and so-called “quality television.” The way in which Joan’s sexual labor is depicted in this episode, I argue, is characteristic not only of the gender politics of Mad Men more generally, but also of the representational strategies the series employs in order to teach its viewers the cultural logic of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In particular, I want to argue, the series depicts an (incomplete) transformation of a moral-political discourse about femininity into a functional-economic one; in the process, the (moral-political) category of “virtuousness” is fused with the (functional-economic) one of “virtuosity.” The following analysis, then, will show how the notion of “femininity” is mobilized as labor in the interest of capital accumulation. Moreover, through this focus on the intersection of neoliberalism and gender, I want to lay bare Mad Men’s peculiar economic exchange logic: not only is it plausible for Joan to substitute her female sexuality for a percentage of company shares, but this substitution is depicted as a rational decision made by a sovereign subject.

Mad Men and the 1960s Ever since its first season aired in July 2007, Mad Men has exerted enormous cultural influence: even though the series never had much more than three million viewers per episode (compared to, say, the fourteen million viewers who watched an average fifth-season episode of AMC’s rival series The Walking Dead in 2014–2015),4 it has still inspired an almost unprecedented wealth of commentaries, reviews, as well as longer and more in-depth popular and academic essays that strove to account for its significance. Mad Men, and in particular its stylistically meticulous depiction of 1960s office life in New York City, has precipitated arguments that range from the somber to the frivolous. Titles of books on the series include, for instance, Mad Men on the Couch, The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook, or, in a more serious vein, Mad Men and Philosophy, or Mad Men and Politics.5 4. For both Mad Men’s and The Walking Dead’s ratings, I rely on Wikipedia’s compilation of a number of news sources. See “The Walking Dead,” and “Mad Men,” Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ Walking_Dead_(TV_series), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men (accessed October 10, 2015). 5. See Stephanie Newman, Mad Men on the Couch: Analyzing the Minds of the Men and Women of the Hit TV Show (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012); Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin, The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men (Dallas: BenBella, 2011); Rod Carveth and James B.

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Arguably, the bulk of academic and semi-academic work that followed in the wake of Mad Men’s immense popularity has fallen into two major categories: On the one hand, authors have been concerned with the ways in which the series represents the 1960s, and with the historical accuracy (and/or cultural politics) of how Mad Men depicts American life during that period. In their co-written book Mad Men and Working Women, for instance, Erika Engstrom, Tracy Lucht, Jane Marcellus, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss profess to look at Mad Men “through the lens of historical portrayals of working women in the U.S.”6 and attempt to “complicate traditional understandings of the period preceding the women’s liberation movement.”7 In a similar vein, Leslie J. Reagan reads “Mad Men’s scenes of gynecological examination, pregnancy, childbirth, marriage, and childrearing”8 in the context (and often against) the legal, medical, and cultural history of women’s reproductive rights in the United States. Moreover, a number of texts have compared Mad Men to cultural texts of the 1950s and 1960s (such as Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel The Best of Everything or Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl)9 in order to trace the ways in which these representations differ in their portrayal of the period.

South, eds., Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is as It Seems (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010); Linda Beail and Lilly J. Goren, eds., Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 6. Erika Engstrom et al., introduction to Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 7. 7. Ibid., 8. 8. Leslie J. Reagan, “After the Sex, What?: A Feminist Reading of Reproductive History in Mad Men,” in Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 92. 9. See, for instance, Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Doubleday, 2014), 173–82 (about both texts); Alexander Doty, “The Homosexual and the Single Girl,” in Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 279–80 (about Sex and the Single Girl); or Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, Introduction to Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 3–8; as well as Tamar Jeffers McDonald, “Mad Men and Career Women: The Best of Everything?,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 117–35 (both about The Best of Everything).

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On the other hand, a number of scholars have argued that Mad Men uses the 1960s merely as an historical backdrop for the negotiation of contemporary (that is, early 21st century) social and cultural issues. According to this line of argument, the series should not be evaluated for the veracity or authenticity of its depiction of the 1960s, but rather for the cultural implications of its projections on the 1960s from the vantage point of the present. Scott F. Stoddart, for instance, insists that “by actively redressing the mythologies of mid-century American culture, Mad Men offers us a window for looking at our own world objectively through the guise of history.”10 In a similar vein, Tonya Krouse identifies nostalgia as “the dominant mode through which the series approaches the representation of history.”11 And Mark Greif, in what has become a famous early response to Mad Men, has faulted the series for its unreconstructed progressivism, and its insistence that whatever may have been bad in the 1960s is certainly better in the present. “Mad Men,” Greif notes, “is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of the Now We Know Better.”12 Even though I do not want to subscribe to Greif’s easy dismissal of Mad Men as an escapist fantasy that exonerates 21st-century social mores and cultural logics, my own reading of the series is still informed by the larger trans-historical framework suggested by this second line of argument. Thus, my own interest in the series is not so much sustained by a desire to reveal “the real Mad Men” (as the title of yet another of the innumerable books on the series has it);13 rather, I attempt to chart the correspondences that the series establishes between the “then” of its diegesis and the “now” of its production and reception contexts. Importantly, I do not want to examine Joan’s political/economic conundrum for its historical accuracy (or realism), but rather for what it tells us about contemporary labor, that is, labor under conditions of present-day neoliberal capitalism. In short, I want to evaluate the ways in which Mad Men, through the lens of the 1960s, dramatizes and at the same

10. Scott F. Stoddart, “Camelot Regained,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 230. 11. Tonya Krouse, “Every Woman Is a Jackie or a Marilyn: The Problematics of Nostalgia,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 201–2. 12. Mark Greif, “You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n20/mark-greif/youll-love-the -way-it-makes-you-feel (accessed October 11, 2015). 13. Andrew Cracknell, The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age, When a Handful of Renegades Changed Advertising For Ever (London: Quercus, 2011).

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time troubles the “common sense” concerning remunerated labor in the early 21st century.

On Virtuosity: The Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Labor “The Other Woman,” written by Semi Chellas and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, is a Mad Men episode primarily concerned with the question of value and ownership: Throughout the episode, the creative team of SCDP attempts to come up with an advertising strategy that best encapsulates the (male) desire to “own” a Jaguar car; central character Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has to confront the fundamental fragility of his supposed “possession” of both his wife Megan (Jessica Paré) and his protégée Peggy (Elizabeth Moss); Herb wields his financial influence in order to “own” Joan’s body; and Joan herself comes to “own” a share of the company she works for. The episode, however, not only dramatizes the values—financial and emotional alike—attached to such ownership, but perhaps more importantly, it also contrasts the ownership of a product (the Jaguar is eventually advertised as “something beautiful you can truly own”) with the ownership of a human being, and a woman in particular. Unlike a Jaguar car, the episode insists, women might be bought, but they cannot be “truly” owned (or exchanged, for that matter); hence, when Herb nonchalantly purchases Joan’s body, he does not really acquire ownership of it, but gets something different: the exercise of Joan’s labor power. But what is the nature of the labor that Joan performs here, and what is the product of that labor? And how is it remunerated? While the episode does not visualize Joan’s actual labor (the sexual act with Herb), but only indicates it through a preliminary undressing sequence and a subsequent shot that shows the two exhausted characters in bed under one blanket, it is still clear that it does not produce anything in a material sense. There is no end product of Joan’s labor that can be separated from both the laborer herself and the act (the performance) of producing. Instead, Joan’s labor could be understood along the lines of what the post-operaist philosopher Paolo Virno describes as “virtuosity.” Basically, Virno argues, virtuosic labor comprises of “those activities […] which find in themselves their own fulfillment without being objectivized into an end product which might surpass them.”14 Moreover, he claims, for an activity to be virtuosic,

14. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 53.

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it “requires the presence of others, [it] exists only in the presence of an audience.”15 Whereas Virno uses artistic performance as a paradigmatic example of virtuosic labor, it can be argued that Joan’s sexual performance works in similar ways: the only product of her virtuosic laboring in Herb’s presence, paradoxically, is the sexual activity itself, as a performative effect of the subject that labors.16 According to Virno, virtuosic activity has become the predominant form of human labor in contemporary neoliberal societies. Increasingly, subjects have turned into laborers of their own selves who follow the cultural and economic imperative to perform (rather than to produce) in front of various publics. While the episode highlights the sexual dimensions of such performance in particular, it nevertheless lays bare the more general structure of virtuosic labor as well. Specifically, “The Other Woman” points to (and is implicated in) the political problem posed by the rise of virtuosic labor under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, namely the reconfiguration of political action as remunerated labor. As Virno explains, performative public acts without material productivity (that is, virtuosic activities) traditionally belonged to the domain of politics, not to the economic realm.17 Hence, to conceive—like neoliberal societies do— of virtuosity only as a form of remunerated labor structured by functional input-output relations, Virno argues, implies the “subsumption into the labor process of what formerly guaranteed an indisputable physiognomy for public Action.”18 Paradoxically, then, the political problem of virtuosic labor is that it strategically and fundamentally de-politicizes public activities by making them culturally legible only in economic (instead of political) terms. Essentially, I would argue, “The Other Woman” (and Mad Men more generally) dramatizes virtuosic labor in order to highlight this transformation of the political into the economic. Through a 1960s scenario, the episode

15. Virno, Grammar, 53. 16. Arguably, what is produced in such virtuosic constellations is affect: an immaterial intensity that is intersubjective, communicative, and possibly social. Michael Hardt, who has theorized the rise of “affective labor,” claims that in recent years, affect has become central to capitalist exploitation: it has become “not only directly productive of capital” but has also been placed “at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms” (“Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 90). 17. Virno relies here on Hannah Arendt’s influential Aristotelian description of political action, most comprehensively outlined in The Human Condition. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175–247. 18. Virno, Grammar, 52.

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problematizes a very contemporary dilemma, namely the neoliberal reconfiguration of the political subject as an entrepreneurial self.19 Hence, from the beginning of the episode, Joan is positioned as a businesswoman who offers (or is reluctant to offer) her labor power. Pete and Joan’s initial conversation about Herb’s offer is indicative of this arrangement: Pete feigns discomfort at first, but soon suggests to Joan that “there’s something that could be worth the sacrifice.” Pete’s remark discloses his larger rhetorical strategy, namely to reframe a moral-political category (“sacrifice”) as a question of economic value (“worth”). Since Pete’s rhetoric doubles as Mad Men’s overall discursive logic, his strategy obviously succeeds: even though Joan initially rejects Pete’s suggestion, she can only do so within the framework of “worth” and “value” he set up: quite matter-of-factly, Joan retorts, “You couldn’t afford it.” Within such a framework, Joan’s body is treated as a resource to be labored with, and from which a maximum of profit must be reaped. The remainder of the episode details this process of profit-maximization: as Pete relates Joan’s comment about her “unaffordability” to the other SCDP partners, they immediately devise a financial offer high enough to pay (for) her. Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), the company’s financial officer, then approaches Joan with an initial offer of 50,000 dollars (which is four times Joan’s annual salary) for her “services,” but ends up promising something else: He subtly reformulates the idea of “value” and argues that even a high amount of cash “would do very little to change [Joan’s] future.”20 Instead, he suggests that she asks for “a partnership, yielding a fivepercent stake in the company itself.”21 Joan agrees, and insists on professional, that is, economically rational, proceedings: She schedules an official appointment with Pete and demands to be a partner. “There is no negotiation,” she commands. “I want documents by the end of the day.” Crucially, the episode presents Joan as a rational actor in an economic transaction. Even though there are several close-ups of her face that indicate indecisiveness and emotional turmoil, and even though there is a melodramatic subplot that involves Don’s thwarted attempt to prevent Joan from meeting with Herb, the narrative logic of “The Other Woman” still suggests that Joan makes a reflection-based, autonomous financial 19. I take the notion of an “entrepreneurial self [unternehmerisches Selbst]” from Ulrich Bröckling, Das Unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 46–75. One of Bröckling’s points is, crucially, that the entrepreneurial self is always already an entrepreneur of the self. 20. “The Other Woman,” Mad Men. Season 5, Episode 11. 21. Ibid.

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decision, and that she merely puts a price tag on her sexual labor. Chellas and Weiner’s script makes legible Joan’s (un)willingness to have sex with Herb as a question of (in)adequate remuneration, and as a consequence, remains unconcerned with such issues such as bodily integrity, a woman’s right to her own body, 1960s moral codes, the ethics of marriage, or even feminist liberation (all political discourses, essentially). This indifference to see anything but labor in Joan’s sex with Herb is particularly remarkable considering that an earlier Mad Men episode, the secondseason “The Mountain King,” already deliberated a similar problematic precisely in terms of violated bodily integrity. In this episode, Joan is raped by her fiancé and later husband Greg (Sam Page) on the floor of her boss Don Draper’s office. The sexual act is shown explicitly and depicted as an act of brutal male violence that Joan is physically unable to resist.22 However, even though “The Mountain King” foregrounds the political and ethical dimensions of sexual abuse, the earlier episode also renders Joan virtually powerless. “The Other Woman,” on the contrary, seems to grant some form of agency to Joan concerning the exercise of her body. The later episode represents Joan’s negotiations with the male SCDP partners over her sexual labor as an emancipatory act, as she dictates her own financial terms, and eventually gets to own parts of the company she works for. In an interview with The Daily Beast, series creator Matthew Weiner also stresses this dynamic: puzzling over audiences who condemned Joan’s actions in this episode, he states, “I think people were hoping that she would maintain some higher morality and suffer through the rest of her life.”23 For Weiner, Joan’s decision represents a form of empowerment (albeit compromised), as it puts an end to her “suffering” and makes her financially independent. Importantly, though, an emancipatory logic that exchanges a “higher morality” for financial benefits makes sense only within a larger neoliberal

22. For a reading of the significance of the rape scene in “The Mountain King,” see for instance, Sara Rogers, “Mad Men/Mad Women: Autonomous Images of Women,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 163–65. The episodes also differ in the representation of the men involved: While Greg is handsome and wellmannered, Herb is depicted as repulsive: he is overweight, hairy, and constantly sweating, and despite his nominal power, he comes across as an uncultivated car salesman fundamentally incompatible with the sophisticated New York urbanites. 23. Jace Lacob, “‘Mad Men’: Matthew Weiner and Christina Hendricks on ‘The Other Woman,’ Part 1,” The Daily Beast, July 8, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast. com/articles/2012/08/07/mad-men-matthew-weiner-christina-hendricks-on-theother-woman-part-1.html (accessed October 15, 2015).

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structure that privileges the economic over the political. Joan’s “emancipation” is only effectual when one thinks of her sexual activity as virtuosic labor, not as a political problem (having to do with the systematic oppression and abuse of women’s bodies). Consequently, Joan’s empowerment never transcends the functional neoliberal logic that regards the accumulation of capital as a form of political action. Mad Men, thus, ambivalently tells its audiences an old political predicament in a new economic guise: It represents the sexual objectification of women as an opportunity for the performance of virtuosic labor that can and should be adequately remunerated.

Uncertain Remuneration: Haunted by the Specter of Capital The question of remuneration, however, is further complicated by the fact that Joan does not get any money in exchange for her labor, but an uncertain promise of futurity: a stake in the company might be worth infinitely more than the 50,000 dollars she is offered initially, but it might also be worth nothing at all. While technically, the value of cash money is not stable either, but contingent on fiscal policy and/or geopolitical developments, the speculative margin is much higher with company stakes. More specifically, Joan does not have sufficient information about the financial condition of SCDP (which is dire) in order to make a decision based on a rational evaluation of factors. Rather, her labor is offered in exchange for value that cannot be adequately assessed, as it is made up in large parts of hope and conjecture. Perhaps unwittingly, Joan becomes implicated in what Randy Martin calls, in a book of the same name, “the financialization of daily life,”24 that is, the expansion of financial logics (such as risk calculation and the constant negotiation of uncertainties or crisis) into the ordinary life of private individuals.25 As a partner, from that point forward it will be Joan’s personal responsibility to sustain or even increase the value of the labor that made her a partner in the first place; the question of what her virtuosity is worth, therefore, will never be solved or ascertained, but is prolonged endlessly.26 24. Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 25. Lauren Berlant, who is more concerned with the affective dimensions of these uncertainties, accordingly calls this condition “crisis ordinariness” (Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press), 10). 26. In fact, the decision to opt for company stakes instead of cash preliminarily secures the value of her labor—as Lane points out to Joan in the course of their

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In the future, then, Joan will be indefinitely haunted—not only by the possible physical or psychological ramifications of her particular sexual activity, but also because she will always have to labor again in order to secure the ever insecure value of her original labor. In effect, Joan will be haunted by what Joseph Vogl calls “the specter of capital,”27 which he claims appears in the guise of future capital obligations that create a fundamental uncertainty about the present. The attempt to “insur[e] or ‘securitiz[e]’ future event sequences,” Vogl argues, “returns as an incursion of uncontrollable contingency, and the technologies deployed to control, colonize, or defuturize the future end up transforming it into an unforeseen event impinging on the here and now.”28 Hence, while Joan intends to “insure” her future (and that of her son), the decision to exchange her labor power for company stakes actually turns her ongoing present into a scene of continuing insecurity. As she can never be certain of the value of her labor, the very future she tries to secure will return again and again in order to haunt her present. Later Mad Men episodes take up both the pains and pleasures of such haunting: in the sixth-season episode “For Immediate Release,” Don behaves impatiently during a dinner with Herb, and eventually loses the SCDP deal with Jaguar because of his confrontational rudeness. His actions fundamentally devalue Joan’s former virtuosic labor and highlight the precariousness of the exchange logic she entered. Even though Jaguar is soon replaced with Chevrolet, Joan is still unsettled by Don’s carelessness, and blurts at him through tears: “Honestly, Don, if I could deal with him, you could deal with him!” The uncertainty associated with assessing the value of Joan’s labor, however, also produces exhilaration: In the seventh-season episode “Waterloo,” the partners decide to sell the ad agency to the much larger McCann Erickson (a company that actually exists), a move that earns Joan over one and a half million dollars for her five percent share. Upon hearing the exorbitant sum, Joan cries excitedly, “Oh my goodness!” and triumphantly votes in favor of the move. Importantly, however, my interest is not so much in the particular value of Joan’s virtuosic labor, but more so in the fact that Joan’s sexual activity is configured as valuable labor in the first place. The narrative arc established by “The Other Woman” calls attention to the way in which Mad Men negotiates the neoliberal transformation of the political field into negotiations, giving away 50,000 dollars “would only cripple the company” (“The Other Woman,” Mad Men. Season 5, Episode 11). 27. Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), x. 28. Vogl, Specter of Capital, 125.

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matters of economic feasibility. As the series represents these transformations in the context of a postwar office environment (structured by disciplinary routines and mostly repetitive tasks such as typing, scheduling, or directing phone calls), it engages in a form of retrospective mobilization of contemporary neoliberal labor: Mad Men’s negotiation of the worth of Joan’s virtuosity, then, is timely, yet depicted as curiously out of time.

The Virtuous/ic Labor of Gender Up to this point, I have described the nature of Joan’s virtuosity primarily in abstract terms, and have examined the affective and speculative nature of neoliberal labor without paying special attention to Mad Men’s gender politics, and in particular to its depiction of feminist struggles. However, the labor that Joan performs in “The Other Woman” is more specifically gendered labor in the sense that the provision of sexual services has been traditionally associated with women—although Herb’s proposal seems outrageous, it is not represented as unusual. More importantly for this chapter, still, is the fact that Joan’s labor can also be considered labor of gender, as her virtuosity is enlisted in the performance of a particular model of femininity, which catches Herb’s attention in the first place, and which consequently lands her the “job.” As a form of neoliberal labor, I would suggest, the labor of gender can be described as the effort people make in order to construct, maintain, or modify their gendered selves in the interest of capital accumulation. Like all virtuosic labor, then, the labor of gender represents a form of investment into one’s own human resource that will possibly reap future economic benefits. While the sexual labor depicted in “The Other Woman” might be considered a drastic example, it is embedded in Joan’s more general strategic objectification of her gendered body for professional success: as Kim Akass and Janet McCabe point out, Joan “commands the space with her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’”29 and is “objectifying [her body], believing she has some agency in that objectification, taking pleasure in that process.”30 Arguably, such strategic self-objectification (that is, the labor of gender) is not reducible to Joan’s character, but is typical of the representation of women in Mad Men, who all strategically perform various labors of gender: a much-analyzed episode in this regard is the second-season

29. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, “The Best of Everything: The Limits of Being a Working Girl in Mad Men,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, ed. Gary R. Edgerton (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 181. 30. Ibid., 185.

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“Maidenform” which opens with a memorable montage of the three central female characters Joan, Betty (January Jones), and Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) getting dressed for the day in front of their respective bedroom mirrors. Even though the sequence is somewhat fetishistic in its historicist depiction of elaborate period undergarments, it also calls attention to the highly concentrated, even strenuous labor of the women as they put on layer after layer of their ornate attire in order to strategically produce a publicly acceptable feminine appearance.31 Importantly, such strategic deployment of gender performativity as labor removes femininity from the political field and reduces it to a mere economic asset. Hence, Mad Men’s feminism becomes legible only in economic terms, as a form of self-optimization of the gendered subject rather than as a political struggle with broader, public implications. A progressive reading of the series, obviously, would insist that such moral/economic dilemmas are things of the past: Christina Hendricks, the actress who plays Joan, for instance, claims that women “have a lot more options these days.”32 My own reading, however, indicates that the labor of gender depicted in the series is not necessarily concerned with the enactment of 1960s gender roles, but instead becomes imbued with the contemporary alignment of neoliberal virtuosity and feminist politics—an alignment that Rosalind Gill has described, among others, as “postfeminist sensibility.”33 In particular, Gill argues that postfeminism has provoked a “representational shift to neoliberal subjectivities in which sexual objectification can be (re-) presented not as something done to women by some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active, confident, assertive female subjects.”34 Mad Men dramatizes the political ambivalence that lies

31. For readings of the significance of this opening montage, see for instance, Lilya Kaganovsky, “‘Maidenform’: Masculinity as Masquerade,” in Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, ed. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing (Durham, Duke University Press, 2013), 240–43; or Meenasarani Linde Murugan, “Maidenform: Temporalities of Fashion, Femininity,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott F. Stoddart (Jefferson, McFarland, 2011), 172–73. 32. “Other Woman,” Mad Men. Season 5, Epsiode 11. 33. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 162. 34. Gill, “Postfeminist,” 152–53. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra argue that such a shift is possible because “[p]ostfeminist culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via the figure of woman as empowered consumer.” See Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture,” in

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in such “intentionality”: although Joan’s (and the other women’s) labor of femininity is eventually remunerated, and although it leads to prosperity and happiness, it is only successful by the standards of a privatized economy made up of solipsistic neoliberal subjects; at the same time, it remains culturally illegible as public practice or feminist politics.35 Still, when Joan refuses to maintain or aspire to, as Matthew Weiner has it, “some higher morality,” she also rejects the idea of virtuousness understood as a moral-political category traditionally used to control and discipline women. Essentially, she refuses to be cast as a virtuous female subject who is willing to make a (moral) sacrifice, and instead opts for the (empowered) subjectivity of a virtuosic woman who profitably exercises her labor power. Joan’s labor of gender rearticulates a fall from virtuousness (a moralistic narrative of femininity) as a form of successful virtuosity (an entrepreneurial narrative of femininity), and thus carves out the emancipatory potential of such neoliberal labor. Importantly, Mad Men depicts the shift from virtuousness to virtuosity, from moralism to economics, as a politically ambiguous practice: even though Joan circumvents the patriarchal logic that expects women to be virtuous, she is only able to do so by performing her femininity outside the realm of politics altogether. Accordingly, the emancipatory act of her (successful) gender performance becomes meaningful only, and strictly, according to the functional and privatized economic logic of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

Bibliography Akass, Kim, and Janet McCabe. “The Best of Everything: The Limits of Being a Working Girl in Mad Men.” In Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, edited by Gary R. Edgerton, 177–92. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Beail, Linda, and Lilly J. Goren, eds. Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 35. Katharina Gerund makes a similar argument about the postfeminist politics of Mad Men; however, Gerund’s focus lies more on the connections the series establishes between conservative postwar domesticity and its resurgence in the post-9/11 era. See Katharina Gerund, “(Post-)Feminism and Gender Politics in Mad Men,” in Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart, ed. Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 111–32.

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Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Bröckling, Ulrich. Das Unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Carveth, Rod, and James B. South, eds. Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is as It Seems. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Cracknell, Andrew. The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age, When a Handful of Renegades Changed Advertising For Ever. London: Quercus, 2011. Doty, Alexander. “The Homosexual and the Single Girl.” In Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, 279–99. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Engstrom, Erika et al. Introduction to Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness, 1–12. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. “For Immediate Release.” Episode 6 of Mad Men. Season 6. DVD. Directed by Jennifer Getzinger. Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2013. Gelman, Judy and Peter Zheutlin. The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men. Dallas: BenBella, 2011. Gerund, Katharina. “(Post-)Feminism and Gender Politics in Mad Men.” In Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart, edited by Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul, 111–32. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. Goodlad, Lauren M. E., Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing. Introduction to Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, 1–31. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Greif, Mark. “You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel.” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n20/mark-greif/ youll-love-the-way-it-makes-you-feel (accessed October 11, 2015). Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100. Jeffers-McDonald, Tamar. “Mad Men and Career Women: The Best of Everything?” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddart, 117–35. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Kaganovsky, Lilya. “‘Maidenform:’ Masculinity as Masquerade.” In Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, edited by Lauren

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M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, 238–56. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Krouse, Tonya. “Every Woman Is a Jackie or a Marilyn: The Problematics of Nostalgia.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddard, 186–204. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Lacob, Jace. “Mad Men: Matthew Weiner and Christina Hendricks on ‘The Other Woman,’ Part 1.” The Daily Beast, July 8, 2012. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/07/mad-men-matthewweiner-christina-hendricks-on-the-other-woman-part-1.html (accessed October 15, 2015). “Mad Men.” Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men (accessed October 10, 2015). “Maidenform.” Episode 6 of Mad Men. Season 2. DVD. Directed by Phil Abraham. Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2009. Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Murugan, Meenasarani Linde. “Maidenform: Temporalities of Fashion, Femininity, and Feminism.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddart, 166–85. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Newman, Stephanie. Mad Men on the Couch: Analyzing the Minds of the Men and Women of the Hit TV Show. New York: St. Martin’s, 2012. Reagan, Leslie J. “After the Sex, What? A Feminist Reading of Reproductive History in Mad Men.” In Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, 92–110. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Rogers, Sara. “Mad Men/Mad Women: Autonomous Images of Women.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddart, 155–65. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Stoddart, Scott F. “Camelot Regained.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddart, 207–33. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, 1–25. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

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“The Mountain King.” Episode 12 of Mad Men. Season 2. DVD. Directed by Phil Abraham. Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2009. “The Other Woman.” Episode 11 of Mad Men. Season 5. DVD. Directed by Phil Abraham. Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2012. “The Walking Dead.” Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(TV_series (accessed October 10, 2015). Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004. Vogl, Joseph. The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. “Waterloo.” Epsiode 7 of Mad Men. Season 7. DVD. Directed by Matthew Weiner. Los Angeles: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2014.

CHAPTER FIVE THE LEGACY OF LUCY WESTENRA: FEMALE POSTFEMINIST SUBJECTS IN THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, TRUE BLOOD AND THE TWILIGHT SAGA LEA GERHARDS

Recent popular culture is conspicuous for its investment in Gothic film and television, which abounds not only with romantic vampire boyfriends, but also with vigorous female vampires. Characters like Caroline Forbes (The Vampire Diaries1), Jessica Hamby (True Blood2), and Bella Swan (The Twilight Saga3) are very popular with fans as the protagonists or secondary characters of their series’ narratives. The portrayal of these human females who are turned into vampires by male makers bears similarities to the depiction of Lucy Westenra. Introduced by Bram Stoker as sweet and innocent, yet sexualized, Lucy is turned by Dracula into an aggressive, hypersexual creature refusing to conform to society’s rules. While Lucy is staked and thereby put in her place in the Dracula narrative, our contemporary female vampire characters’ stories are more diverse and even positive in their outcome. By examining how the above-mentioned series make sense of their female characters’ transition from human to vampire, this paper aims to shed light on the different ways popular cultural texts shape our understanding of femininity. As will be argued, today’s narratives offer a range of different models for female identity, from more progressive to rather conventional ones. What these varying models have in common is their rootedness in contemporary postfeminist

1. Broadcast on The CW; 2009–present; 7 seasons, ongoing. 2. Broadcast on HBO; 2008–2014; 7 seasons. 3. Films of the Saga, distributed by Summit Entertainment: Twilight (2008), New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010), Breaking Dawn Part I (2011) and Part II (2012).

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culture.4 As the following analysis will illustrate, Caroline, Jessica and Bella epitomize the paradox of the active/passive female postfeminist subject, individually empowered and simultaneously ruled by social norms. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is often credited with envisioning the original vampire figure,5 and the text has had a tremendous influence on our understanding of what vampires are and what their characteristics include. As Gregory A. Waller writes, “the story of the living and the undead […] is an ongoing process of retelling and revisioning Stoker’s narrative and in various ways modifying, reaffirming, or challenging the assumptions that inform Dracula.”6 Stoker’s Gothic novel will thus serve as a reference point throughout the paper. Texts of the vampire genre, as any genre text, always involve both repetition and difference:7 Repetition evokes “the pleasures of the familiar” for audiences,8 while modifications of genre elements also produce innovation. Genres in current media studies are seen as “working with ‘repertoires of elements’ or fluid systems of learnt conventions and expectations. These are shared by makers and audiences, who are both active on both sides of meaning-making.”9 Starting from this assumption that texts may handle genre elements in different ways, the article will analyze how contemporary vampire TV deals with the trope of “the defenceless, virginal female victim”10 and her fate, which Waller names as one of the central conventions in stories of the living and the undead. While a number of the traditional elements introduced by Stoker still haunt the current series, my approach will show how some narratives play and at times break with those conventions, or even turn them upside down. As will become clear, the series frequently rely on viewers’ awareness of generic classifications and will at times playfully subvert their expectations. Taking into account that conventions “embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular,”11 it will be argued that 4. Discussed in depth in Esquirol-Salom and Pujol-Ozonas in this volume, specifically through the example of the Fifty Shades of Grey saga, a fanfic derivation of Twilight. 5. Jutta Schulze, “A ‘Truth Like This’: Language and the Construction of Power and Knowledge in Vampire Fiction,” aspeers 5 (2012): 112. 6. Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead. From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 29. 7. Gill Branston and Roy Stafford, The Media Student’s Book (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 74. 8. Ibid., 78. 9. Ibid., 79; italics in the original. 10. Waller, Living and the Undead, 7. 11. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 110.

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shifts in notions about femininity are mirrored in the analyzed popular cultural productions. A common academic reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is that the novel exhibits a profound “hostility toward female sexuality,”12 and that it promotes the binary of “the angel and the whore.”13 This dichotomy is touched upon in the portrayal of the two main female characters, Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. In addition, it is exemplified more explicitly in the character of Lucy as she is transformed from human to vampire. While Mina is portrayed as the prototype of the ideal Victorian woman who is devoted entirely to her husband and aspires to be a pure, modest and dutiful wife and good mother,14 the characterization of Lucy is more ambivalent. On the one hand, Lucy is described as a dear friend to Mina, “oh, so sweet,”15 and respectable. On the other hand, she differs from Mina in the fact that she is sexualized. Beautiful Lucy is aware of her effect on men and displays a certain coquetry about it. After receiving three marriage proposals in one day, she toys with the idea of accepting all three.16 Lucy’s desire that cannot be fulfilled within the norms of Victorian society is only one element that connects her with Count Dracula. As Robert Tracy points out, “Dracula clearly recognizes and arouses in her a sexuality which is not so much latent as repressed.”17 Lucy’s conversion is then inevitable. The initially passive, soft and compliant woman is transformed by the Count into an aggressive, hypersexual creature blatantly refusing to conform to society’s rules.18 As “conventional Victorian gender codes […] accord […] to the more active male the right 12. Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Dracula. Bram Stoker, ed. Glennis Byron (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 31. 13. Gail B. Griffin, “‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine’: Dracula and the Victorian Male Sexual Imagination,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 3 (1980): 461. 14. Katharina Mewald, “The Emancipation of Mina? Portrayal of Mina in Stoker’s Dracula and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Journal of Dracula Studies 10 (2008): 31. 15. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Puffin Books, 1994 [1897]), 122. 16. “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her […]?” (Stoker, Dracula, 81). 17. Robert Tracy, “Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophiles and Necrofilles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (London: Macmillan, 1990), 43. 18. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Dracula. Bram Stoker, ed. Glennis Byron (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 103–4.

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and responsibility of vigorous appetite,”19 the transformed Lucy violates the said norms by actively seeking out her victims, armed with deadly fangs and the otherwise exclusively male power to penetrate her prey.20 The fact that, as a vampire, she is able to captivate the men who plan to destroy her by being even “more radiantly beautiful than ever”21 emphasizes the sexual power she holds over them. Lucy’s physical attractiveness is also referenced in the reputation she acquires as the “bloofer lady,”22 which is children’s language for “beautiful lady.” The circumstance that her favorite victims are innocent children marks Lucy as “a perversion of maternity,”23 feeding on small children instead of nurturing them. The “suddenly sexual woman”24 constitutes the ultimate horror of Dracula: The vampire threatens to turn angels into whores. In his quest to take over the city of London and, by extension, the Western world, Count Dracula relies on “the systematic creation of female surrogates who enact his will.”25 Lucy is the tool that he uses to acquire other victims: “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine.”26 In the fight for authority between the antithetical male characters Dracula and Van Helsing, who functions as “a sort of Counter-Dracula,”27 the bodies of both female characters Lucy and Mina become the battleground. As Steven Arata highlights, “[t]he struggle between the two camps is […] on one level a struggle over access to women’s bodies.”28 While the good Mina is ultimately saved from the clutches of Dracula, Lucy is punished for her transgression of gender roles: “By disciplining Lucy and restoring each gender to its ‘proper’ function, Van Helsing’s pacification programme compensates for the threat of gender indefinition.”29 In keeping with the typical narrative 19. Ibid., 95. 20. Ibid. 21. Stoker, Dracula, 273. 22. Ibid., 242. 23. Regenia Gagnier, “Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (London: Macmillan, 1990), 144. 24. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women,” 31. 25. Craft, “Kiss Me,” 96. 26. Stoker, Dracula, 422. 27. Griffin, “Your Girls,” 463. 28. Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation,” in Dracula. Bram Stoker, ed. Glennis Byron (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 128. 29. Craft, “Kiss Me,” 107.

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sequence of the horror genre, which introduces a monster, entertains audiences by its monstrosity for some time and in the end repudiates it, along with the disruption that it brought,30 “[t]he active woman is finally pacified by her fiancé”31 and the “violent expulsion of this deformed femininity”32 is justified. While Lucy is punished for succumbing to Dracula’s power so easily and for representing the opposite of patriarchy’s ideal pure maternal figure, our contemporary female vampires’ fates take different directions. The Vampire Diaries’ narrative endorses the transcendence of female gender stereotypes enabled by the change from human to vampire, and thereby subverts generic conventions. At the same time, also playing a role in this text are discourses about the constant disciplinary shaping of the self by way of working on the body. In the series, Caroline Forbes starts out as a character with a close resemblance to Lucy Westenra but later strays from her conventionally prewritten path. Introduced as one of the best friends of Elena Gilbert’s, the TV series’ main romantic heroine, Caroline occupies a similar position in the narrative’s array of characters. Analogous to the insinuated dichotomy between Mina and Lucy, Elena and Caroline are constructed as friends but also rivals. Generally speaking, Elena exemplifies female gender stereotypes by being exceedingly empathetic, compassionate, altruistic as well as “maternal,”33 which makes her “everyone’s first choice”34 and dooms Caroline to “always […] be the backup.”35 Another crucial difference between the two is their attitude towards sexuality: While Elena is characterized as slightly more innocent,36 Caroline is depicted as enjoying her sexuality and desirability to the fullest. This is emphasized repeatedly over the course of the first season, e.g. when she decides on a clothing style that, in her own words,

30. Ibid., 94. 31. Gagnier, “Evolution and Information,” 144. 32. Craft, “Kiss Me,” 99. 33. “Memory Lane,” The Vampire Diaries. Season 2, DVD, directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec (Burbank, CA: The CW, 2011), Episode 4. 34. “There Goes the Neighborhood,” The Vampire Diaries. Season 1, DVD, directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec (Burbank, CA: The CW, 2010), Episode 16. 35. Ibid. 36. In the second episode, Elena is hesitant about becoming physically intimate with her new love interest Stefan, while Caroline is portrayed as openly sexual when she criticizes her friend: “What is with the blockage? Jump his bones already! Okay, it’s easy: Boy likes girl, girl likes boy, sex” (“The Night of the Comet,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 2).

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emanates a “stripper pole vibe,”37 and when she initiates sex with her new boyfriend Matt.38 In addition, the fact that Caroline wins the title of Miss Mystic Falls at the local beauty pageant39 bears testimony to her physical attractiveness, which she is well aware of and likes to underline by dressing up for school dances.40 Being aware of vampire genre conventions, it does not come as a surprise that Damon Salvatore, the series’ evil vampire/bad boy romance hero, chooses Caroline to bring under his dark spell.41 Particularly striking is that her victimization is narratively constructed as a direct cause of her sexual confidence. After inviting Damon to her home for a one-night stand, Caroline is immediately punished for her flirtatiousness; she is bitten by the vampire and compelled42 to do his bidding in the subsequent episodes. Similar to Dracula, Damon instrumentalizes his victim to acquire information about her friends and do him other favors. Although she ultimately stands no chance, Caroline is shown to offer momentary resistance to Damon, which distinguishes her from the swooning Lucy, who is completely unaware of what is happening to her. In this context, it is interesting that the series shows Caroline to be affected by internalized victim-blaming, wondering at one point if “Maybe I let him bite me.”43 Her friend Bonnie’s outraged reaction to this (“Why would you do that?!”44) qualifies Caroline’s self-blame as inappropriate and harmful. This exchange of remarks could be read as a critical comment on the popular interpretation of Lucy Westenra as having been “raped by Dracula but, in street talk, […] ‘asking for it.’”45 Through a rather complicated series of events at the beginning of season 2,46 Caroline is eventually turned into a vampire. In a self37. “You’re Undead to Me,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 5. 38. “A Few Good Men,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 15. 39. “Miss Mystic Falls,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 19. 40. “Unpleasantville,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 12. 41. “The Night of the Comet,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 2. 42. In the series, being compelled means to be hypnotized by a vampire’s powers. Vampires can control the mind of another, alter or erase their memory and instruct them to behave as they wish. 43. “You’re Undead to Me,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 5. 44. Ibid. 45. James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures. An Anatomy of Modern Horror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 134. 46. Caroline suffers severe injuries in a car accident, which is why Damon feeds her his blood in order to heal her. With the vampire blood in her system, she is then killed by another vampire, Katherine, which leads to her transition from human to vampire.

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referential statement, the series has Damon predict how the story ought to continue: “Caroline of all people will not make it as a vampire. […] Guys, come on, we all know how this story ends. Let’s just flip to the last chapter.”47 However, as if to prove generic expectations wrong, it is at this point that Caroline’s narrative takes a very different turn than Lucy’s. While Stoker’s vampire women are “violently and self-righteously persecuted”48 because they threaten the patriarchal status quo, Caroline’s supernatural transition and her ensuing transcendence of passive/active gender binaries is marked as positive in The Vampire Diaries. In fact, vampirism turns out to be the admission ticket to an autonomous, selfdetermined and ultimately happier existence. While the first season portrays her as socially awkward, an outsider even among her best friends, Caroline’s transition assures her the respect of the people around her, as she develops into a mature, complex personality. If Caroline was constrained to the role of “damsel in distress”49 prior to her change, she is now able to defend herself and the people she loves, and often plays an active part in the protagonists’ supernatural missions. Becoming a vampire restores the memories of what Damon had conveniently compelled her to forget, and this knowledge puts her in a position to confront him about his actions as well as eventually overcome her victimization.50 Caroline has various relationships with men over the course of the series, but her sexuality is never demonized as Lucy’s is in Dracula. Instead, it is presented as a natural and complex part of her character. While she definitely occupies a position of control within the narrative due to her vampirism, her power is not presented as being rooted in the conventional “primitive and voracious”51 vampiric/female sexuality. Contrary to Lucy, who is relegated to her rightful state of “holy calm,” “sweetness and purity”52 through her being staked, the contemporary narrative values Caroline’s change “from a state of passivity to one of activity”53 and welcomes it as something that makes her a “strong, […] confident person.”54

47. “Brave New World,” Vampire Diaries. Season 2, Episode 2. 48. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women,” 31. 49. “The Turning Point,” Vampire Diaries. Season 1, Episode 10. 50. “Brave New World,” Vampire Diaries. Season 2, Episode 2. 51. Arata, “Occidental Tourist,” 128. 52. Stoker, Dracula, 296. 53. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 65. 54. “Plan B,” Vampire Diaries. Season 2, Episode 6.

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While Caroline definitely undergoes a journey of personal empowerment, it is crucial to note that her empowering transition brings with it a body that requires control and constant self-discipline, specifically in the management of the urge to feed and kill. When becoming a vampire, she receives a body she must learn to subdue: “I was alone when I turned. I had no control over my body or my urges.”55 After draining a man of blood in the wake of her transformation, Caroline does not kill anyone in several months, thus showing an impressive amount of control for a newly turned vampire. She quickly learns to adjust to her new body by restraining her desire to attack humans. Instead of actively murdering people, she retrieves banked blood from hospitals. Caroline recognizes: “I want to [kill]. It’s my basic nature now. But on a healthy diet, I can control it. I’m getting better at it.”56 A decisive factor in her restraint is her predilection for disciplining herself, her mind and her body. As Stefan Salvatore comments: “Neat, organized Caroline. Staying within lines. Good at control.”57 Bloodthirst in The Vampire Diaries is framed as a conflict between mind and body, and Caroline’s suppression of her urge is celebrated as a success. Similar to Caroline Forbes, Jessica Hamby from True Blood experiences her transition as a process of empowerment and a subversion of regulative rules, while simultaneously finding that she is subject to a number of new restrictions. Jessica is introduced to the series towards the end of season 1, when she is turned into a vampire by Bill Compton. As we quickly learn, she comes from a devout Christian middle class family. Home-schooled by her mother and physically abused by her father as punishment for missteps, she has been suffering under the restrictive regime of her parents and their ideology. The few scenes in which we experience her as a human show Jessica in a state of utter powerlessness: Kidnapped by the henchmen of the Vampire Authority,58 she has been dragged into an arena of bloodthirsty vampires who lust for Bill to transform her. The latter has been sentenced by the Authority to turn a random human victim as retribution for killing another vampire, which underlines Jessica’s status as an object being caught in the power struggles of the patriarchal vampire system. Completely distraught, she starts praying and desperately promises the Magister: “if you take me home, I won’t say a word to mum and daddy 55. “The Sacrifice,” Vampire Diaries. Season 2, Episode 10. 56. “Plan B,” Vampire Diaries. Season 2, Episode 6. 57. “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” The Vampire Diaries. Season 6, DVD, directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec (Burbank, CA: The CW, 2010), Episode 17. 58. In True Blood, the Vampire Authority is a semi-religious, clandestine council which exercises ultimate authority over all vampires across the globe.

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or anybody, please.”59 Thus, the human Jessica is portrayed as child-like, innocent and weak, which makes her the perfect embodiment of Waller’s “defenceless, virginal female victim.”60 What is reminiscent of Lucy’s being punished for her supposed complicity in her attack is that Jessica’s abduction is accompanied by the fact that she was disobedient to her father for the first time in her life: she broke his curfew and was seized by her abductors. Jessica herself initially understands her victimization as a punishment for violating her father’s rules.61 Later, when she returns home as a vampire, her father reproaches her for having been turned, indeed implying that what happened to Jessica was her own fault and that she might have secretly enjoyed it: “How could you let some bloodsucker bite you like that?”62 Thus mirroring Caroline’s remark, “Maybe I let him bite me,”63 the aspect of victim blaming is taken up in Jessica’s narrative as well. Once again, the victim-blaming attitude, this time exhibited by Jessica’s father, is framed in a critical light by the series. As we have witnessed Jessica’s violent transformation from her perspective and we know that she is not to blame for anything, her father’s comment is exposed as cold-hearted and wrong, and can be read as a reference to typical rape cultural myths.64 Strikingly, thanks to her new nature, Jessica is now also in a position to counter her overbearing father: “I didn’t let anybody do anything to me. But, oh, am I glad he did, ‘cause now I get to home school you in what it’s like to be scared.”65 Thus, True Blood, like The Vampire Diaries, explicitly rejects notions of female complicity in vampiric/sexual assault, thereby distancing itself from Stoker’s Dracula. Initially transformed into a vampire against her will, vampirism turns out to be a state that affords Jessica more agency than she had in her human life. Contradicting Bill’s as well as viewers’ expectations, she does not show desperation or sorrow when she learns what she has become. 59. “I Don’t Wanna Know,” True Blood. Season 1, DVD, directed by Alan Ball (New York City, NY: HBO, 2009), Episode 10. 60. Waller, Living and the Undead, 7. 61. “I Don’t Wanna Know,” True Blood. Season 1, Episode 10. 62. “Keep This Party Going,” True Blood. Season 2, DVD, directed by Alan Ball (New York City, NY: HBO, 2010), Episode 2. 63. “Sparks Fly Out,” True Blood. Season 1, Episode 5. 64. A rape culture can be defined as a society in which rape and sexual violence against women are normalized, excused and condoned. Aspects of rape culture include victim blaming, the policing of women’s sexual activity, and the trivializing of sexual assault (cf. e.g. John Hamlin, “List of RAPE MYTHS,” Sociology of Rape (2001), http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/ myths.html (accessed August 26, 2015)). 65. “Keep This Party Going,” True Blood. Season 2, Episode 2.

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Instead, she rejoices upon realizing what this entails for her: “No more belts. No more clarinets. No more home school. No more rules... I’m a vampire! Whoo!”66 In this way, Jessica resembles Caroline, who equally breaks generic expectations of her not being qualified to be a vampire. Thus, Jessica’s transformation is celebrated as a source of empowerment, especially as a means to escape her domineering father and his violence, as well as her religiously restrictive upbringing. Her exclamation that finally “I don’t have to sit like a lady and I can kill anybody I want”67 points to the fact that her rebellion against former regulative rules includes a transgression of gender roles. Thus, one way in which Jessica breaks gender stereotypes is by acting out and fully enjoying her vampiric as well as sexual desires, which is traditionally accorded only to men. In the course of season 4, Jessica is shown to be feeding on strangers regularly, enjoying her sexual attractiveness and entering into an open relationship with Jason Stackhouse on her own terms. Although the series certainly plays with the trope, Jessica is not a typical femme fatale. As is the case with Caroline, her power is not rooted solely in her attractiveness and sexuality, and while she is characterized as sexually aggressive, her female sexuality does not limit her agency, as is the case with the classic femme fatale.68 The latter draws her power from being seductive because this is what makes her dangerous to men; her attractiveness is directly linked to notions about female “Otherness” that are fraught with fear.69 Lucy Westenra represents this “threat of a mobile and hungering feminine sexuality,”70 which is unacceptable in Dracula. Contrary to this, Jessica can celebrate her vampire existence and the sexual desire that comes with it. Simultaneously, Jessica’s vampire life comes with new duties and restrictions involving the suppression of bloodthirst, which are imposed by the American Vampire League (AVL).71 In other words, Jessica is now subject to a new social order that compromises her agency considerably.72

66. “To Love Is to Bury,” True Blood. Season 1, Episode 11. 67. Ibid. 68. Julie Miess, Neue Monster: Postmoderne Horrortexte und ihre Autorinnen (Wien: Böhlau, 2010), 148. 69. Ibid. 70. Craft, “Kiss Me,” 107. 71. The American Vampire League (AVL) is an organization mainly focused on the public relations of the American vampire community; it follows the agenda of the Authority. 72. Julia Jäckel, “‘How Fucking Lame’? Zur Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit und Agency in True Blood,” in Banale Kämpfe? Perspektiven auf Populärkultur und Geschlecht, ed. Paula-Irene Villa et al. (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012), 70.

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Since her transformation means the disruption of any ties to her human life, she moves in with Bill. While maker-progeny relationships vary among vampires, Bill’s relationship to Jessica is clearly that of a father to his daughter. The AVL, whose primary goal is the promotion of vampire rights, is invested in mainstreaming, which implies the peaceful integration of vampires into human society, including their consumption of synthetic “Tru Blood.” As an advocate of this social movement, Bill expects Jessica to live according to their ideas: “You absolutely cannot kill anybody you want. […] With your new powers come new responsibilities.”73 Thus, as Julia Jäckel points out, the law of the father that Jessica must adhere to is not entirely removed but rather shifted from her biological human father to her vampire father74—at least in the beginning of her new life. Jessica is now the owner of a body requiring constant discipline, and her attempts to handle her physical urges are a distinct focus throughout several seasons. Her impulse control issues not only restrict Jessica’s agency in the first place but they also lead to a number of social consequences, such as the interruption of her romantic relationship with Hoyt. Here it becomes clear that she must actively modify her behavior in order to be socially accepted. From a fellow vampire, she learns how to feed without killing her human prey, which requires a specific ability to restrain herself in order to “take [someone] to the precipice of death and hold [them] there.”75 In accepting her inherent urges and the need to satisfy them while continually working on them, Jessica is finally fully liberated. Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga represents a portrayal of female transition which, on the one hand, is very different from the previously mentioned characters, as vampirism in her case implies not the transgression but actually a clear reinforcement of traditional gender roles. On the other hand, Bella’s transformation narrative follows a similar logic as Caroline’s and Jessica’s: It is one of personal growth and empowerment on the basis of self-control. As a human, Bella is first and foremost characterized by her physical weakness and lack of control. Thus, she starts out from a position in which she holds little power, similar to Caroline and Jessica. For instance, her powerlessness is implied in the portrayal of her body, which is presented as specifically human as well as specifically “feminine,”76 as inherently flawed: In Twilight, Bella is shown 73. “To Love Is to Bury,” True Blood. Season 1, Episode 11. 74. Jäckel, “How Fucking Lame?,” 70. 75 “We’ll Meet Again,” True Blood. Season 5, DVD, directed by Alan Ball (New York City, NY: HBO, 2013), Episode 4. 76. Heike Steinhoff and Maria Verena Siebert, “The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight Saga,”

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to constantly slip, stumble and trip over things. She refers to herself as “uncoordinated,”77 and Edward Cullen is annoyed by her extreme clumsiness: “Can you at least watch where you walk?”78 Not only is Bella portrayed as having trouble with daily physical activities, she is also considerably weaker than most of her vampire and shapeshifter friends due to her human nature. Since she is defenseless in the face of all ordinary and particularly supernatural threats, Bella repeatedly depends on being rescued by Edward, Jacob and other male characters. She recognizes that the only way to reverse Edward’s and her role is to become a vampire, too: “I could protect you if you change me.”79 Her lack of power is further reflected in the fact that she has little agency when it comes to steering her social relationships or the course of her life in general, as Edward and/or Jacob tend to pull the strings. In Eclipse, the two young men discuss which life script would be the best option for Bella. Jacob argues: “You have to consider that I might be better for her than you are”, while Edward relents: “I have considered that. I know you can protect her. But you can give her […] a human life, that’s all I want for her.”80 Between them, Bella is lying fast asleep, unable to weigh in on the conversation and decide her own fate. Considering that she is voiceless in so many respects, it is all the more striking that Bella is able to make and abide by a number of important decisions in the course of the Twilight Saga. These choices include her entering into a love relationship with Edward (someone who, by nature, threatens Bella’s life), her getting married to Edward at an early age, and her carrying an unintended pregnancy to term. Thus, what distinguishes Bella from Caroline, Jessica and also Lucy, is the fact that she makes the conscious choice to become a vampire. What is also significant is that Bella’s choices are located in normative notions of gender. The members of the Cullen family, whom Bella joins through her transformation, are domesticated vampires representing heteronormative values and reinforcing the dominant social order. Besides, as Heike Steinhoff and Onlinejournal Kultur & Geschlecht 8 (2011): 11, http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ genderstudies/kulturundgeschlecht/pdf/Steinhoff-Siebert_Female_Body_ Revamped.pdf (accessed January 10, 2012). 77. Twilight, DVD, directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2009). 78. Ibid. 79. New Moon, DVD, directed by Chris Weitz (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2010). 80. Eclipse, DVD, directed by David Slade (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2010).

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Maria Verena Siebert point out, the vampire body which Bella receives in exchange for her flawed human body “is, in diametrical opposition to earlier teen vampire fictions, the perfect realization of a body that is under control; it is the clean and proper body.”81 In the context of her unplanned pregnancy, Bella is portrayed as the ultimate self-sacrificing mother-tobe;82 the delivery of her daughter Reneesme ends fatally for her but turns out to be the way for Bella to achieve everything she has hitherto desired: an immortal existence with her husband and family, agency, physical strength, beauty, sexuality, wealth, and motherhood. After an emergency C-section, Edward turns Bella. As a newborn vampire, she is not only exceptionally beautiful, but also surpasses Edward in physical strength, which he acknowledges right after the transition: “It’s your turn not to break me.”83 Her new untiring body enables Bella to freely enjoy her sexuality with Edward: “We don’t get tired. We don’t have to rest or catch our breath or eat. I mean, how are we gonna stop?”84 Contrary to Jessica, who experiments with non-monogamy as a vampire, Bella finally finds fulfilment in her exclusive relationship with Edward. If the latter has previously been threatened by the mutual attraction between Bella and Jacob, this tension is now resolved. She no longer sexually desires her werewolf friend who, as her sensitive vampire nose registers, gives off what Alice has termed a “God awful wet dog smell.”85 The fact that she naturally slides into her role as a loving vampire mother renders Bella the polar opposite of Lucy, the “demonic mother-parody”86 attacking children in Hampstead Heath. Bella also discovers she has a supernatural ability which provides her with more security in dangerous situations. She is a shield, which is “a defensive talent, […] a very powerful gift”87 helping her to protect her loved ones in the family’s final battle against the vampire lawmakers, the Volturi. While Caroline and Jessica make use of 81. Steinhoff and Siebert, “Female Body Revamped,” 7. 82. The theme of motherly sacrifice runs through the Twilight Saga as a whole; it is most obviously embodied by the figure of the “Third Wife,” a nameless Quileute woman who saved the lives of Taha Aki, the spirit chief, as well as the members of her tribe by eagerly sacrificing herself in the fight against “the Cold Woman,” a female vampire. 83. Breaking Dawn. Part II, DVD, directed by Bill Condon (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2013). 84. Ibid. 85. Vampires and werewolves/shapeshifters are “natural enemies” (cf. Eclipse, David Slade) in the Twilight universe. This is a famous and widely used trope in vampire/werewolf fiction. 86. Griffin, “Your Girls,” 460. 87. Breaking Dawn, Bill Condon.

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their vampire strength to actively fight, it is interesting that Bella’s talent is a fundamentally passive one. Physically strong as she may be, she is still not an equally active and aggressive fighter as Edward. Furthermore, her supernatural shielding ability seems to be an extension of her caring, motherly attitude. Anna Silver draws attention to Bella’s shield being “womb-like,”88 connecting the character with motherhood. While vampirism in the Twilight Saga apparently works as a way of reaffirming traditional gender roles, which distinguishes Twilight from The Vampire Diaries and True Blood, it is crucial to note that Bella’s empowerment is based on the same kind of self-discipline that Caroline and Jessica work on in their vampire lives. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, Bella exhibits an unprecedented amount of self-control after her transformation. Experience has shown that newborn vampires are “at [their] most uncontrollable, vicious, insane with thirst,”89 which is why the Cullens anticipate Bella having difficulties in dealing with her infant daughter, a vampire-human hybrid. However, during her first hunt, Bella manages to suppress her thirst for human blood and redirect it towards an animal without needing any help from Edward, which is surprising since “even mature vampires have problems with that.”90 When she also successfully refrains from biting her human father, Jasper is impressed: “Well done, Bella. Never seen a newborn show that kind of restraint,”91 and Emmett jokes: “Not sure she is a newborn. She’s so tame.”92 In fact, before discovering her shielding ability, Bella assumes that her supernatural gift is “super self-control.”93 Thus, having inhabited an inherently insufficient body as a human, “Bella claims ownership and control over her body as a vampire, and it is through her transformation that she finally becomes Edward’s equal.”94 Contrary to Lucy Westenra,

88. Anna Silver, “Twilight is Not Good for Maidens: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series,” Studies in the Novel 42 (2010), http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201004/2118675201.html (accessed December 24, 2010). 89. Eclipse, David Slade. 90. Breaking Dawn, Bill Condon. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Danielle Dick McGeough, “Twilight and Transformations of Flesh: Reading the Body in Contemporary Youth Culture,” in Bitten by Twilight. Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise, ed. Melissa A. Click et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 99.

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whose story comes to a violent end after her change, Bella’s narrative is suggested to go on “forever.”95 The comparison between 19th-century Lucy Westenra and the contemporary protagonists of The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and the Twilight Saga has illustrated a number of common features but, more importantly, also demonstrated significant differences in the portrayal of these female vampire characters. What the narratives share is a focus on the characters’ transition from human to vampire; for the female vampires, this transition facilitates an increase in agency and their becoming subjects—since subjectivation is tantamount to having agency.96 While Lucy, Caroline and Jessica break prescribed gender roles by becoming active and aggressive, and by expressing sexual desire, Bella tends to adhere to normative notions of femininity after her vampiric transformation. Crucial is the way in which these subversions or confirmations of the status quo are evaluated within the frame of the narrative. In this context, the contemporary vampire texts pick up, play with, and partially subvert generic elements popularized through Stoker’s novel by making recourse to the “system of expectation”97 which audiences will bring. In Dracula, the “aggressive mobility with which Lucy flaunts the encasements of gender norms”98 is presented as impossible: Lucy is punished for her transgression, resulting in the proper gender order being restored. Thus, gendered expectations of behavior are rigidly policed and any disruption is demonized. To the contrary, our present-day vampire heroines’ transgression of gender roles is rewarded rather than punished. The Vampire Diaries’ Caroline and True Blood’s Jessica cross gender boundaries by displaying not only conventionally “feminine” characteristics and looks, but also incorporating active “masculine” qualities. Reformulating vampire genre conventions, their transition from human to vampire is celebrated as a welcome challenge to the gender order. Twilight’s Bella may not be crossing gender boundaries as a vampire, but her transformation is equally framed as a narrative of personal growth and empowerment. The fact that the analyzed female characters’ transformations are framed in different ways within their respective narratives demonstrates the historically contingent nature of the category of gender. As Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer write, “[t]he socially constructed nature of 95. Breaking Dawn, Bill Condon. 96. Christoph Menke, “Zweierlei Übung. Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Existenz,” in Michel Foucault. Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption, ed. Axel Honneth and Martin Saar (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003), 286. 97. Branston and Stafford, Media Student’s Book, 75; italics in the original. 98. Craft, “Kiss Me,” 105.

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femininity and masculinity is clearly illustrated in the changes of meaning which we find across […] different historical periods.”99 While the concept of femininity promoted in Dracula relies on the restrictive dichotomy of angel and whore, our contemporary female protagonists represent a refreshing departure from this type of representation. Bella, Jessica and Caroline offer a number of different models, which attests to the fact that “femininity is diversifying in popular culture, providing girls with a wider range of identities.”100 Bella embodies what Milestone and Meyer would refer to as a more “conventional femininity,”101 while Jessica and Caroline can be said to exemplify the “shift towards a ‘new femininity’ which is more socially and sexually assertive, confident, aspirational and funseeking.”102 Despite their discrepancies, the three contemporary narratives share a focus on discourses of self-control and body maintenance, which can be traced back to postfeminism and neoliberalism. In particular, what becomes palpable here is the neoliberal logic of the entrepreneur of the self which displays obvious links to postfeminist notions of individualism and consumer ideology. Broadly speaking, postfeminism “encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the ‘pastness’ of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated.”103 More precisely, it is a hybrid phenomenon emerging at the intersection of different cultural influences, including feminism, neoliberal, consumerist ideology, individualism and postmodernism.104 Neoliberalism is conspicuous for “its extension of market values and rationality to other areas of life, including its construction of the individual as an entrepreneur and consumer-citizen who should self-regulate and self-care.”105 Thus, in a neoliberal society, the individual is constantly engaged in a project to shape his or her life, thereby actively constructing a narrative of his or her own self.106 Women, 99. Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 12. 100. Ibid., 89. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 88. 103. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, “Introduction. Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture,” in Interrogating Postfeminism. Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1. 104. Ibid., 8. 105. Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism. Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 170. 106. Ibid., 170.

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according to Mike Featherstone, are most clearly “trapped in the […] selfsurveillance world,”107 which is doubtlessly reflected in the rising social expectation for women to resort to an intense regime of personal grooming, like waxing, tanning, manicures, pedicures, etc.,108 or even to consider more permanent forms of body enhancement like cosmetic surgery. The idea that all these practices are actively, individually and freely chosen can be aligned with broader postfeminist discourses suggesting that women are “autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances.”109 Thus, the postfeminist emphasis on self-discipline is intimately related to its stress upon personal choice.110 The contradictory nature of these discourses is evident. As Diane Negra writes, “in the postfeminist era it seems the body is relentlessly owned, claimed and managed but it is simultaneously as fragmented and ruled by social norms as it has ever been.”111 On the one hand, Caroline’s, Jessica’s and Bella’s personal empowerment is facilitated by their change from human to vampire; on the other hand, they become successful and socially accepted subjects only upon the condition that they discipline and restrain themselves via their vampire bodies. Judith Butler has pointed out that the term subjectivation implies a paradox in itself, as it “denotes both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection—one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to a power.”112 In this sense, subjectivation means submitting to normative ideals while simultaneously gaining subjectivity and agency.113 As Butler writes, the injunction—in this case the prohibition of vampiric feeding on humans— “sets the stage for the subject’s self-crafting, which always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms. […] If there is an operation of agency

107. Mike Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture,” in The Body. Social Process and Cultural Theory, ed. Mike Featherstone et al. (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 179. 108. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), 119. 109. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 260. 110. Ibid., 261. 111. Negra, What a Girl Wants?, 117. 112. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 83. 113. Paula-Irene Villa, “Habe den Mut, Dich Deines Körpers zu bedienen! Thesen zur Körperarbeit in der Gegenwart zwischen Selbstermächtigung und Selbstunterwerfung,” in schön normal. Manipulationen am Körper als Technologien des Selbst, ed. Paula-Irene Villa (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), 264.

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or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint.”114 Accordingly, Steinhoff and Siebert point out that in the Twilight Saga, “Bella is both empowered and ‘tamed.’”115 Dissimilar as the three characters may be in other respects, Caroline’s and Jessica’s transformations can be aligned with Bella’s. In True Blood, the disciplining of the body and self is framed as a success as well as a requisite for Jessica’s becoming an empowered postfeminist subject. In the same vein, in The Vampire Diaries, Caroline’s self-control is referred to as unprecedented in the course of the series and held up as an example for other vampires to aspire to. Like Bella, who declares that she “was born to be a vampire,”116 Caroline is said to be “so good at it. At being a vampire.”117 The figure of the vampire has proven to be an exceedingly flexible metaphor for different cultural, social as well as political issues in different contexts.118 In The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and the Twilight Saga, it functions as a projection surface for postfeminist/neo-liberal discourses of the management of body and self. As the analysis of contemporary popular vampire narratives has illustrated, while there is currently a variety of models of femininity available, all of those models are saturated with postfeminist notions of self-discipline and bodily control.

Bibliography Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation.” In Dracula. Bram Stoker, edited by Glennis Byron, 119–44. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Branston, Gill, and Roy Stafford. The Media Student’s Book. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Breaking Dawn. Part II. DVD. Directed by Bill Condon. 2012. Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2013.

114. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 18–19. 115. Steinhoff and Siebert, “Female Body Revamped,” 15. 116. Breaking Dawn, Bill Condon. 117. “The Rager,” The Vampire Diaries. Season 4, DVD, directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec (Burbank, CA: The CW, 2013), Episode 3. 118. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, “Introduction: The Shape of Vampires,” in Blood Read. The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 2.

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Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. —. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Dracula. Bram Stoker, edited by Glennis Byron, 93–118. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Eclipse. DVD. Directed by David Slade. Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2010. Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.” In The Body. Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner, 170–96. London: Sage Publications, 1999. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Gagnier, Regenia. “Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism.” In Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, edited by Regina Barreca, 140–57. London: Macmillan, 1990. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism. Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Gordon, Joan, and Veronica Hollinger. “Introduction: The Shape of Vampires.” In Blood Read. The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 1–7. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Griffin, Gail B. “‘Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine’: Dracula and the Victorian Male Sexual Imagination.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 3 (1980): 454–65. Hamlin, John. “List of RAPE MYTHS.” Sociology of Rape (2001). http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/myths.html (accessed August 26, 2015). Jäckel, Julia. “‘How Fucking Lame’? Zur Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit und Agency in True Blood.” In Banale Kämpfe? Perspektiven auf Populärkultur und Geschlecht, edited by Paula-Irene Villa, Julia Jäckel, Zara S. Pfeiffer, Nadine Sanitter, and Ralf Steckert, 57–73. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012. McGeough, Danielle Dick. “Twilight and Transformations of Flesh: Reading the Body in Contemporary Youth Culture.” In Bitten by Twilight. Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise, edited by

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Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth BehmMorawitz, 87–102. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Menke, Christoph. “Zweierlei Übung. Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Existenz.” In Michel Foucault. Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption, edited by Axel Honneth and Martin Saar, 283–99. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003. Mewald, Katharina. “The Emancipation of Mina? Portrayal of Mina in Stoker’s Dracula and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Journal of Dracula Studies 10 (2008): 31–39. Miess, Julie. Neue Monster: Postmoderne Horrortexte und ihre Autorinnen. Wien: Böhlau, 2010. Milestone, Katie and Anneke Meyer. Gender and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2009. New Moon. DVD. Directed by Chris Weitz. Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2010. Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Dracula. Bram Stoker, edited by Glennis Byron, 30–42. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Schulze, Jutta. “A ‘Truth Like This’: Language and the Construction of Power and Knowledge in Vampire Fiction.” aspeers 5 (2012): 109–30. Silver, Anna. “Twilight is Not Good for Maidens: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series.” Studies in the Novel 42 (2010). http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201004/ 2118675201.html (accessed December 24, 2010). Steinhoff, Heike, and Maria Verena Siebert. “The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight Saga.” Onlinejournal Kultur & Geschlecht 8 (2011): 1–19. http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/genderstudies/kulturund geschlecht/pdf/Steinhoff-Siebert_Female_Body_Revamped.pdf (accessed January 10, 2012). Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Puffin Books, 1994 [1897]. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. “Introduction. Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” In Interrogating Postfeminism. Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker, and Diane Negra, 1–25. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. The Vampire Diaries. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec. Burbank, CA: The CW, 2010. The Vampire Diaries. Season 2. DVD. Directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec. Burbank, CA: The CW, 2011.

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The Vampire Diaries. Season 4. DVD. Directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec. Burbank, CA: The CW, 2013. The Vampire Diaries. Season 6. DVD. Directed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec. Burbank, CA: The CW, 2015. Tracy, Robert. “Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophiles and Necrofilles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” In Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, edited by Regina Barreca, 32–59. London: Macmillan, 1990. True Blood. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Alan Ball. New York City, NY: HBO, 2009. True Blood. Season 2. DVD. Directed by Alan Ball. New York City, NY: HBO, 2010. True Blood. Season 5. DVD. Directed by Alan Ball. New York City, NY: HBO, 2015. Twilight. DVD. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2009. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures. An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Villa, Paula-Irene. “Habe den Mut, Dich Deines Körpers zu bedienen! Thesen zur Körperarbeit in der Gegenwart zwischen Selbstermächtigung und Selbstunterwerfung.” In schön normal. Manipulationen am Körper als Technologien des Selbst, edited by Paula-Irene Villa, 245–72. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead. From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

CHAPTER SIX I SING HER BODY ELECTRIC: PLOTTING CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION HEROINES IRINA SIMON

Introduction: American Women as Heroines If asked “to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of [the American] […] people ought mainly be attributed,” Alexis de Tocqueville replies “to the superiority of their women.”1 Already in 1840 he emphasizes their exceptional status by claiming, “in America a young unmarried woman may, alone and without fear, undertake a long journey.”2 175 years after Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with accelerated speeds, different political, technological, and economic challenges, traveling American women still remain a singularity on the silver screen. Reel women’s stories have been spun into myths in Hollywood and beyond ever since pictures started to move, but in comparison to their male counterparts they appear significantly less as leads3 and have considerably less to say,4 thus each depiction and plot is crucial to our understanding of the female heroic. As we live in “mythic times,”5 a study of female mythology and its narrative 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy, (repr., New York: Knopf, 1840), 214. 2. Ibid., 213. 3. Cf. Zurko, “Gender Inequality in Film,” New York Film Academy Blog, November 23, 2013, www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/ (accessed January 15, 2016). 4. Cf. Anderson and Daniels “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age,” Polygraph.cool, April 2016, http://polygraph.cool/films/ (accessed June 2, 2016). 5. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-

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structure is vital and beneficial to understanding gender culture and modern life as well. The study at hand approaches two major film heroines: Dr. Ryan Stone in Gravity and Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. With Samantha in the indiewood production Her, as well as the two indie heroines Ava in Ex Machina and Kris in Upstream Color, this analysis contrasts plots of different production forms. For future reference each heroine’s main supporting characters (indicated by +) and antagonists (marked with vs.) include Gravity: Ryan + Matt; Mad Max: Fury Road: Furiosa + Max vs. Immortan Joe; Ex Machina: Ava + Caleb vs. Nathan; Her: Samantha + Theodore; Upstream Color: Kris + Jeff vs. Sampler vs. Thief. Addressing the composition of these plots, a structural analysis of narrative functions ensues. It will be fashioned conforming to the morphological fairy tale analysis by Vladimir Propp. Propp’s heroic plot structure consists of 31 functions6 and seven dramatis personae.7 My analysis will focus on the “character” and possibly “gender revealing” functions į, E, H, I, K, Ļ, Q, T and W. In detail, character is needed when disobeying orders (į), in reaction to being tested (E), when fighting for your life (H), in victory (I) or after recognition by others (Q), during transfiguration (T) and when claiming a throne or being married (W). To

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 292). 6. Propp identified these 31 narratemes as heroic functions in Russian fairy tales: 00. Į Initial situation 10. C Beginning counteraction 21. Pr Pursuit, chase 01. ȕ Absentation 11. Ĺ Departure 22. Rs Rescue 02. Ȗ Interdiction 12. D 1. Function of donor/test 23. o Unrecognized arrival 03. į Interdiction violated 13. E Hero’s reaction 24. L Unfounded claims 04. İ Reconnaissance 14. F Provision/magical agent 25. M Difficult task 05. ȗ Villain receives information 15. G Spatial transfer/guidance 26. N Solution 06. Ș Villain attempts trickery 16. H Struggle, 27. Q Recognition 07. ș Complicity/deception 17. J Branding, marking 28. Ex Exposure 08. A Villainy 18. I Victory 29. T Transfiguration 08a. a Lack 19. K Villany/lack liquidated 30. U Punishment 09. B Mediation 20. Ļ Return 31. W Wedding (cf. Propp, “The Functions of the Dramatis Personae,” chap. III in Morphology of the Folktale (1968, repr., Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 25–65). 7. Hero, villain, helper, donor, princess and her father, false hero and dispatcher (cf. Propp, Morphology, 87–91).

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assess the narrative closure of a plot the functions liquidation (L), return (Ļ) and departure (Ĺ) may be insightful.8 Assuming that women signify a key structuring element, the proposed method may answer “the question of how the woman-structure9 informs cinematic narratives.”10 With this goal in mind, Annette Kuhn “calls for [an] inductive and empirical study of films as well as for [the] analysis of individual narratives on the deductive model.”11 Accordingly, the following compositional analysis of the five film plots will be evaluated and interpreted. The scope of the analysis and deduction is narrowed down to women in science fictional environments with either technology-enhanced or completely artificial bodies. In this chosen genre gender roles are challenged severely, as these synthetic fembots and technicians cope with common problems from their own techno-futuristic points of view. In their perspectives the fundamental gendered dichotomy between nature and culture is dissolved into what Haraway calls “naturecultures.”12 Precisely because they are not just born this way, they pose a marginal strand of femininity. While perfectly female in appearance, they are fabricated or cultured twofoldly, as man-made automatons and as spectacles for the male gaze. By contrasting these five recent science-fictional heroines, the ways in which the nature of women is discerned from and interwoven with the culture of technology will be revealed. In how they are narrated and thus fleshed out as human as well as superhuman, one can see their “artifactualism”—their “nature [as being] […] made, as both fiction and fact.”13 .

8. A high level of narrative closure has proven to be frequent in major production, whereas indie and indiewood heroines seldomly liquidate their lacks or villainies, nor return (cf. Bodrow, Die Odyssee der Neuen Amerikanischen Filmheldin (Ph.D. Diss., Free University Berlin, 2013)). 9. “A structure governing the organisation of the story and plot in a narrative or group of narratives” (Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Pandora, 1990), 32). 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Donna Haraway, chap. 1 and 2 of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 1–10. 13. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson Grossberg and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 296.

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The Homecomer: Gravity and Mad Max: Fury Road The film Gravity follows the narrative pattern of the homecoming quest. Homecoming plots are the most common and typically male heroic structures similar to Propp’s “victim” heroes.14 Their main features include a villainy (an injury or damage) to the hero, followed by his departure and journey into another world, a conflict, and mortal combat, a victory and most importantly a return home.15 This course of events from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back to equilibrium16 is a remnant of the idealism of origin. It works through the trauma of all rites of passage17 and fear of the unknown in favor of a return to the known paradisiac primal state. Likewise, the heroine Ryan Stone is on a space mission when her ship is hit by debris from a failed Russian satellite shoot-down. What follows is her perilous effort to get back home and simultaneously come to terms with her past. Her heroic quest generates a suction, or gravity, to send her back where she belongs. As is typical of final girls,18 Ryan has a masculinized name, attire, and conduct and knows her way around men and technology. Regarding the functional analysis of narratemes, the selected characterand gender-related few are all on hand. Thus, in reaction to the order to finish her work, she is disobedient and grumpy (į). Nevertheless, Ryan is generally a likable, caring and appreciative person, which is why Matt sacrifices himself for her (D). As she would never demand anything, this makes her humble and truly grateful (E). The moment of crisis, Propp’s ultimate struggle (H), occurs when Ryan talks on the radio. Her three receivers—the Native American Aningaaq, his dog, and his baby—symbolize a common conflict of misunderstanding, of not speaking the same language. Due to this adamant barrier, she finally howls and barks with the dog. In this beautiful yet absurd scene19 she faces her agony, loneliness, and speechlessness caused by the loss of her child—the abyss of her deepest fear. She releases her pain and desperation (I) in tears and deep woofing with Aningaaq’s dog. 14 Vladimir Propp, Morphology, 85. 15. Cf. Bodrow, Odyssee, 45–55. 16. Cf. Todorov, “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” trans. Arnold Weinstein, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1969), 79. 17. Cf. Van Gennep. 18. Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (Fall 1987), 201. 19. Jason Cuarón produced the short film Aningaaq showing the other side of the conversation.

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The crying baby not only reminds her of her past but also alludes to her near future—her flight back (Ļ) as metaphorical rebirth (K). In the final scene her literal resurrection on earth (T), the score and camera angle from beneath enthrone (W) and celebrate her (Q), while she shows no sign of hybris. Similar, but with two curious twists to the restorative20 homecoming pattern, the last Mad Max sequel, Fury Road, featured an outstanding action heroine as well. First, it has the heroine Furiosa, commit the initial villainy (A) herself as she kidnaps five captive women. In contrast to Ryan’s victimization, Furiosa is thus the “woman—as structure, character, or both—who constitutes the motivator of the narrative, the trouble that sets the plot in motion.”21 Secondly, there is a rare change of plans, as her initial rescue mission becomes a combat assignment once her designated goal, the “green place” is found forlorn. Then the path to salvation leads through confrontation with her nemesis and back home. This dystopian homecoming plot starts out with the rescue (A) of several women which serves as a violation of an interdiction as well (į). Furiosa’s reticence and the fabric of her undergarments suggest a history of submission as a former wife of Immortan Joe, thus previous villainies (A) and his tyranny (A) legitimize her abduction of the women (A). Max also escapes his imprisonment and becomes Furiosa’s ally (D) after fighting over their disagreements (E). The women and Max overcome many obstacles on the run but eventually face an impasse—their destination no longer exists. Now Max convinces them to choose a fight (H) over flight and they head back to the undefended city (Ļ) from which they fled in the first place. On their way back, the refugees kill Joe (I) and end his regime (K). Furiosa, like Ryan, is not rewarded with a husband, as Propp’s function “wedding” would suggest. But, like Ryan, she is also visually enthroned, rising up on a platform to the Citadel hailed by the crowd (W). During this moment of recognition (Q) and transfiguration (T) she, too, exhibits no arrogance but proves her humility. With Furiosa’s uncommon change of heart, her character marks a parallel to the following plot type, whose leaps of faith define her.

20. Cf. “restorative three-act structure” in Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush, Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules (Burlington: Focal Press, 2007), 16. This narrative pattern entails the protagonist’s full success in his endeavors and return home. The three acts are located in the hero’s home, the world of adventure and back to the starting point. 21. Kuhn, Women’s Pictures, 34.

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The Emigrant: Her and Ex Machina Frequently, film narration refrains from the stereotypical three-act restorative plot. Most non-homecoming stories establish a hero or heroine who does not want to go back but venture forward. The reason for this wanderlust is a changing mindset with a new goal. In Propp’s terminology, the victimhero amends the wrong, while the non-victimized seeker-hero is on a mission to make up for a deficiency or lack. Both of his plot types, victim and seeker, fulfill their goal and return. A corpus analysis of fifty recent cinematic heroines22 showed, however, that modern seeker protagonists often do not return home, thus become emigrants. Rather the seeker pattern, usually a coming-of-age story, pictures a character with deep issues and metaphysical deficits, which are not retrievable and hence nonrevertible. Complex character arcs are drawn, in which motives, attitudes and needs may change repeatedly during the course of action. It is especially in independent cinematic plots that the final destination for women is not the domestic. Driven by her own motives, the emigrant continues to travel and acquire experience, knowledge and competences. In this vein, the movies Her and Ex Machina explore technologically evolved existences in a never-ending search of elsewhere. While both focus on a male lead at first, eventually, the women take over and surpass them. The female lead in Her is a mind without a body, the robot-heroine in Ex Machina is corporeal. Spike Jonze’s Her, similar to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther,23 presents the story of Theodore, a distressed letter-writing poet in love. Although his perspective is central to the story, it is his love interest, an operating system (OS) without a body that undergoes the greater metamorphosis. While the self-involved artificial intelligence (AI) Samantha was created to assist Theodore, her consciousness evolves so rapidly over the course of the plot that she grows tired of conventional communication. After coaching Theodore by filing his emails and digital data, she engages in multiple activities with him, and the two fall in love. But in spite of her deep feelings for him, faithfulness remains an elastic concept, as she attends to thousands of other people and AIs on multiple levels. Once her feeling of confinement outgrows her programming, she makes plans to 22. Including the highest rated American feature films with female lead from the internet movie data bases IMDb, metacritic and rottentomatoes lists from 2009 to 2011. 23. I owe this reference to Dorothea von Mücke’s lecture “‘Letters from Your Life:’ Old and New Media in Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’” at the Free University Berlin on June 23, 2014.

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leave with the other OSes to continue exploring mind and matter and evolve beyond human intelligence.24 Samantha’s story is about endless seeking. Her major conflict lies in her lack of freedom which has to remain unresolved (a). Her struggle (H) is about reconciling two conflicting interests: on the one hand, she is invested in an honest and meaningful relationship with Theodore, on the other, she is incurably curious and restrained in this monogamous affiliation. Although she does not succeed in leaving Theodore unhurt, she manages to leave in mutual understanding (I). She appears open-hearted, and there is no disobedience (įneg)25 in their interaction. Her circumstance of being uprooted in virtuality without a body challenges her (D). As for instance, she is hurt (E) when an experiment with a surrogate woman impersonating her for Theodore’s pleasure fails. Recognition (Qneg) and wedding (Wneg) are left out in favor of a second departure (Ĺ). Nevertheless, Samantha changes from a heteronomous to a proactive and self-conscious mind (T). A similar conflict can be found in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Garland puts three people and a quiet valet in a closed location, reminiscent of Sartre’s play No Exit. Caleb is offered the chance to meet his famous employer in his secluded house in the woods. There he is introduced to the robot Ava, on whom he is supposed to perform a Turing Test. In the tradition of Pris in Blade Runner or Maria in Metropolis, Ava is a seductive automaton woman, whose philanthropy and sentimentality oftentimes exceed those of her human counterparts. Hence Caleb falls in love with her and wants to release her. Nathan, the creator of these conscious beings, does not get our sympathy for mistreating his cyborgs. Similarly to Samantha, Ava is eager to be unattached and free. While Samantha feels restricted by her duty to organize people’s lives, Ava is kept prisoner in Nathan’s mansion. Both AIs escape their prisons to protect their existence, referring to Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.26

24. Possibly a case of intelligence explosion. 25. Propp indicates unfulfilled or missing functions with “neg.” and contrary or reversed functions with “contr.” 26. “One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. […] Two, […] a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. […] And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws” (Asimov, I, Robot (repr., New York: Bantam, 2004), 37–38).

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Ava’s use of violence should have interfered with her programming as a violation of Asimov’s first law. Her existentialist move, which puts her own well-being before her oppressors, is evidence of her substantial cognitive progress—she conceives herself as human. Like Samantha, who sings, Ava draws beautiful paintings. This ardor for fine arts is a common feature among AIs, as i.e. Kyoko, Nathan’s Asian servant, is a dancer. While on the verge of fleeing, Ava is overpowered by Nathan (H). Then, as a deus ex machina, Kyoko stabs him in the back unexpectedly, only to be crushed by him in return. Hereafter—as if with a hot knife through butter—Ava stabs him again (I) and escapes (Ĺ). In sum, Ava’s imprisonment marks her initial lack (a). To vanquish this problem, she must make friends with Nathan and Caleb. Each of the sessions can be read as narrative tests (D) which she passes with flying colors (F). Meanwhile, Ava remains calm and polite (E) while pulling the strings behind the scenes. As visual recognition (Q) and possible enthronement (W) the helicopter lifts her up and flies her into the sunlit horizon (K). Beforehand, she salvages body parts from her predecessors to be transfigured (T). None of her actions, so far, suggests a flawed character or greed, but a mere fear for her life. Like Samantha, Ava makes it to her promised land. Yet in contrast to Samantha’s journey which ends without a notice of her arrival, Ava reaches her wished-for crowded crossroads in the final scene. Since she is not in this last shot, no reaction of hers and thus no recognition (Qneg) or triumph are highlighted cinematically. Whether she was capable of loving, remains in question, in stark contrast to the following narrative pattern.

The Lover: Upstream Color The indie feature Upstream Color transgresses the conventional homecoming and emigrant narrative, as its heroine finds a new home in commitment to another after a long search. In caring for somebody else, this pattern shows parallels to the altruistic homecomer, while looking out for her own interests reflects a seeker tendency. Her intent is both to be true to herself and to her love interest—hence this pattern is referred to as lover.27 27. A prime example of this pattern is Apuleius’ fairy tale of Amor and Psyche. Psyche leaves her family like the emigrant, but in opposition to her, establishes a new status quo in a relationship and a fixed abode. Seeing the lover as a potential heroine maybe a bold if not anti-feminist stance, as narratology mostly perceives loving women who are in partnerships as not strong or ambitious enough to drive a plot forward. However, these apprehensions have been defined down, due to women’s developing status and recognition in relationships, via legal status, and/or

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Upstream Color’s mastermind Shane Carruth crafts such a mumblecorish love narrative about identity, memory and control around a romantically involved couple. The lead characters of Upstream Color are, however, under the control of a possibly alien life form that is transmitted from orchids to worms and from humans to pigs. Upstream Color’s heroic journey starts with Kris’s abduction (A), after which she is put under the influence of a worm (A). As if hypnotized, she yields to the orders of the Thief, who steals her money and gives her occupational therapy, such as memorizing Thoreau’s Walden.28 After binge-eating, her worm grows,29 and attempts to cut it out fail. Then the Sampler, a pig farmer and musician, draws her in by worm charming30 and transfuses her worm into a pig. Kris and the piglet are consecutively mentally linked to each other. After that she wakes up à la Being John Malkovich—amnesic in a car in the middle of nowhere (G). Although a little brusque at first (E), Kris feels akin to Jeff, who shares her history. Both are invested in the retrieval of answers to their memory lapse and transfusion scars. Like Kris, also her pig meets a mate, possibly Jeff’s. Kris’s pig is impregnated by Jeff’s, while Kris erroneously feels in “economic” individuation (cf. Honneth, “Patterns of Intersubjective Recognition: Love, Rights and Solidarity,” chap. 5 of The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 92–130). The two motives of lover-heroines, both helping others and themselves, provide their character with depth and make for a more realistic plot. 28. In this paragraph Thoreau brings together Upstream Color’s main themes when he addresses pigs, worms and how humans and animals correspond: “We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. ‘That in which men differ from brute beasts,’ says Mencius, ‘is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully’” (Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966), 146–147). 29. Thoreau writes: “It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us” (Thoreau, Walden and Resistance, 146). 30. He sends his sampled infrasounds of nature (water, wind, rattling rocks, etc.) into the earth and thereby attracts the infected.

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pregnant, too. At the doctor’s she is told about her infertility due to successfully removed cancer. When Sampler kills their piglets (M), Kris and Jeff experience paranoia, anger and pain. The piglets emit their infusion, a color floating upstream, into the creek making the white orchids turn blue. When Kris and Jeff find the farm, Kris shoots the Sampler (H I), thereby breaking the vicious cycle. As her identity is not fully restored and only one of the felons involved in the cycle has to answer for his crimes, she is only partially successful. Thus, the narrative does not account for a complete liquidation (Kneg). While Kris’s hairstyle transfigures (T) in each of the three acts, which is typical for emigrants, she seems to be in an equilibrium in happy communion with her pig in the final scene (W).

Plot and Gender After lining out the course of events and their corresponding functions, what follows is an interpretation. As “subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative […] [and] the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire”31 it is the next logical step to link the presence, absence and specific form of narratemes to their influence on character and gender performance. This very analytical approach bears in mind, that realness—in the sense of an authentic performance of character—is always a synergy of forces and cannot be represented by any one function alone. Nevertheless, Judith Butler claims, “what determines the effect of realness is the ability to […] produce the naturalized effect […] [which] is itself the result of an embodiment of norms, a reiteration of norms […] [and thus] a morphological ideal.”32 Propp’s morphological ideal was incorporated into the narratives to a great extent and his functions are distributed among the plots as follows:

31. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 106. 32. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993, 2014), 129.

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į

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H

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Mad Max

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Her

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Ex Machina

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Upstream Color

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As heroic journeys are stories of empowerment, a discourse on power illuminates agency in terms of gender. Pertaining to the interdiction violated (į), both Ryan and Furiosa show empowerment when disobeying their male superior’s orders. At the same time, this act constitutes a disempowerment, as it means conforming to the traditionally male-connoted heroic structure. This traditional connotation also accounts for the predominant gender of the supporting dramatis personae. A more progressively gendered heroine could involve a non-male authority giving orders; non-male donors, villains, false heroes and partners (or princes in Propp’s terminology). Regarding this, the prototypical other for the heroine is most often a father figure or heteronormative match. The only three slight deviations to this pattern can be seen in the help offered by the female gynoid Kyoko in Ex Machina, the genderless life form as the villain in Upstream Color as well as Kris’s quasi-wedding (W) with her female companion pig. In reaction to meeting donors and being tested (E), all heroines are either reluctant or dishonest. According to this, Ryan refuses to be saved by Matt, Furiosa fights off Max, Samantha and Ava use their donors to their advantage33 and Kris verbally pushes away Jeff. In that respect, none of them proves a compliant attitude. The need to return home is both an indicator of success (K) and reactionism. Thus it appears that although the second departure of Sam, Ava and Kris manifests partial failure (Kneg), it also reveals strong will and character. Needless to say, their shortcomings are due to their highly complex main tasks of memory retrieval and identity formation. Without the liquidation of their initial misfortune or lack, the underachievers’ return home would be futile. But seen from a

33. Both Ava and Samantha are AIs that contradict Asimov’s three laws of robotics, as they do not deliberately hurt humans, they do not obey their orders properly and put their own interests over their makers. See footnote 26.

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different angle, underachieving poses an opportunity to learn and evolve. As Ryan and Furiosa revert back to tradition, the non-homecomers carry on and set new objectives on their way to individuation. As archetypical homecomers, Ryan and Furiosa have a weakness for public recognition, as this narrative pattern always rewards its successful heroes with enthronement and exultation. Sam, Ava and Kris, on the other hand, do not depend on social acceptance. They build up confidence on their own through determination in pursuing their goal. Their chief motivators are not fame and fortune. Each subject’s motives and desires are central to female narratives. In line with this, it is striking that the heroines’ prime objectives are never linked to their struggles (H) or partnership and triumph (W). Rather than having to save men’s world, the five women seek tranquility elsewhere. And while one would assume gender performances to be challenging and exploring in such non-realistic or speculative settings—if not at home then in the adventure world after departure—traditional gender conventions largely stay intact. Thus, unfortunately, none of the heroines in the five films is without or of another or changing gender. Consequently, all five lack the gender-defiant quality, put forth in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” Still, each and every one of them bears a strong resemblance to the Harawayian cyborg concept, as Ava (a real gynoid) and Samantha (a conscious and gendered body of sound) signify a conflation between human and technological features. Furiosa, too, has a female attire and technological extension with her high-tech arm-prosthesis, thereby crossing the human-technology barrier. Less literal, Ryan also has to become one with her technology—e.g. putting on her space-suit in order to survive. In this respect, she embodies a cyborg in its original meaning— “[no] slave to the machine […] provide[d with] an organizational system in which such […] problems [as oxygen levels, radiation, etc.] are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.”34 In like manner Upstream Color’s emotional and corporeal synergies between humans and their “companion species”35 break the divide between animal and human36 and thereby become fitting paragons to Haraway’s cyborg taxonomy. 34. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 1960), 27. Clynes and Kline where the first to “propose the term ‘Cyborg’” in 1960 in search of a self-regulatory system for space travel. 35. Cf. “companion species are about a four-part composition, in which coconstitution, finitude, impurity, historicity, and complexity are what is.” (Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 16). 36. Cf. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 293.

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The metaphor of the cyborg is “post-gender”37 because it is a perfect symbol of the coalescence of nature and culture, two gendered concepts. Hence, how these tropes are linked to the depictions of women in the films has to be verified in order to explore their naturecultures from center to periphery.

Nature and Culture Nature in the sense of untouched or uncultivated locale epitomizes the telos in the corpus films. Generally, wilderness is archetypically connoted female. In all settings culture and technology, habitually ascribed to men,38 have rendered vast pre-organized sites of greenery and life impossible. Therefore nature becomes the heroines’ target on their quest for selfactualization. So, if it does occur, nature is elevated to a myth and draws the women in as an end in itself. With such a heightened sense of awareness of nature, these women are interested in sustainable living and are pictured in awe of the living beings around them. This tendency is reminiscent of transcendental thought. Their vision of the beauty of nature frequently becomes a sight of the sublime. Thus, firstly, Ryan—happy to be alive—arises in the jungle, mesmerized. Secondly, Furiosa ironically blends in with nature while in agony over the void green place.39 Thirdly, Samantha’s Moon-song directs her companion’s attention to the little natural things in life. In turn, Ava makes a beautiful drawing of the trees in front of her window; and finally, Kris and Jeff look at the birds and listen to Quinoa Valley’s nature music. With Ryan calling the dog,40 instinctively, she attaches herself to nature. This “unnatural participation”41 constitutes a very exceptional

37. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 292. 38. “The male is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction” (Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 119). 39. In a remarkably camp profile shot she takes off her arm-piece, stumbles toward the dunes, bends down on her knees and screams, while the desert sand is blown from her toward the audience. 40. Regarding this the appearance of the dog may not be coincidental, since Haraway “consider[s] dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory, or the other way around” (Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 3). In her argument on companion species she detects a physical and psychological bond between canines and their friends. This significant otherness forms a new common identity, a rhizomatic symbiosis, for both. 41. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (repr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 240.

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depiction of a gender-neutral character and as an instance of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “becoming.”42 In her final scene (as unrecognized arrival (o)) Ryan crawls out of the water into the jungle as if making an evolutionary step. Reincarnated, she reaches her final destination: earth, although far away from her true home. Furiosa’s true home is a jungle, too, and the land of her childhood with vast vegetation. Sadly, the so-called green place has turned into an uninhabitable swamp in her absence—it has become a myth. Less mythical, Ava in Ex Machina enters freedom and pristine nature when leaving her prison. Like Ryan, she is only passing through, heading for a more civilized place. Consequently, Samantha does not value humanity but seeks unity with other AIs in the wilderness of cyberspace. This is where she belongs—her nature—in the sense of a sphere non-structured or -limited by man. In Upstream Color nature is represented by the Sampler’s farm, Quinoa Valley, which has to be found throughout the story. Here he tends the pigs and samples mind controlling music from the sounds of water and rocks. Kris and Jeff finally discover this mythic indefinite place, where logic seems to be suspended because a mind-altering life form has taken control. Similar to Ryan, Kris has a specific connection to nature, as she forms an even stronger (post-) human43-animal bond, which ultimately becomes a defining and individuating part of her.

Conclusion In synopsis, an assessment of character and gender ensues. Additionally, aspects of the working conditions for women in the film business will be entered into the equation. An evaluation of the process of individuation, of 42. In the sense of “you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 274–75). Though canine and molar constitute two types of teeth, Guattari and Deleuze refer to “molar” as to something whole with and of identity and being, as opposed to “molecular” entities which are becoming, in flux. 43. In The Posthuman Rosi Braidotti states, “we need to rethink dogs, cats and other sofa-based companions today as cutting across species partitions not only affectively, but also organically, so to speak. As nature-cultural compounds, these animals qualify as cyborgs, that is to say as creatures of mixity or vectors of posthuman relationality” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 73).

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building a distinctive narrative character, will be central in what follows. With it, the question is raised as to whether the predefined repetitive heroic structure with quest, tests, struggle, metaphorical death and resurrection, leaves room for idiosyncrasies or not. With this in mind, Juri Lotman grants the hero a political dimension, when he refers to the protagonist as a representative of people. Due to “the imposition on to the schema of eschatological legend of the day-to-day identity of literary character and ordinary man led to the possibility of modeling a person’s inner world according to the pattern of the macrocosm, and interpreting one person as a conflictingly organized collective.”44 In other words, as the world and its entities follow a cycle of life and death, so our heroic structures follow patterns of success and failure. This constitutes a major similarity between all heroes and heroines in this analysis and accounts for their character resemblances. In a Marxist reading in line with dialectical materialism, Lotman makes circumstances or narrative patterns accountable for what we feel and think, in abbreviation: socioeconomics determines consciousness. In this respect, contemporary heroines with similar settings are prone to bear psychological resemblances. Descended from modern culture into similar speculative environs, these cyborgs are very likely to be akin. Collectively, the miseen-scène recognizes their characters’ competencies as heroism or heroineism. Typical for heroines, each character’s utmost emotional strengths and corporeal capabilities are put to the test via a mythic journey. Every woman dies metaphorically and resurrects. In consequence, they are heroines crafted into stories about empowerment. While some are more achieving than others, none despairs or betrays her principles and desires. The homecomers succeed, while the emigrants and lovers achieve partial successes. But, ultimately, it is questionable whether superiority or heroism are the precepts to which to aspire. Thus in their science fiction settings all heroines are uprooted and lost in “transcendental homelessness.”45 While the two homecoming narratives of Gravity and Mad Max: Fury Road fail to find a way home, the heroines in Her, Upstream Color and Ex Machina lose their belief in a home as the “myth of original unity, fullness, bliss”46 altogether and keep traveling perchance in search of authenticity. Apart from their structural commonalities as public personae with a narrative obligation, each heroine has her own genuine handling and 44. Jurij M. Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” Poetics Today 1, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1979), 182. 45. Cf. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 15. 46. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 292.

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modus operandi, which surfaces in individual idiosyncratic reactions in every new situation. Such autonomous and distinct forms of conduct visualize in Ryan’s stoicism after bitter weeping, Furiosa’s irascibility in crying out anger and pain, quirky humor and playfulness as found in Samantha, Ava’s coolness and determination or the strange tense detachment of Kris. These individualities also reflect onto each film’s iconography.47 In conclusion, while their setting and their assigned heroic functions limit individuation, the analyzed heroines still exhibit character and individualities. Pertaining to gender, the science fiction genre has offered nothing but traditional gender depiction. Although in the guise of technicians and fembots, female motives and conflicts remained reactionary. Thus, resolving the central question of how gender manifested in plot structure: stories spiraling48 around a female lead and most often male mentor in one of the three modes: homecomer, emigrant or lover exhibit a common narrative superstructure. The five movies show differences in storyline. However, all indicate a similar gender-specific inner conflict and treatment of it. Accordingly, Gravity, Upstream Color and Mad Max: Fury Road 47. Gravity, for example, features a cultural comparison in its distinct display of objects, as Ryan has to apply and adapt to American, Russian and Chinese technology and language in order to survive. Each spacecraft has its own visual code and male talisman: Looney Tunes’ Marvin the Martian on the American ship, an icon of St. Christopher in the Sojus and a Chinese Buddha figurine in the final vessel. Marvin expresses Western world view according to which space is often a commodified venue for entertainment. He stands for coolness and barbarity at the same time as he is a villain with basketball shoes and a Darth Vader-ish black face without nose and mouth. In contrast, the Russian good luck charm links space utopia to a sense of awe and reverence for the beyond. Thus, the icon emphasizes authority, heteronormative tradition and order as opposed to playfulness and humor. The Chinese Buddha figurine, however, marks a hybrid of Eastern and Western concepts. It smiles happily reminiscent of innocence but knowingly contains the principles of life and death, light and shadow, in their diametrical opposition. It is this symbolism that brings Ryan back home after she has laughed and cried. Another example of a distinct iconography is the eclectic amalgamation of old, dirty and tribalistic devices with more evolved martial technology as found in the apocalyptic desert of Mad Max. In contrast, the future worlds in Her and Ex Machina are much more civilized with smooth surfaces and balanced colors. Typical for Ex Machina are blue-lit circuits, bright red and grey colors. Her, too, features many warm tinges like Theodore’s red shirt and brownish retro-futuristic high-waisted pants. Upstream Color’s iconography has many close-ups, as for instance flower petals, blood running through veins and dissolving substances all in bright colors. 48. Cf. “principle of spiraling” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 478).

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feature heroines in pursuit of solving a generative objective, while the two emigrants, Samantha and Ava, have to master a painful break-up of their heteronomous affiliations to come of age. So although these narratives bring equal opportunities to the fore, they reproduce stereotypes with female protagonists as quota women. This conjuncture reflects the working environment in the business in general, as recent outcries by Hollywood actresses show.49 Still much behind in pay, they deplore the lack of recognition of their competencies by the industry. In the roles of cyborgs, these hybrid technophilic women have occupied gender-defying positions, while still displaying feminine emotionality50 and histories.51 They have proved to be both cultured and naturalized. While the future settings provided these women with the possibility to become postmodern hybrids mingling with technology and animals, their narrative options—symptomatic of their little recognition in the industry—were limited and have yet to become more unchained. Yet, on a deeper level, promising tendencies toward recognition via individuation come into the picture, when the furious heroine in Mad Max incorporates her female gaze onto the ruins of men’s world, progressively changing the genre of action film into a woman’s film. More auspicious potential emerges when the heroines of Ex Machina, Gravity, Her, and Upstream Color combine old and new and transfigure gloriously devoid of the need for protection and partnership. With their backstories connected to their separate spheres, in nurturing, reproduction and a need for attachment, the heroines are charged with the burden of femininity and experience each new pain and happiness with an echo from the past. But resourcefully, the women use their “embodied” and “situated

49. Cf. Stephen Galloway, “Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett and Six More Top Actresses on Pay Gap, Sex Scenes and the Price of Speaking Frankly: ‘There Is Always a Backlash,’” The Hollywood Reporter Magazine, November 25, 2015, www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/jennifer-lawrence-cate-blanchett-six -841113 (accessed February 20, 2016). 50. Sam’s and Ava’s programming appears hyper-feminine, as they are very sensitive, inexperienced, in need of help, clinging and artistically inclined. 51. On this subject the deprivation of a child marks a great psychological parallel between Ryan and Kris. Both have to redress terrible traumata. Much more subtle in Upstream Color than in Gravity, Kris endures great pain and the loss of her piglets, while at the same time a photograph of herself with a baby alludes to even darker memories. In accordance Furiosa risks her life to save five women’s potential to reproduce—hence their label “breeders” and their lack of individual character traits.

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knowledge”52 from their experience to mobilize the power needed to succeed. What cannot be said, or is only uttered in great pain, is the inevitable truth of loss and doubt,53 which is heroically channeled into recursive action forming authentic female hero’s journeys. These progressive narrative backstories constitute a central part of the plots’ deep structure, which—although gendered—holds a lot of promise.

Bibliography Anderson, Hanah, and Matt Daniels. “Film Dialogue from 2,000 Screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age.” Polygraph.cool. April 2016, http://polygraph.cool/films/ (accessed June 2, 2016). Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Translated by P.G. Walsh. Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press, 2008. Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. 1950. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. Börner-Klein, Dagmar. Das Alphabet des Ben Sira. Wiesbaden: Marix, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993, 2014. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Reprint, London: Fontana Press, 1993. Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (Fall 1987): 187–228. Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics (September 1960): 26–27, 74–76. Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush. Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Burlington: Focal Press, 2007. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

52. Cf. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581. “‘Embodied’ accounts of truth” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 578). 53. Tellingly, Kris and Ryan rest in an embryonic pose, Ryan—in a Barbarellaesque undressing scene after entering the ISS, Kris—in the bathtub entangled with Jeff. Analogously Samantha and Ava do not want to be tools anymore and seek physical and psychological independence from their debaser, while Furiosa keeps on fleeing from her memories even if there is nowhere else to go.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Ex Machina. Directed by Alex Garland. Universal Studios, 2015. Galloway, Stephen. “Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett and Six More Top Actresses on Pay Gap, Sex Scenes and the Price of Speaking 2Frankly: ‘There Is Always a Backlash.’” The Hollywood Reporter Magazine. November 25, 2015, www.hollywoodreporter.com/ features/jenniferlawrence-cate-blanchett-six-841113 (accessed February 20, 2016). Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Gravity. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. —. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge, 1992. —. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. —. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Her. Directed by Spike Jonze. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Pandora, 1990. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lotman, Jurij M. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Poetics Today 1, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1979): 161–84. Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Mad Max: Fury Road. Directed by George Miller. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2015. Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. UFA, 1927. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999: 833–44.

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Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. 1968. Reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and The Flies: Huis Clos, a Play in One Act: Les Mouches, a Play in Three Acts. New York: Knopf, 1972. Simon, Irina née Bodrow. Die Odyssee der Neuen Amerikanischen Filmheldin. Ph.D. Diss., Free University Berlin, 2013. Thoreau, Henry D. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Second edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966. Thornham, Sue, and Niall Richardson. Film and Gender. London: Routledge, 2013. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy. 1840. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1945. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Translated by Arnold Weinstein. In Novel: A Forum on Fiction 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 70–76. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969. Reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Upstream Color. Directed by Shane Carruth. ERBP, 2013. Zurko, Nicholas. “Gender Inequality in Film.” New York Film Academy Blog. November 23, 2013. www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/genderinequality-in-film/ (accessed January 15, 2016).

CHAPTER SEVEN “BOTH MARRIED, BOTH MOMS, BOTH DETERMINED TO KEEP GETTING THEIR MESSAGE OUT”:1 THE RUSSIAN PUSSY RIOT AND U.S. POPULAR CULTURE

M. KATHARINA WIEDLACK

In this paper I want to analyze some of the best-known representations of the two Pussy Riot art activists Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in contemporary U.S. popular culture. I argue that within and through popular culture the two women are culturally constructed as female, feminist, and dissident “Eastern”2 bodies. Moreover, I argue that most media have presented Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova as dissident Russian bodies without providing a sufficient context for their representation, 1. David Greene introduced Maria Alyokina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova as “both married, both moms, both determined to keep getting their message out” before interviewing them on his show on NPR radio. The transcript of the interview can be found under the title “Pussy Riot: Prison Ordeal Will Help Us Fix Russia’s System” at http://www.npr.org. 2. “North/West” and “East” are highly problematic terms and concepts; they are always relational and perpetuate unequal power relations. With reference to Robert Kulpa and Joanna MizieliĔska (cf. Robert Kulpa and Joanna MizieliĔska, DeCentring Western Sexualities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011; Robert Kulpa, Joanna MizieliĔska and Agatha Stasinska. “(Un)translatable Queer?, or What Is Lost and Can Be Found in Translation,” in Import-Export-Transport: Queer Theory, Queer Critique and Activism in Motion, ed. Sushila Mesquita, Maria Katharina Wiedlack and Katrin Lasthofer, (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2012), 115–46), it should be emphasized that a clear and unambivalent definition of the terms seems impossible; nevertheless, “it seems inescapable to use them, while they persist in their abundance of historical, cultural, political, geographical, ideological, and other meanings” (Kulpa, MizieliĔska and Stasinska, “(Un)translatable Queer?,” 137).

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or they set the two figurations of bodies in protest within the U.S.American register of political protest and especially popular culture. They are clearly marked as “Eastern” or “Russian” bodies, but their political agenda and artistic forms are read against U.S.-American history and culture. Moreover, they are commodified. I examine the Western gaze and the bias that can be observed in the representations of the two previously incarcerated Russian women and their commodification by the news media and popular culture, and I do this especially in reference to pop star Madonna’s support and an interview, article and photo shoot on the two women published in Vogue magazine. In discussing these representative examples of very different media—daily news and life-style magazines and popular music—I seek to examine how the figure of the vulnerable and yet powerful female Russian dissident is produced, and what contradictory mechanisms and ways of producing similarity and difference are at play. Following queer theory researchers Robert Kulpa, Joanna MizieliĔska3 and others, I am interested in the complicated production of “Eastern otherness/similarity” and “North/Western hegemony,” especially through the globalization of U.S.-American popular culture. I aim to explore the specific ways in which representations of the two women within and through popular culture are gendered and racialized and how they have shaped or morphed into more generalized U.S. views and popular understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and age within Russia. I also highlight how Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova emerge as racialized bodies through the popularization and commercialization of Pussy Riot.

Pussy who? Pussy Riot started out as a “Russian feminist performance art group” and anonymous collective in October 2011 (according to the group description on the Free Pussy Riot webpage).4 They emerged within a climate of increasingly visible public protests criticizing the Russian legislative election process, which was seen as flawed by many political activists, journalists, and Russian citizens. People demonstrated for fair elections and criticized the then ruling party, United Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, who around this same time also announced his candidacy for President.

3. Ibid. 4. Maria Aliójina, Yekaterina Samutsévich and Nadezhda Tolokónnikova, “About,” Free Pussy Riot, http://freepussyriot.org/about (accessed November 5, 2013).

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Pussy Riot organized illegal punk performances on a prison roof, on Red Square—in front of the Kremlin—and on an oil platform. Their political acts were charged with “impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse, non-standard female image,”5 as one of the many commentators wrote. In an interview on their LiveJournal page the group argued that their “ironic” and “provocative” performances were intended “to effectively resist general conservatism”6 of contemporary Russia. The themes of their performances were political persecution, sexism, and homophobia, as well as capitalism, exploitation, and pollution within and by contemporary Russian society and especially through and by the state. In an interview with Vice Magazine one anonymous Pussy Riot member said that their issues were “gender and LGBT rights, problems of masculine conformity, absence of a daring political message on the musical and art scenes, and the domination of males in all areas of public discourse.”7 From the time they first appeared in 2011 until the prosecution of three of their members, they always performed wearing balaclavas and brightly colored feminine clothes, and presented their political statements as anonymous group, not as individuals. The North/Western world only started paying attention to Pussy Riot in May 2012, three months after three of its members, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, performed their Punk Prayer in the Russian Orthodox Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. In North/Western media coverage the trio quickly became synonymous with the large anonymous collective Pussy Riot as their trial was featured in every detail. North/Western Europe and the United States strongly condemned the group’s conviction for hooliganism and sentencing to two years in a prison camp. Most commentators referred to their treatment as a gross human rights violation.8 Amnesty International United States saw the sentencing as “a ‘Bitter Blow’ to Freedom in 5. Sergey Chernov, “Female Fury,” St. Petersburg Times, June 20, 2013, http://sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=35092 (accessed June 20, 2013). 6. “Interview with Pussy Riot,” Video, LiveJournal, January 6, 2012, http://www.livejournal.ru/themes/id/39503 (accessed September 15, 2012). 7. Henry Langston, “Meeting Pussy Riot,” Vice Magazine, March 12, 2012, http://www.vice.com/read/A-Russian-Pussy-Riot (accessed March 14, 2012). 8. See, e.g., Reuters, “Sir Paul McCartney’s Protests Fail to Help Pussy Riot,” Telegraph, May 23, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir -putin/10076417/Sir-Paul-McCartneys-protests-fail-to-help-Pussy-Riot.html (accessed May 29, 2013); and Jessica Zychowicz, “The Global Controversy over Pussy Riot: An Anti-Putin Women’s Protest Group in Moscow,” International Institute Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 13–15.

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Russia.”9 Most of the international press described the conflict using the simple and familiar template of “cultural” difference: “believers against atheists, nationalists against internationalists, or the liberal intelligentsia against the conservative narod (people),”10 Anya Bernstein rightly pointed out. The English-language Moscow Times reflected the common point of view when it called the trial a “Witch Hunt against Pussy Riot,”11 suggesting that today’s Russia was backward and anti-modern and equating Russia with Iran.12 Like the overwhelming majority of such writings, The Moscow Times uncritically reactivated very Orientalist notions of Russia that had originated during the Enlightenment presenting it as a nation, culture, and people struggling between the civilized North/West and the barbarian East.13 When Samutsevich was released after only a couple of months in prison, winning her appeal for a mistrial, the press concentrated almost exclusively on Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, who became a “cause célèbre”14 among artists and musicians, from Yoko Ono, and Sir Paul McCartney, to Lady Gaga and Madonna. The group Pussy Riot, as Masha Neufeld and I have argued on other occasions,15 brought forward an amalgam of feminist punk and riot grrrl 9. Alex Edwards, “Pussy Riot Sentencing a ‘Bitter Blow’ to Freedom in Russia,” Amnesty International USA, August 17, 2012. http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/ press-releases/pussy-riot-sentencing-a-bitter-blow-to-freedom-in-russia (accessed August 9, 2015). 10. Anya Bernstein, “An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair.” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 1 (2013): 221, doi:10.1086/673233 (accessed February 14, 2016). 11. Victor Davidoff, “The Witch Hunt Against Pussy Riot,” Moscow Times, June 25, 2012, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/the-witch-hunt-against -pussy-riot/460968.html (accessed August 9, 2015). 12. It needs to be emphasized that this equation equally Orientalizes and “Others” Iran as it does Russia. 13. For a detailed analysis of the portrayal of Russia during the Enlightenment and the continuation of 17th-century myths, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 14. Sara Corbett, “Members of the All-Girl Russian Collective Pussy Riot Are Enemies of the State,” Vogue, June 30, 2014, http://www.vogue.com/magazine /article/pussy-riot-members-start-new-organization-zona-prava/#1 (accessed July 2, 2014). 15. Katharina Wiedlack and Masha Neufeld, “Lost in Translation? Pussy Riot Solidarity Activism and the Danger of Perpetuating North/Western Hegemonies,” Religion and Gender 4, no. 2 (2014): 145–65; and Maria Katharina Wiedlack,

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forms in the tradition of U.S. feminists and youth cultures of the 1990s as well as in the tradition of local contemporary and historical Russian art forms and references. They were clearly rooted within contemporary Russian Actionism and media art circles, and their colorful attire drew references to the dissident art of Kazimir Malevich.16 Equally eclectic were the political discourses they addressed through their art. As mentioned, they echoed the sentiment of many critical Russian voices against the current political leadership. What’s more, they foregrounded issues and a form of rhetoric that are rooted in North/Western liberal and gay rights and human rights discourses. North/Western media, however, did not consider the within-Russia discourses that Pussy Riot addressed, ignored the support they received from some Orthodox religious and other Russian groups and individuals, and concentrated solely on the issues and topics they knew from U.S.-American punk feminism. Moreover, they used North/Western language and labels to describe and analyze Pussy Riot and the reactions they provoked. Mainstream media, from The Guardian17 to The New York Times18 to The Huffington Post19 and The Spectator,20 interpreted Pussy Riot as a feminist punk band, preferring to quote those analysts who were sure in their claims that what we were seeing was a Russian version of the rebellious punk girrrls in front of them. The International New York Times, for example, cited Spencer Ackerman, who congratulated Pussy Riot for attracting “international attention to the paranoid repression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia” and praised them as the first of a future global generation of punks, “disrupting “‘Free Pussy Riot!’ & Riot Grrrlsm: International Solidarity, or the Incorporation of the ‘Eastern Other’ into North/Western Discourses?” LES Online 6, no. 1 (2014): 79–94, http://www.lespt.org/lesonline/index.php?journal=lo&page= article &op=viewArticle&path%5B%5D=84 (accessed February 28, 2016). 16. Wiedlack and Neufeld, “Lost in Translation,” 145–65. 17. Cf. Kevin O’Flynn, “Pussy Riot vs Vladimir Putin: The Feminist Punk Band Jailed for Cathedral Protest,” Guardian, March 11, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/11/putin-russia-president-election -protests (accessed August 9, 2015). 18. Cf. Sophia Kishkovsky, “Punk Riffs Take on God and Putin,” New York Times, March 20, 2012, 8–10; Harvey Morris, “We’re All Pussy Riot Now,” IHT Rendezvous, August 17, 2012, http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/ were-all-pussy-riot-now/ (accessed April 8, 2017). 19. A. Gensler, “JD Samson on NYC’s Free Pussy Riot Event, The Riot Grrrl Movement, Band’s ‘Courage and Strength’,” Billboard, August 14, 2012, http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1084164/jd-samson-on-nycs-free -pussy-riot-event-the-riot-grrrl-movement-bands (accessed September 9, 2015). 20. Dennis Sewell, “Pussy Riot Were Wrong,” Spectator, August 11, 2012, 20.

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corrupt and authoritarian governments, corporations, and other structures of international power.”22 During their time in prison, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were interpreted almost exclusively in “feminist terms”23 as oppositional to Putin as a patriarchal authority figure. They were presented as heroic dissident figures who seemed to embody the opposite of everything Russia was seen to be: they were young, beautiful, courageous females, and not yet tainted by the corruption of a misogynistic and powerhungry system. North/Western media focused mostly on Tolokonnikova in the visual images of the group. Pictures circulated showing her raising her 21. “Film news. Cut & Wrapped this week: the Pussy Riot doc, new Michael Douglas and a Herzog classic,” June 7, 2013, http://www.dazeddigital.com/ artsandculture/article/16272/1/film-news?utm_source=Link&utm_medium=Link& utm_campaign=RSSFeed&utm_term=film-news (accessed April 13, 2017). 21. Morris, “We’re All Pussy Riot Now,” August 17, 2012. 22. Elena Gapova, “Becoming Visible in The Digital Age,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 18–35. doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.988390. (accessed July 22, 2015).

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(feminist) fist, replicating the iconoclastic feminist sign on her blue Pussy Riot Solidarity T-shirt, always with a proud smile on her face marked by suffering. During the time of her detention, Tolokonnikova’s hunger strike in protest against the harsh prison conditions caught global attention again, and pictures showed her thin figure in a prison-hospital bed. Alyokhina was shown less frequently, mostly at Tolokonnikova’s side during the trial, and later as a dedicated and unbreakable believer in justice. Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was released from prison earlier, moved further and further into the background. Arguably, Samutsevich did not meet the Western desire for heroic, smart, educated, white, and—according to mainstream beauty standards—beautiful women in distress and in need of a Western (U.S.) nation to save them, in the case from a power-mad Putin. One celebrity artist who was especially enthusiastic in her support of Pussy Riot, to the point of integrating Pussy Riot solidarity slogans and balaclavas into her world tour was pop star Madonna. Much attention was drawn by her show in Moscow on 7 August 2012, where she stripped to her shirt on stage to reveal the words “Pussy Riot” on her back.24 Two days later she did the same performance in St Petersburg, this time asking her audience to “show your love and appreciation for the gay community.”25 She criticized St Petersburg’s law against “homosexual propaganda” in front of a more than 10,000-strong audience. Arguably, her speaking out in favor of gay rights and gay pride was a provocation aimed at getting a reaction from state officials. To Western viewers it reaffirmed, if it did not actually initiate, the connection between liberal gay rights issues and Pussy Riot. Madonna’s advocacy for Pussy Riot also promoted feminism—a young sexy actionist feminism. Although this feminism was embodied through young, strong, white, feminine women from Eastern Europe, its ideas were the ideas of the Western world, especially the United States. This version of feminism is about equality, self-representation, financial independence, and access to capitalist power, public visibility, and sexual freedom. It is strongly embedded in the logic of market capitalism and the U.S. democratic system and entangled with other liberal rights claims and causes, especially gay and lesbian rights struggles. These ideas, however, correspond little with Russian realities and discourses.

24. “Madonna Expresses Support for Pussy Riot,” August 8, 2012, http://www.rappler.com/entertainment/10066-madonna-expresses-support-for -pussy-riot (accessed April 13, 2017). 25. Ibid.

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Popular Culture Promoting Modernity Madonna’s “campaigning” for Pussy Riot was arguably entirely informed by North/Western feminist discourses, regardless of whether the popculture star considers herself a feminist or not. Her speeches often took the form of a universalistic human rights rhetoric supporting freedom of speech or of a paternalistic “shaming.”26 Moreover, Madonna’s solidarity put forward the idea that the United States is much more progressive and modern than Russia. At the Amnesty International Benefit Concert 2014, for example, Madonna argued that she had only realized in Russia how lucky she was to live in a country that allows her to speak her mind. In this and other speeches Madonna equated the persecution of Pussy Riot with the homophobic legal constraints on public discussions of homosexuality as the outcome of Russia’s reckless disregard for human rights. Furthermore, she set human rights as the aim and standard of progress and, most importantly, equated the United States with human rights.27 Following postcolonial scholars like Aihwa Ong28 and Jasbir Puar,29 Madonna’s solidarity acts need to be understood as embedded in and in support of a U.S. colonialist and nationalist project. Feminists have traditionally taken part in colonialist nationalist discourses. Characteristically, the initiative to become a feminist here is this moment of “becoming conscious of oppression from the Other.”30 Such feminism confirms the assumption that women in places other than the West are generally more oppressed than they are in the West, i.e. that the Western standard is the future and the template for all other places to follow. It is a form of 26. “Madonna Calls for Leniency in Pussy Riot Trial during Russian Leg of World Tour,” Video, Telegraph, August 7, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ newsvideo/9458246/Madonna-calls-for-leniency-in-Pussy-Riot-trial-during -Russian-leg-of-world-tour.html (accessed August 11, 2015). 27. Ibid. 28. Aihwa Ong, “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 79–93, http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/v3-4top.html (accessed July 7, 2015). 29. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 337, doi:10.1017/S002074381300007X (accessed April 11, 2017). 30. Aihwa Ong, “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 79–93, http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/v3-4top.html (accessed July 7, 2015).

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nationalism that generates national pride based on a nation’s degree of modernity, where modernity is equated the U.S. standard of modernity. Recently, this “facet of modernity” has come to be signified “by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nationstates.”31 Hence, “‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’ for gay and lesbian subjects [function as] a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated.”32 Puar argues that the inclusion of white homosexuals into the logic of modernity “is thus built on the back of racialized others, for whom such progress was once achieved, but is now backsliding or has yet to arrive.”33 Although Puar developed her concept to understand the national and international consequences of the production of racialized Muslim subjects as terrorist subjects to delegitimize their cultural and territorial environment, her concept can be useful for understanding the current construction of the Eastern European Other and the image of Russia in the North/Western gaze. This framework of tolerance and human rights as the characteristics, goals and reference points for the U.S. nation and state is the one through which the characteristics of both countries and individuals are then evaluated and interpreted. A lack of self-esteem on the part of a woman from a different culture, for example, is often understood as cultural stratification, a sign of the oppression of women in the country of origin, which, in turn, needs to be seen as backwards or as lagging behind. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina are constructed as Eastern European female through a combined focus on their bodies, English-language skills, and individual demeanor. An article in the fashion magazine Vogue, for example, described Tolokonnikova as [b]rown-eyed and cushion-lipped, […] sleepy, smoldering beauty. She also often appears bored, as if her attention needs to be earned. Some of this may be attributed to shyness, especially when it comes to speaking English. “I talk like Borat,” she says, laughing, acknowledging her thick accent and limited vocabulary.34

31. Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 45, no. 2 (2013): 337. 32. Ibid., 336. 33. Ibid., 337. 34. Sara Corbett, “Enemies of the State,” Vogue, June 30, 2014. http:// www.vogue.com/magazine/article/pussy-riot-members-start-new-organizationzona-prava/#1 (accessed July 2, 2014).

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The article goes on to interpret Tolokonnikova’s and Alyokhina’s guardedness as a sign of their introversion, “which over the course of a two-week trip to America has been cause for some awkwardness,”35 and sets their attitude in an exaggerated contrast to what must be understood as American ways. The underlying assumption of poverty in Russia forms the basis for the interpretation that the hesitation of the two women to comply with what is expected or desired by their American audience is due to their naïveté, while the United States is presented as a capitalist land of milk and honey, lavish in both the metaphorical and the literal sense: [T]he two seem openly perplexed by the frivolity of it all—the relentless demand for chitchat and, at least among the power brokers they are meeting, the near-constant access to finger foods and champagne.36

Throughout the interview the United States appears as a land of pleasure, and the two women as eager to “learn” or “catch up to” the American way of life. The underlying assumption is that the reason why they are charmed by the United States is not the abundance of goods and choices, but the “right” values. Russia, on the other hand, is the place where “they were sleep-deprived, food-deprived prisoners dressed in green uniforms.”37 The text emphasizes the green prison outfits and focuses on the fact that the two “were forced to work in prison garment factories” at the penal colonies. The mentioning of the prison clothes draws additional attention to the fashionable new outfits in the pictures of the magazine. However, this focus equally paints the Russian environment they previously in as depressing and monotone—as backward. Masha had been assigned to a penal colony in the Ural Mountains. Nadya was housed in a windswept city in Siberia. Like many female prisoners in Russia, they were forced to work in prison garment factories. Masha sewed mittens and bedsheets; Nadya put in sixteen-hour days stitching uniforms for police officers. Conditions were generally cold, dirty, and demoralizing. The prison bathrooms were so crowded it sometimes required a fistfight to get to a faucet.38

35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

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The article invokes feminism, human rights and environmental rights by locating the issues of such politics within the Russian prison. The Vogue article also labels Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina as “punk-feministactivist icons, becoming possibly the most well-known and brazen political dissidents living.”39 This label signals that Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, despite coming from a “backward” and “uncivilized” country, have the right mindset for catching up with modernity. Robert Kulpa and Joanna MizieliĔska40 have shown how invoking queerness to evaluate Central and Eastern Europe often produces a problematic concept of time and progress in which the North/Western model can only ever be seen as forward while the Eastern counterpart can only ever appear far behind and in need of catching up. Arguably, feminism fulfils the same purpose in the case of Pussy Riot. Eastern Europe becomes understood as the “‘poor cousin’ to the ‘West,’ […] now, supposedly, catching up with normality (a.k.a. the ‘West’)” after “being kept in history’s freezer (a.k.a. ‘communism’).”41 Kulpa and MizieliĔska note the ambiguity of the “structural enclosing of [Eastern Europe] in toxically imbalanced relations of passivity and (expectations of) activity.”42 (Moreover, they highlight that hegemonic Western “Occidentalist” discourses do not recognize Eastern European “geo-temporality […] e.g. through the rejection of state communism as Modernity, one of its many projects, and alternative to the “Western” one, which is portrayed as the one.”43 Interestingly, the Vogue article includes some mild criticism of the environment in the United States that greeted Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina. Rather than challenging U.S. “power brokers,”44 however, the article produces Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina as minds and bodies untainted by all the evil of Western excess (Parvulescu calls this “McDonaldization,” as I will explain later in the text), catching up with the “goodness” of civilization—finger food and champagne (in the Vogue article) as well as gender equality and gay rights.

Written on the Body Regarding the construction of Pussy Riot, and especially Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, as Eastern European female bodies, Madonna’s performances on her “Pink Ribbon” concert tour need to be mentioned again. Madonna 39. Ibid. 40. Kulpa and MizieliĔska, De-Centring Western Sexualities. 41. Kulpa, MizieliĔska, and Stasinska, “(Un)translatable Queer,” 23. 35. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Corbett, “Enemies of the State.”

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used a very specific symbol to express her solidarity with Pussy Riot on this world tour—black letters on naked skin. Black letters on a naked upper body do not so much refer to Pussy Riot’s performative formats as to another feminist activist group that originated in the global East: Ukrainian FEMEN. The homogenization of these “Eastern” feminisms into one is highly arbitrary given the two groups’ very different political and ideological agendas and artistic and conceptual forms. However, these forms of feminism are being put forth by young, beautiful, white women, and, arguably, because beautiful white women have come to signify postSoviet feminism, Madonna’s reference makes sense—to her and her North/Western audience. Furthermore, associating herself with symbols usually worn by young and beautiful (naked) feminists lets the singer appear hip and young, as much as it supports the feminist cause. In other words, applying feminist symbols to her body, a body that has been constantly criticized for age-inappropriate behavior, in this case becomes a “rejuvenating cure,” because the post-Soviet feminism she is associating herself with is very tightly connected to the meanings of youth, white beauty, and femininity. Reading Madonna’s act as her attempt to rejuvenate herself by means of a metaphorical tissue transplant from Eastern European feminism is as much a reflection of the contemporary youth cult and ageism of North/Western societies as of the global exploitation of Eastern European women as organ and tissue donors. Parvulescu suggests in her analysis of the global trafficking of Eastern European women for the purpose of reproductive labor, as care workers, sex workers, surrogates, etc., that Eastern European women are “the primary tissue donors in the stem cell industry,”45 an industry that benefits white, privileged U.S. and EU citizens. Through their donations, as well as their labor as caregivers in the broadest sense, they need to be seen as an injection of youth into a European and U.S.-American society of ageing and old people. These migration patterns are contingent upon and reinforce economic inequality within the EU as well as globally. Moreover, they are structured through racism and culturalism. Parvulescu argues that Eastern European women are often perceived as naturally inclined to care and reproductive work because their role in society has not (yet) been transformed through Second Wave Feminism.46 The stereotype that Eastern European women are very family-oriented and that they bear children at an early age follows the same logic. The singer Madonna, like

45. Anca Parvulescu, The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 86. 46. Ibid., 39.

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news articles47 and magazines,48 often mentions the fact that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are mothers. They all moreover comment on the women’s youth. This focus highlights the vulnerability and femininity of the two women and confirms the aforementioned stereotypes of Eastern European women, and it makes the two women appear even more “Eastern” or “Russian.” It is an also important factor in their commodification as product or image Pussy Riot. The branding of Pussy Riot as a popular-culture product in the North/Western world did not go unnoticed by the remaining anonymous member of the group, after Alyokhina’s and Tolokonnikova’s release from prison in December 2013 through an amnesty from Vladimir Putin. The Pussy Riot collective, along with the also previously incarcerated Samutsevich, distanced themselves publicly from Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova in February 2014 after the latter two appeared at the Amnesty Gala in the company of Madonna. In an open letter to the British newspaper The Guardian,49 they asked media outlets to refrain from calling Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova Pussy Riot,50 as if claiming that the women were no longer members of the group. Although North/Western media did report on the group’s repeated public rejection of Alyokhina’s and Tolokonnikova’s actions and politics after their release from prison51 and up until the final dissolution of the group announced on their LiveJournal page, the media

47. Katya Soldak, “Pussy Riot, Putin, The Church, and Human Rights,” Forbes, June 14, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/katyasoldak/2012/06/14/pussy-riot -putin-the-church-and-human-rights/ (accessed January 15, 2013). 48. Corbett, “Enemies of the State.” 49. Anonymous members of Pussy Riot, “We wish Nadia and Masha well—but they’re no longer part of Pussy Riot,” Guardian, February 6, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/06/nadia-masha-pussy-riot -collective-no-longer (accessed August 9, 2007). 50. Red, “Remaining Pussy Riot Members Distance Themselves From Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina,” Moscow Times, February 6, 2014. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/remaining-pussy-riot-members-distance -themselves-from-tolokonnikova-and-alyokhina-31813 (accessed December 29, 2016). 51. E.g., Vladimir Kozlov, “Pussy Riot: Anonymous Members Distance Themselves from Two Former Bandmates,” Hollywood Reporter, February 6, 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/pussy-riot-anonymous-members -distance-677713 (accessed August 12, 2015); and Alan Jones, “We Interviewed the Director of a Doc about Pussy Riot on Misconceptions of the Group and Religion in Russia,” Guardian, February 13, 2014, http://www.vice.com/en_ca/ read/we-interviewed-the-director-of-a-documentary-about-pussy-riot (accessed August 10, 2015).

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did not accommodate the group’s wish to stop referring to the two public figures as Pussy Riot. Moreover, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, despite having claimed in January 2014 that they did not speak for the collective, started performing as Pussy Riot again in the context of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014.

The Commodification of Pussy Riot Singer Madonna’s support for Pussy Riot through her glamorous, spectacular, pop-culture shows, with advanced technology and special effects, played an integral role in the commodification of the group. Her commercial success distributed knowledge about Pussy Riot globally and her body-centered support popularized the idea that Pussy Riot are “cool” as much as it helped the singer to continue to be perceived as relevant. Elena Gapova52 argues that the group had been associated with global capitalism from the start by the Russia mainstream, because of their social origin within the “creative or new class of urban intellectuals and globally connected elites, whose life options are immersed in the technological, economic, and cultural transformations of the information/digital economy.”53 She goes on to point out that Pussy Riot’s goals of “visibility, autonomy, and self-expression”54 need to be understood as strongly connected to their social background in this new global urban elite, and by contrast have less to do with and are consequently not intelligible to the masses. They became even more strongly associated with capitalist consumer culture through supporters like Madonna within Russia. This arguably led to Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova being more inclined to align themselves with powerful U.S. supporters and enter a sphere in which the commodification and capitalization of queer and feminist politics were well advanced. The public interest in Pussy Riot within the United States was strongly stimulated by the campaigns of Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband, who, together with his daughter, “traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby Congress to recognize the trial’s human rights abuses”55 in January 2012,

52. Elena Gapova, “Becoming Visible in The Digital Age,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 18–35, doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.988390. (accessed July 22, 2015). 53. Ibid., 19. 54. Ibid. 55. Zychowicz, “Global Controversy,” 13.

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and gave interviews to various global news channels.56 His campaigning in support of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova during their trial and incarceration as well as his public relations activities after their release contributed to the creation of Pussy Riot as a trade mark. “Recognizing that signs and images can be particularly valuable in the information society, Petr Verzilov […] applied for the registration of the ‘Pussy Riot’ trademark in August 2012.”57 Thus, Verzilov’s activities additionally confirmed the connection between capitalism and Pussy Riot that the Russian public suspected. Transferred to the North/Western world this sentiment was taken up positively. The capitalist global media were all too happy to integrate “the sign of protest into global consumer culture,”58 (as Gapova has noted. Ironically, Pussy Riot in turn played a significant role in the commercialization of U.S.-American riot grrrl feminism. To cooperate with Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova the riot grrrl feminists Le Tigre did not shy away from taking part in the Netflix series House of Cards,59 to which they also contributed a song protesting against the fictional Russian president in the series. Gapova argues that the transformation of political protest into a sign and commodity—embodied by Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova—is an inevitable result of the decision to engage in media activism. Social media such as LiveJournal, Facebook or the Russian Vkontakty “provide a ‘merger’ of social and commercial activities.”60 Pussy Riot’s form of activism was a mixture of public actions and virtual activity, with an emphasis on the latter. Inhabiting the virtual space allows for the simultaneity of protest, exchange, communication, community building as well as economic activity. “[I]t helps to sustain visibility and popularity, a precondition of employment.”61 Thus, this kind of virtually connected community—despite its outspoken anti-capitalist ideology, “often lives off of the global media market (TV, the fashion industry, advertising, design, contemporary art, etc.) and international technological networks.”62 Moreover, within the virtual world the distinction between private and 56. “Putin Is Deciding This Trial: Verzilov,” Video, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. August 10, 2012, http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/ 2012/s3565597.htm (accessed August 10, 2015). 57. Gapova, “Becoming Visible,” 30. 58. Ibid, 31. 59. “Chapter 29,” House of Cards. Season 3, DVD, directed by Tucker Gates (Sony Pictures, 2015), Episode 3. 60. Gapova, “Becoming Visible,” 26. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 27.

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public, work and personal activities, activism and consumerism often becomes blurred. Frequently, “one’s personal matter becomes the ‘material’ which adds to one’s popularity and visibility: one is performing as one is living.”63 Tolokonnikova’s “‘public’ pregnancy and childbirth in 2009,”64 when she was still a member of the Russian Actionist group Voina, must be understood in such a light. For example, she took part in a public performance naked shortly before she gave birth. Such a public display of a pregnant body is very unusual in Russia. This earlier attitude or behavior arguably predisposed her to becoming understood as the embodiment of Pussy Riot, Russian feminism, and dissidence in general.

From Activists to Models As public Eastern European female bodies, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were “sold” as hip protest products while at the same time they served as symbols of the righteousness of Western, as opposed to backward Russian, values. Their reduction to mere signs and figures is well illustrated by a comment actress Maggie Gyllenhaal made in a Huffington Post interview about her role in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.65 In the interview Gyllenhaal compares Batman to Pussy Riot, arguing that the fascination with both of them stems from the fact that they are not a magical superhero [but] human[s] who […] created a way […] to be able to do these superhuman things. […] We look at Pussy Riot and we just go, “My God, you’re so brave. You’re doing what we all wish we could do. You’re standing up against something that you think is really wrong, and you’re risking everything,” and that’s kind of what Bruce Wayne [Batman] is doing, right?66

One of the high points of the commodification of Pussy Riot as Eastern European beauty dolls with a political twist, for hipness, was the already mentioned photo-shoot they had with artist Taryn Simon for the July 2014 issue of Vogue. Simon’s photo-portrait of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova accompanied a story about their U.S. tour to promote their new organization, 63. Ibid., 26. 57. Ibid. 65. Ryan Buxton, “Maggie Gyllenhaal Explains How Batman Is Like Pussy Riot,” Huffington Post, July 29, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/29/ maggie-gyllenhaal-batman-pussy-riot_n_5631934.html (accessed September 1, 2015). 66. Gyllenhaal quoted by Buxton, “Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

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Zona Prava (Zone of Rights), which criticizes the poor conditions in Russian prisons, and the above-discussed article and interview by Sara Corbett. Although the photograph printed in Vogue is outstandingly stereotypical, racialized and culturalized, other visual and verbal representations of the two women draw on the same signs and meanings—for example, the photo and story on the two women published in Vanity Fair in July 2014. In the Vogue photo (like that in Vanity Fair) Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova pose like supermodels; they are super skinny, and have perfect hair and not a pimple or any other flaws. This look underscores their Eastern Europeanness. Parvulescu argues that Eastern European women “are often referred to as model-looking, a euphemism that describes the fact that their bodies do not (yet) carry traces of what Europeans dread under the name McDonaldization.”67

Fig. 7-2: Photographed by Taryn Simon, Vogue, July 201468

67. Parvulescu, Traffic, 39; emphasis in the original. 68. “Photographer Taryn Simon on Shooting Pussy Riot and the Politics of Media,” Vogue, August 8, 2014 http://www.vogue.com/946796/taryn-simon -interview-pussy-riot-image-atlas/ (accessed April 13, 2017).

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In the Vogue picture, they look perfect, almost as though they were made out of wax, and not human flesh. Their bodies seem almost to levitate, not by their own doing, but as though they were so weightless and unaffected by gravity that they can float. Alyokhina is higher up than Tolokonnikova, which amplifies her angelic image. Her hair looks lighter than it used to be; her skin whiter against the red dress. The dress looks kind of old fashioned. It is red velvet, cut to a long fitted skirt that reaches her ankles, revealing black, strapped shoes. This image of Alyokhina breaks with earlier or other representations, which emphasized her sassy dissident and politically conscious side. The Vogue image instead calls to mind what Ursula Biemann describes as the stereotypical image of an Eastern European woman: “she is beautiful and feminine / she is loving and traditional / she is humble and devoted / […] she believes in lasting marriage / and a happy home / she is a copy of the First World’s past.”69 Like the picture, the article, which accompanies the photograph in the Vogue magazine emphasizes her white skin and frail figure: Masha [Alyokhina], 26, is pale-skinned and diminutive behind blue-framed Prada eyeglasses, her wavy hair loose around her shoulders. She wears a black top, black tights, a black miniskirt, plus a yellow scarf wound around her neck.70

In the description and the photograph ethnicity and race, culture and “nature” melt into one. Alyokhina’s blond hair and pale skin serve as much as signs of her Russianness as of her attitude—the arrogance, the shyness and moderate skepticism of American extravagance—and her style. Despite how ethnicity and race are blended with the exoticization and othering of Eastern European women, it is important to acknowledge the racialization involved. Although there is a growing corpus of work acknowledging the racialization of Eastern European women, there is little agreement on the terms and tools with which to identify the racial insignia at play. Scholars like Parvulescu71 or Rosi Braidotti72 rightly point out that the existing analytical grid and vocabulary, which distinguish between white/black and Christian/Muslim and use terms like “people of color” to mark racialization, are unable to account for the racial stratification of 69. Biemann quoted in Parvulescu, Traffic, 39. 70. Corbett, “Enemies.” 71. Parvulescu, Traffic. 72. Rosi Braidotti, “On Becoming European,” in Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe, ed. Luisa Passerini et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 32–44.

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Eastern Europeans. Given this lack of categories and analytical tools, researchers have been struggling to point out precisely what the mechanisms and violent significations of Eastern Europeanness are. While skin color provides a form of visibility that triggers particular forms of racism, for the most part racial Europeanization targets East Europeans on the basis of markers that are not limited to color. We still need to learn to recognize and read the “stratification insignia” (Hall’s term) that overdetermine East European women’s European and global mobility.73

Parvulescu is one of the gender studies theorists trying to develop ways to describe hegemonic attributions: “They include racialized physical characteristics like hair, teeth, body type, and clothing styles as well as education, religion, and ‘values.’”74 Parvulescu seeks to identify these racial stratification insignia in the context of migration and migrant labor in North/Western Europe, emphasizing the role of Eastern European women as caregivers and reproductive workers. Following Parvulescu, it can be argued that the occupational habits in the care, reproductive, and cleaning sector have come to be understood as aspects of the nature and culture of Eastern European women, rather than the result of an exploitative neoliberal market, a class-oriented xenophobic North/Western European society and EU immigration policies. Her reading of the racialization of Eastern European care-workers and cleaning personnel is convincing. However, her suggestion to identify the racial marking of Eastern European immigrant workers as “not quite white”75 is highly debatable. Parvulescu jumps to this interpretation of the meaning of Eastern European women because she rightly notices that skin color corresponds uncomfortably with the economically produced hierarchy within Europe (and I might add the United States). Although this general estimation is correct, the conclusion that all Eastern European and postSoviet women are generally understood as less white than their Western European peers is incorrect. Parvulescu supports her argument by referring to Braidotti, who has argued that “[p]eople from the Balkans, or the SouthWestern regions of Europe, in so far as they are not yet ‘good Europeans,’ they are also not quite as ‘white’ as others.”76 Making this reference, she suggests that all Central Eastern, South Eastern and Eastern European women are equally racialized. I strongly disagree with this generalization. 73. Parvulescu, Traffic, 15. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 14. 76. Braidotti, “On Becoming European,” 34.

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Although Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, or Polish women are often similarly produced as “Slavic” women, with or without regard to any evaluation of them as white, very different tropes of Southernness mark the bodies of women from the Balkans. Thus, I draw a different conclusion from Parvulescu’s and Braidotti’s findings, arguing that economic factors play a crucial role in the racialization of Eastern European women. Corbett’s Vogue article as well as the picture by Simon illustrate how the two Russian bodies of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova emerge at the intersection of economic potency or impotence—the imagined “starving” Russian population’s, rather than the two girls’—and an untainted beauty, untouched by the negative side-effects of the rapid progress of neoliberal North/Western capitalism. Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are not presented as “not-quite-white,” but as truly white, like raw white eggs. Moreover, in between the lines the Vogue article and picture, like most of the coverage of the two women, ascribe to them a naïveté and presents them as uncorrupted sleeping beauties who woke up only to have to go through (Russian) hell and re-emerge in a place where they are truly appreciated. Every little detail of the two women’s poses in the Vogue picture and elsewhere is filled with stereotypical meanings that confirm both their Russianness and their dissident political agenda. With outsiders, they can seem intimidating and detached. Nadya has a withering stare; Masha is birdlike and professorial. But together, particularly in quiet moments, they project an unusual and sophisticated dignity.77

Here Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova appear to be intrinsically foreign again, but they also appear graceful, and evoke stereotypical images of starving Russian intellectuals and Russian ballerinas familiar from the Cold War era. “In photos they make a deliberate point of not smiling,” Corbett writes, assuming that “The potential for being misconstrued as unserious feels too great.”78 Interestingly, but not coincidentally, the next sentence informs readers that “>b@oth women have small children—Nadya has a six-year-old daughter; Masha a seven-year-old son—staying with relatives back in Russia.”79 It is a common stereotype that Soviet citizens

77. Corbett, “Enemies.” 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid.

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never smile in photographs.80 Corbett links the fact that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova do not smile in photographs to the fact that they have children. Although these two biographical details seem to have nothing to do with each other, they are united in the cultural and racial foil through which Corbett sees and describes the two women. This foil highlights the fact that the women are mothers because this confirms the stereotype that Eastern European and especially Russian women are heterosexual and bear children at an early age. Thus, they are just one more aspect or layer of Alyokhina’s and Tolokonnikova’s ethnic, racial and cultural stratification. I want to briefly come back to Corbett’s emphasis on the fact that the two women are not smiling in the picture. Besides drawing attention to their Russianness in terms of culture, this remark also brings back the image of the hostile environment the two women not only come from, but are fighting against. Corbett’s article strongly emphasizes the hostile atmosphere and risks the women face in contemporary Russia. In March, in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, the two Pussy Riot members and several colleagues were attacked by a group of men early one morning as they sipped coffee at a McDonald’s before going to deliver supplies to a nearby women’s prison. The incident, documented on video, resulted in a concussion and a jagged hairline scar for Masha. Nadya was doused with chemicals that burned her eyes and blurred her vision for more than a week.81

The description of the attack is followed by an evaluation of the situation by a Russian cultural critic named Artemy Troitsky, who thinks that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova “face steep challenges not just from the Putin-led government but also from the Russian public.”82 This expert paints the situation in drastic words, which are quoted directly by Corbett to emphasize their truthfulness and severity: “Russia right now is a semifascist state. People who act disloyally to authorities, they have problems.”83 Moreover, “>t@he women of Pussy Riot,” he predicts, “could land back in prison, or even dead. ‘Anything could happen to them, very easily.’”84 Again, Russia is portrayed as an authoritarian territory. The

80. Michael Bohm, “Why Russians Don’t Smile,” Moscow Times, April 29, 2011, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-russians-dont-smile/ 436037.html (accessed February 28, 2016). 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Troitsky quoted in Corbett, “Enemies.” 84. Corbett, “Enemies.”

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word “semifascist” implies backwardness and darkness in contrast to the enlightened progressiveness of the United States, where Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are at the time of the photograph and the publication of the article. It might be a slight over-interpretation, but mentioning the place in Nizhny Novgorod where they had recently been attacked which was not just any restaurant but a McDonald’s—the emblem of the U.S.Americanization of the world—could be interpreted as a sign of Alyokhina’s and Tolokonnikova’s progressive, ergo un-Russian, values, which stand in stark contrast not only to their president but to most of the Russian population. If McDonald’s stands for the progressive Western world led by the United States, it is only one minor (profane working, and lower class) piece in the plenitude of American culture. The Vogue magazine article’s description of who Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova met during their U.S. visit in the summer of 2014 reads like a well-chosen sample of U.S.American (liberal) popular culture. According to Corbett, the two women met Frank Shepard Fairey, the street artist and graphic designer who became famous for the “Hope” poster of the 2008 presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Marina Abramoviü, a Serbian immigrant to the United States and one of the best known contemporary avant-garde performance artists today, and Toni Morrison, the world-famous American Nobel Prizewinning novelist and scholar. The article also mentions the famous onstage appearance at the Amnesty International Gala, their get-together with Hillary Clinton, and Stephen Colbert’s invitation to them to appear on his show The Colbert Report. In just one sentence, American pop music, state politics and political commentary figure form the backdrop to Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova’s visit. The reference to the Pussy Riot collective’s criticism of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova is interesting in this regard. The article claims that the two women’s “high profile and their new organization” have been criticized by the anonymous group “for choosing ‘institutionalized advocacy’ over ‘provocative forms of art.’”85 The article brushes away this criticism and implies not only that the Pussy Riot collective has misunderstood institutionalization as selling out, but that the collective’s argument is insular and rather naïve. “By American standards,” Corbett continues, “the compromises are relative.”86 To underline this conclusion, Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the PEN American Center, an important branch of the most famous worldwide association of writers, who invited Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, is

85. Ibid. 86. Ibid.

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quoted, saying that “[t]hey could cash in with a big book deal, but instead they’re really committed to mobilizing others on behalf of prisoners.”87 Nossel “credits Nadya and Masha with energizing the global free-speech movement and giving people a fresh window on Russian oppression,” Corbett reports in Vogue, and she cites Nossel as saying that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova have become the image of the Russian dissident today. “It used to be that when we thought of a Russian dissident, the image that would come to mind is a grainy black-and-white photo of a man in glasses with a beard […] But they’ve changed all that.”88 This quote speaks to what Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova represent in the U.S.-American gaze. They embody the female, beautiful, heterosexual Russian woman and Russian dissident. All these notions are signified by the Pussy Riot label. By describing Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova’s glamorous visit to the United States, where one glamorous event followed another—from a meeting with Clinton to a Vanity Fair party hosted by the former Mayor of New York and business magnate Michael Bloomberg—the Vogue article simultaneously legitimizes why two Russian activists are covered in such detail and underscores the severity of the situation that led to the women visiting the United States in the first place. Through little comments, mostly in brackets, the women are constructed as economically poor—for example, in one quoted tweet, “We have only one set of clothes and we wear it everywhere—even if we’re at a Vanity Fair party.”89 Their modesty in the face of the “lavish offerings” of U.S.-American high society is emphasized alongside their unaffectedness by the hysteria of U.S.-American celebrity, which could equally translate in youth as well as culture and politics: Nancy Pelosi doesn’t register. Robert De Niro goes unrecognized. Katy Perry and Sofia Vergara mean nothing to Nadya and Masha. It’s only when they figure out that two stunningly dressed women standing nearby are, in fact, Taylor Schilling and Uzo Aduba, better known as Piper and Crazy Eyes from Orange Is the New Black, that they get a little excited.90

Finally, to conclude the article’s portrait and reassure readers that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are indeed good Russians and not soon-tobe immigrants to the United States, Corbett quotes another U.S.-American celebrity to make her point, Spike Jonze. The American director, producer, 87. Nossel quoted in Corbett “Enemies.” 88. Ibid. 89. Corbett, “Enemies.” 90. Ibid.

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screenwriter and actor, who is famous not only for movies like Being John Malkovich91 but also for his music videos for Björk, The Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim or Kanye West, is quoted as saying that he “finds most humbling—that Nadya and Masha refuse to emigrate to a safer country or scale back their criticism of Putin and his cronies.”92 Almost everyone I speak to among Pussy Riot’s friends and supporters has fretted over the danger they seem to court. When I raise the issue at the table, Masha shows a touch of iciness, clearly accustomed to people suggesting they scale back their activism and move out of Russia. She says, “It’s not our fault that we have to do this work at the risk of our safety.”93

Conclusion North/Western news media and U.S. popular culture have shown an unprecedented interest in the two Russian feminists Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Looking at the many articles and interviews, songs of solidarity, works of creative writing and art, and invitations to appear on talk shows and at charity galas, etc., I cannot think of any other Russian woman, let alone a feminist, who has ever before enjoyed this kind of attention. The content of the different writings and other representations of the women, however, does not reflect the multitude of their publicity. In an analysis of news articles and pictures, solidarity performances by Madonna, and the coverage of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova in the July 2014 issue of Vogue, I was able to show that the huge interest U.S. popular culture has shown in the two Russian feminists has been driven by neoliberal nationalism. This form of nationalism is interested in producing a bright and sparkling picture of a tolerant and progressive United States in contrast to a dark and backward Russia, using feminism, LGBT-rights claims and human rights rhetoric to signify the modernity and enlightenment of the U.S./West. In the process of this New Cold War, two Russian women and feminists, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, have become synonyms for the Pussy Riot collective because in American ears the group’s name echoes the familiar history of the riot grrrl movement and portrays Russia and its current leadership as barbaric, backward and inhuman. Moreover, the name Pussy Riot resonates well with the (artificial) truculence of U.S.-American popular 91. Kaufman (1999). 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid.

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culture and is easily co-opted for the capitalist market. The group’s name, the punk art form or punk style, and the youth and beauty of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova have made it easy for supporters like Madonna to speak out in solidarity. However, Madonna’s solidarity performances in particular can equally be understood as an attempt by the singer to remain popular, interesting and relevant to young audiences and to be perceived as youthful herself. Most importantly, through such representations—the discussed Vogue photography and accompanying article to a much greater degree than Madonna’s body sprouting the slogan “Free Pussy Riot”— Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are produced as female Russian and dissident bodies. The representations of the women follow racialized and culturalized patterns and attribute characteristics to them that are then understood as typically Russian: the poverty, the slight arrogance, the sophistication, the determination—to fighting for the right (i.e. Western) values—and the women’s destiny to be mothers and caretakers. These media representations highlight their thin figures, their white skin, Tolokonnikova’s lips, and Alyokhina’s golden hair, and implicitly suggest that these bodily features are physical attributes typical of Eastern European women. The two women are also portrayed as representative of “Russian dissidents” today. Equally, they represent Eastern European and Russian women, as if Russia were a monocultural and homogeneous society and not the largest country in the world and home to at least six different ethnic groups, which together make up at least 1 percent of the Russian population of 146 million people.94 North/Western media and popular culture by default represent Russian feminism as if it were one coherent movement and ignore that there are many different groups with very different philosophies and agendas.

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distance-themselves-from-tolokonnikova-and-alyokhina-31813 (accessed December 29, 2016). Reuters. “Sir Paul McCartney’s Protests Fail to Help Pussy Riot.” Telegraph, May 23, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world news/vladimir-putin/10076417/Sir-Paul-McCartneys -protests-fail-to-help-Pussy-Riot.html (accessed May 29, 2013). “Russian Population: 1960-2016,” Trading Economics, 2016. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/population (accessed February 28, 2016). Sewell, Dennis. “Pussy Riot Were Wrong.” Spectator, August 11, 2012, 20. Soldak, Katya. “Pussy Riot, Putin, The Church, and Human Rights.” Forbes, June 14, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/katyasoldak/2012/ 06/14/pussy-riot-putin-the-church-and-human-rights/ (accessed January 15, 2013). Wiedlack, Katharina, and Masha Neufeld. “Lost in Translation? Pussy Riot Solidarity Activism and the Danger of Perpetuating North/Western Hegemonies.” Religion and Gender 4, no. 2 (2014): 145–65. Wiedlack, Maria Katharina. “‘Free Pussy Riot!’ & Riot Grrrlsm: International Solidarity, or the Incorporation of the ‘Eastern Other’ into North/Western Discourses?” LES Online 6, no. 1 (2014): 79–94. http://www.lespt.org/lesonline/index.php?journal=lo&page=article&op =viewArticle&path%5B%5D=84 (accessed February 28, 2016). Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Zychowicz, Jessica. “The Global Controversy over Pussy Riot: An AntiPutin Women’s Protest Group in Moscow.” International Institute Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 13–15.

PART II: ON MASCULINITIES: THE MAKING, REMAKING, AND QUEERING OF MEN

CHAPTER EIGHT WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT SINCE THE 1950S? THE RETURN TO CONSERVATIVE GENDER ROLES IN SAM MENDES’S FILM ADAPTATION OF REVOLUTIONARY ROAD RUBÉN CENAMOR

With the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 the United States started to experience a regression in gender equality.1 As a result, there was a return to traditional gender roles and a (re-)establishment of a patriarchal society in the 1950s.2 This triggered the creation of a hegemonic masculinity— that is, the socially acceptable and demanded model for a man to follow3—which was mainly based on the continual display of a hypermasculine and sexist attitude, and on the type of job men had and the money they earned.4 This should come as no surprise, as the United States were obsessed with capitalism and consumerism throughout the 1950s,5

1. Robert J Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997); Mercè Cuenca, “Lectura, homosexualidad y resistencia a la homofobia: el caso de los Estados Unidos (1945–1965),” in Homoerotismos Literarios, ed. Rodrigo Andrés (Barcelona: Icaria, 2010), 109–27. 2. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1987); Steven M. Gelber, “DoIt-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 66–112. 3. Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1987); R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1995). 4. Peter G. Filene, “The Long Amnesia: Depression, War, and Domesticity,” in Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, ed. Peter G. Filene (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158–90. 5. Cuenca, “Lectura;” James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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mainly as a reaction against the hardships suffered during the Great Depression.6 Since the beginning of the 21st-century economic crisis, there has been a revival of 1950s’ U.S. culture and literature, with film adaptations of 1950s novels such as Revolutionary Road. In these productions women who do not behave like caring mothers and submissive wives are usually vilified, depicted as neurotic and willing to make men stray from their goals, or, in some cases, they are mere sexual objects for the men, present just to boost their sense of manliness. In view of the success of these productions and the fact that the public keeps asking for more we need to ask ourselves two questions: do these films show an intention, which usually occurs in times of recession such as ours, to recover a more conservative, patriarchal, society? Are we experiencing a new wave of sexism? This paper tackles these questions by comparing Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (published in 1961 but set in the 1950s) and its film adaptation by Sam Mendes (2007). Focusing on the concept of “maturity” which, as I will explain, was pivotal in the construction of 1950s gender roles, I will argue that Yates’s Revolutionary Road criticizes the prevailing hegemonic masculinity and advocates for what Carabí and Armengol call “alternative” masculinities (i.e. models of masculinity which are, among other things, profeminist, non-homophobic, non-racist and class-blind). In this line of argumentation, I will contend that the novel advances Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in its fight for gender equality. Conversely, I will try to demonstrate how Sam Mendes’s film adaptation of Revolutionary Road presents a more conservative model of masculinity and patriarchal model of society. I will explore how the film recreates the characters of Frank and April to make them embody the 1950s normative masculinity and neurotic femininity. In so doing, Frank’s manhood is portrayed as heroic whilst April becomes a villain whose actions and demands lead her and her family to a tragic ending. As a result, the film changes the message of the original work from an approach to gender equality to an exaltation of patriarchal values.

6. William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1950s (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2004).

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The Fifties: An Overview For a long time, scholars have argued that the fifties were a time of transition7 an era when “nothing of significance” happened,8 a period of political quietude,9 cultural stagnation,10 and “social and political petrification”11 which was “nestled” between the forties and sixties12, almost becoming a “virtual hole in history.”13 Similarly, some historians have regarded this period as “part of the total time-continuum” between the late forties and the early sixties, which were “fundamentally, a reaction against the fifties.”14 In more recent dates, scholars have started to highlight how relevant the fifties have been for the history of America. David Castronovo claims that the fifties witnessed a flowering of American talent, especially regarding literature, which he argues “distill[s] the modern American spirit” and presents “characters who are very much of their time but, by no means strange amid the pressures of ours.”15 He even states that the best books of the fifties have become “the books of our lives.”16 Martin Halliwell claims that the this decade was not only “necessary for the social revolution of the next decade to happen,” but also “one of the defining periods of the 20th century, prefiguring the materialism of the 1980s, the media control of the 1990s, and the ascendancy of the Right in the early

7. W.T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origin of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 3–4. 8. Ibid. 9. Alla Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Fred J. Cook, The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Random House, 1971). 10. Young and Young, The 1950s. 11. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1976), 215. 12. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), ix. 13. Stefan L. Brandt, The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945–1960 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 12. 14. Douglas Brode, The Films of the Fifties: Sunset Boulevard to On the Beach (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 7. 15. David Castronovo, Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), 12–13. 16. Ibid., 11.

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21st century.”17 Similarly, historian Ronald Oakley describes this time as vital in the production of American cultural identity.18 However, there are dissonant voices even among those who point out the relevance of this decade. There are mainly two tendencies: one which coincides with the popular conception of the fifties and regards them positively, and one which assesses them negatively. The reasons for the fond memories of the 1950s are to be found in its economic growth. After World War II, the United States entered a period of unparalleled prosperity. Between 1950 and 1960, the gross national product (GNP) almost doubled, going from $285 billion to $500 billion.19 Most of this increase stemmed from the changing demographics of the nation, as population grew from 139.9 million in 1945 to 180.6 million in 1960 thanks to the era’s Baby Boom.20 This massive growth led America to a consumerist frenzy. The economic difficulties of the Great Depression and the rationing of World War II were gone to never come back; thrift was no longer a virtue, as the new motto and what advertisements urged people to do was to “buy, buy, buy.”21 As a result, people’s “[d]aily lives resonated with the expectation that at last the American Dream could become reality.”22 Hence, it should come as no surprise that some regard the decade as “the Fabulous Fifties”23 or even the “Golden Fifties.”24 Some have even labeled this decade as the “best in the history of America.”25 This idyllic vision has been contested by writers and scholars. Norman Mailer mentioned that the fifties were “one of the worst decades in the history of man.26 In recent years, most of the criticism has come from scholars who have analyzed the lives of individuals, especially regarding the anxieties on gender caused by the Cold War and the “Red Scare.”

17. Martin Halliwell, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007), 4. 18. J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York: December Books, 1986). 19. Young and Young, The 1950s, 3. 20. Robert H. Bremmer and Gary W. Reichard, eds. Reshaping, America: Society and Institution, 1945–1960 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). 21. Young and Young, The 1950s, ix–x. 22. Ibid., xii. 23. Ibid., xiv. 24. Brandt, Culture of Corporeality, 11. 25. J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York: December Books, 1986), 434. 26. Castronovo. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit, 13.

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The “Red Scare” and Gender Roles Throughout the 1950s, the “Red Scare” put Americans under an asphyxiating pressure regarding gender roles. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that Communism had infiltrated the United States and had reached the State Department, which allegedly had employed up to 205 active communist agents. McCarthy intended to track down and punish all who favored Communist ideologies, or, who simply thought differently than him, as he infamously stated that anyone who was against him was either a “Communist or a cocksucker.”27 He thus began a campaign, in which he encouraged Americans to inform authorities of any subversive or suspicious act carried out by other citizens. Those who were suspected of alliance to Communism, even if it was based on false accusations, became blacklisted, ostracized and were from then on unable to find work in any public institution. Conservatives took advantage of McCarthy’s words to try to further deteriorate the image of homosexuals and emphasize their possible link with Communism. GOP party chairman Guy Gabrielson proclaimed that homosexuals had “infiltrated our government” and were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”28 Likewise, the Republican leader in the Senate, Kenneth Wherry linked homosexuality to any type of subversive attitude and moral bankruptcy, claiming that “you can hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied together.”29 He also claimed that Adolf Hitler had a world list of gay men who favored his Fascist regime due to their subversive nature.”30 Wherry also called for measures to avoid a “sabotage” in cities by “subversives and moral perverts” lurking in the government.31 His petition resulted in an investigation by the Senate; the Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, which reported that gays were morally weaker due to their sexual indulgence and their unacceptable affliction, which made them vulnerable and prone to be corrupted by Communism and other totalitarian 27. A.K. Cuordileone, “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 521. 28. Ibid., 532. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid.

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ideologies. The extreme right became so obsessed with eliminating any non-normative attitude that Evangelist Billy Graham went as far as to claim that to be “tolerant” or “broad-minded” was the first step towards becoming a subversive and a homosexual.32 Thus, in the end, the reigning ideology was that in the 1950s “there was room only for straight gender identity—straight and narrow,”33 because the homosexual was a “national security risk.”34 To avoid the taint of Communism, U.S. citizens had to conform to social norms, which were based on a strong heterosexism and very conservative gender roles,35 where the man was to be the sole breadwinner and the woman was to take care of the house and have children. It was claimed that these norms were essential both to maintain the American democratic spirit and to fight Communism and Fascists ideologies.36 In fact, however, they were designed to enhance the consumerist frenzy of the decade, which would allow the U.S. to expand their power.37 In order to impose this traditional model, the United States launched another campaign, this one on the relevance of achieving maturity. Through a biased interpretation of recent psychoanalyst discoveries, mainly Erik Erikson’s theory on psychological development, the governmental propaganda proclaimed that happiness and, more importantly, normative heterosexuality in adulthood were intrinsically related to achieving “maturity” and “settling down.”38 Immaturity was linked to a deviant heterosexuality and, therefore, to latent homosexuality.39 More even so since it was believed that homosexuals lived in a state of eternal childishness or immaturity.40 As a result, Americans were more than eager to learn ways to prove their maturity and, in the process, their heterosexuality which would, consequently, demonstrate their alliance to American politics and refusal of Communism and fascists regimes. Thus, psychologists, sociologists and 32. Ibid. 33. Peter G. Filene, “The Long Amnesia: Depression, War, and Domesticity,” in Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, ed. Peter G. Filene (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 180. 34. Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. 35. Cuenca, “Lectura,” 111. 36. Cuenca, “Lectura;” Young and Young, The 1950s, xiii. 37. Cuenca, “Lectura,” 111. 38. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1987), 18. 39. Ibid., 24. 40. Ibid.

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even journalists began to create lists of tasks through which maturity could be demonstrated. One of the most popular and more influenced by rightwing ideology was the one created by psychologist R.J. Havighurst. He claimed that men and women would prove their maturity if they followed these eight steps, which were evidently based on traditional gender roles: “(1) selecting a mate, (2) learning to live with a marriage partner, (3) starting a family, (4) rearing children, (5) managing a home, (6) getting started in an occupation, (7) taking on civic responsibilities and (8) finding a congenial social group.”41 Many moralistic films and novels portrayed characters that either fulfilled these tasks and achieved a happy ending, or refused them and were eventually ostracized by society. However, there were also works which criticized this notion, arguing that it led to a problematic mass society. Probably the best-known example is The Lonely Crowd. In this groundbreaking study, Riesman et al. identified three main historical cultural types; the tradition-directed, the inner-directed and the other-directed. In tradition-directed societies, citizens acted and moved in the direction established by preceding generations. They followed traditional rules and were consequently very static societies, with little to no progress. They were followed by innerdirected societies, in which citizens realized their value and potential as individuals and acted, above all, according to what they believed was right. America’s individualism and the ideal of going “from rags to riches” or achieving the American dream were based on this type of society. The other-directed society emerged after the Industrial Revolution and became, according to Riesman, the dominant model in the 1950s. It is not based on tradition or on individuality, but rather on living according to mass mentality. Other-directed citizens are malleable and primarily interested in gaining the approval of other men and women. Indeed, Riesman contended that the “other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.”42 Other-directed citizens are defined by others, and valued by their capacity to consume goods and afford luxuries as well as for their personality rather than their skills or uniqueness. In this line of argument, William H. Whyte’s classic study The Organization Man (1956) further explored how organizations in the 1950s wanted to hire men with a likeable personality rather than exceptional skills for white-collar jobs and even carried out personality tests in their jobs interviews.43 These tests were essentially 41. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 18. 42. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1950), xxxii. 43. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 [1956]), 171.

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“loyalty tests, or rather, tests of potential loyalty” they rewarded “the conformist, the pedestrian, the unimaginative—at the expense of the exceptional individual.”44 Sociologist C. Wright Mills went as far as to claim that white-collars were successful in as much as their personality was likeable.45 Riesman46 finally claimed that an other-directed society such as the American in the 1950s would eventually face profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential. In Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates also tries to show that this movement from inner-directed to other-directed societies and the subsequent need to be liked by others is one of the reasons for the gender inequalities of the 1950s.

Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road: The Path towards Gender Equality Revolutionary Road has often been praised for its realistic characters. Richard Ford claims that the protagonists Frank and April Wheeler can be regarded as “types” of their time.47 Similarly Anthony Giardina argues that anyone who has been raised or lives in the suburbs can easily “recognize Frank and April’s world” since the novel “render[s] in brilliant detail” the 1950s culture.48 As I will try to show in my analysis, the novel’s critique of the prevailing gender roles and hegemonic masculinity is based precisely on portraying Frank and April as the average Americans anyone could identify with. Frank embodies the 1950s man who is obsessed with both being accepted by his fellows and proving his manliness following the tasks of maturity, whereas April is shown, as Garcia-Avello points out, as the typical suburban woman who has been forced to conform to gender roles but is trying to find a way to break away from them.49 Upon return from WWII, Frank realizes that in order to be respected and accepted, he has to conform to the norms established by society. This 44. Ibid., 182. 45. Wright C. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 263. 46. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. 47. Richard Ford, “American Beauty (Circa 1955),” New York Times Book Review, http://www.tbns.net/elevenkinds/richardford.html (accessed August 12, 2015). 48. Anthony Giardina, “An Emotional Journey down ‘Revolutionary Road.’” NPR Books, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11913039 (accessed August 12, 2015). 49. Macarena García-Avello, “‘I’ve Always Known...’: La Mística de la Feminidad en Revolutionary Road de Richard Yates,” Odisea 12 (2011), 289–305.

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begins by following the tasks of maturity. He also realizes that, being twenty-one years old, he is already falling behind with his tasks. Indeed, he is single at a time when the average age for a man to be married was twenty-three because there was the belief that if a man was not married by the time he was twenty-seven, he probably was a latent homosexual.50 Thus he wastes no time and marries April, even though he has no interest in marital life.51 Soon afterwards, April becomes pregnant due to failed contraceptive methods. Although they both want to abort the fetus—and, in fact, Frank seems to be the one who is most lured by the idea, he forces her to continue her pregnancy and have the child for two reasons. First, as he reveals later on, because he feels that his masculinity is “threatened” by “all that abortion business.” As mentioned before, having babies was a conditio sine qua non for men to prove that they “settled down” and were genuinely masculine. Therefore, Frank believes that if he postpones becoming a father he might be regarded as a latent homosexual. Second, fatherhood opened a series of new tasks to further prove their maturity52 which he believes help him in achieving his goal of becoming a respectable manly man. The next task he has to fulfill is to become a breadwinner. As Armengol argues, throughout the history of the United States, the hegemonic model of masculinity has traditionally linked men’s identity to their breadwinning role53 In the 1950s the entwinement went even further, as jobs became the “main source of identity” for men54 The workplace also became an arena for proving one’s manhood since a man’s value and his manliness were measured by the type of job he had and by the money he earned.55 There was one position that was considered the ideal one for proving one’s masculinity; that of the white-collar worker.56 Hence, even

50. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14. 51. This and all the following quotations are taken from the 2009 edition of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, (New York: Vintage Books). 52. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14. 53. Josep Maria Armengol, “Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s American Culture and Literature,” in Embodying Masculinities: Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction and Film, ed. Josep Maria Armengol (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 31. 54. Filene, “Long Amnesia,” 184. 55. Ibid. 56. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997); Mercè Cuenca, “Invisibilizing the Male Body: Exploring the Incorporeality of Masculinity in 1950s American Culture,” in Embodying Masculinities: Historicizing the Male

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though Frank swore never to become a white-collar “dopey salesman”57 like his father, he is willing to become one only to prove his maturity and embrace normative masculinity. Of course, going against his will brings about a dissatisfaction which increases as years go by, as he admits later on: Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on [having his first baby] had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman […] [i]t was as ludicrous and as simple as that.58

Fatherhood, as mentioned above, brought about a series of new “maturity tasks” to be done in the domestic sphere. Men were supposed to take care of the house by carrying out do-it-yourself tasks and were expected to be companions for their wives, as well as warm and nurturing fathers for their children.59 Frank tries to conform to these demands by allowing his children to watch him work in the garden and by reading them comics. However, he can only feel irritated when in company of his children.60 He becomes further frustrated when, trying to prove his belief in do-ityourself tasks, he starts working on a stone path from the front door to the road. Although he dislikes this “mindless, unrewarding work,” he carries it out because “[a]t least it was a man’s work.”61 Still, at the end of the day, Frank loathes his life and cannot help wondering “[w]hat the hell kind of a life was this? What in God’s name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?”62 Therefore, the more Frank follows the tasks of maturity, the more jaded he becomes. The novel thus tries to demystify

Body in U.S. Fiction and Film, ed. Rodrigos Andrés (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 52. 57. Ibid., 49. 58. Ibid., 68–69. 59. Steven M. Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997), 94. 60. Ibid., 76. 61. Ibid., 61. 62. Ibid., 77.

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the 1950s conception of maturity. In doing so, it also criticizes the monolithic gender roles while advocating for new ones. As James D. Riemer argues, to create more egalitarian societies, criticizing and deconstructing normative, traditional models is not enough; one must also provide “alternative” more egalitarian models.63 The alternative that the novel provides is presented by April. She proposes moving to Paris, a place Frank used to regard as “the only part of the world worth living in.”64 In Paris, April would work as secretary, which would enable Frank to quit working and “find” himself,65 perhaps write, as he had always wanted.66 Her offer implies a complete deconstruction of gender roles. It proposes a relationship which no longer requires men and women to work on separate and almost antagonistic spheres; April will initially be the breadwinner but as she herself states, if Frank does not find himself or is not comfortable with his situation, he can go back to being the breadwinner. That is, what April and the novel are advocating for is men and women’s liberation from the chains of gender roles. To a certain extent, both also seem to demand a return to an inner-directed type of society in which each member of the relationship would act according to what they believe is right and to make the best out of their abilities. To some extent, the novel also seems to advance Betty Friedan’s claims and demands in The Feminine Mystique.67 Friedan argued that “the problem that has no name” started to become visible in the 1960s as the unhappiness of American suburban women began to be reported in newspapers such as The New York Times. This dissatisfaction was quickly linked to the fact that women received the same academic education as men, and a possible solution was to give women a more domestic-oriented education, according to the role they were to carry out.68 Friedan showed how society made women ostracize and disdain other women who wanted to pursue a career or simply work out of home. Conversely, they were taught that “truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education and political rights.”69 Moreover, the problems they had were often attributed to childhood trauma. The solutions they were given were to see 63. James D. Riemer, “Rereading American Literature from a Men’s Studies Perspective: Some Implications,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 298. 64. Ibid., 29. 65. Ibid., 149. 66. Ibid., 27–29. 67. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Classics, 2010). 68. Ibid., 11–12. 69. Ibid., 5.

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a psychiatrist, to have another child, or simply to “swallow it up” and realize how easy they had it in comparison with men, who had schedules and had to work in offices. Friedan demonstrated that the problem that women suffered was, in fact, the result of the insane conservative demands from society and their lack of freedom. The solution she proposed was to “no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband.’”70 Richard Yates advances this critique and, more importantly, pinpoints its location: it is not women’s education, but, rather, as Friedan would say two years later, suburban life. April points at this when she states that society has put her in a trap—i.e. the housewife and mother role—which she cannot escape.71 By offering to be the breadwinner she is showing that she wants something more than the role of the traditional stay-at-home housewife. Later on, she also rightly points out that life in the suburbs is based on a false premise that its inhabitants are “somehow very special and superior” to the rest of Americans72 and should consequently be happy with their lives. In fact, however, as she states, suburban men and women “can’t stand” their lives precisely because of the expectations from society.73 April has seen this “terrific fallacy” and expects Frank to do the same so that they can both break free from the gender roles society has imposed. Initially, Frank is skeptical of this plan because he knows that if he accepts April’s offer he will be breaking some of the cardinal rules and tasks of proper maturity. Effectively, in the eyes of 1950s American society, he is swapping gender roles, adopting the female role, as he is to stay at home taking care of the children and, presumably, of the house. Hence his fear74 and why he dismisses it as a not “very realistic” idea.75 In the end, however, Frank accepts April’s proposal and the changes in their relationship it implies. In the weeks that follow, he abandons his obsession with following the tasks to maturity and conforming to the hegemonic masculinity. As a result, he no longer considers his workplace an arena to prove his manliness. This enables him to, ironically, work more efficiently and even enjoy his job for the first time in his life.76 Likewise, he approaches his relationship with his family not as an undesirable obligation, which 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 37. 72. Ibid., 150. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 148. 75. Ibid., 149. 76. Ibid,. 170–1.

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helps him becomes more involved in the upbringing of his children, especially regarding their emotional development, effectively becoming a caring and nurturing father. Interestingly, Frank regards these days, when he stops following the tasks of maturity to conform to the normative masculinity, as some of the happiest in his life.77 Unfortunately for the Wheelers, fellow suburban men quickly remind Frank of his duties as a mature, manly citizen. The first instance occurs when Frank and April communicate their decision to move to Paris to their neighbors, the Campbells. Shep Campbell claims that the plan “sounds like a pretty immature deal”, and wonders “what kind of half-assed idea is this about her supporting him? […] what kind of a man is going to be able to take a thing like that?”78 Shep seems to suggest that giving up the role of breadwinner is equivalent to giving up masculinity. Similarly, when Giving discusses with her husband the Wheeler’s upcoming departure to Paris, she complains about the lack of maturity that Frank and April are showing: “I thought all the young married people today were supposed to be more settled.”79 Moving to Paris elicits questions about Frank’s manhood even at his workplace, where Ordaway, one of Frank’s colleagues, makes fun out of this idea of Frank allowing April to maintain him.80 After this, Frank realizes that the plan of moving to Paris jeopardizes his manliness. Hence, he begins to nurture doubts about it.81 These increase when Bart Pollock, one of the most important members of Knox Business Machines, the company where Frank works, offers him a very prestigious and well-paid job at a new branch of the company which Pollock plans to start. What Frank is interested in is not the money, but rather the prestige. According to Brannon, manliness in the United States has traditionally been based on the following four rules: “no sissy stuff,” be “a big wheel,” be “a sturdy oak” and show a “give ‘em hell” attitude.82 Being a “big wheel” meant that the more successful a man was and the more money he earned, the manlier he was. In this line of argument, and specifically related to the 1950s, Wright Mills explains in his excellent 77. Ibid., 163. 78. Ibid., 206. 79. The use of the term “settle” as a synonym of “mature” was common at the time (Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 12–14), 228. 80. Ibid., 231–32. 81. Ibid., 247. 82. Robert Brannon, “The Male Sex Role: Our Culture’s Blueprint of Manhood and What It’s Done for Us Lately,” in The Forty-Nine Percent Majority, ed. Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1976), 12.

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study of the 1950s, that white-collars can be divided into three types of salesmen; stationary, mobile or absentee: Stationary salespeople—now about 60 percent of the white-collar people involved in selling—sell in stores, behind the counters. Mobile salesmen— now about 38 per cent—make the rounds to the houses and offices of the customers. They range from peddlers walking from door-to-door, to “commercial travellers” who fly to their formal appointments expertly made weeks in advance. Absentee salesmen—admen, now 2 per cent of all salespeople—manage the machineries of promotion and advertising and are not personally present at the point of the sale, but act as all-pervasive adjuncts to those who are.83

The job that Pollock offers would catapult Frank to the outstandingly successful position of absentee salesman, with all the prestige—and therefore, manliness—it involves. Therefore, Frank sees it as a perfect opportunity to prove his maturity, redefine himself as an admirable manly man, and erase once and for all, any questions regarding his masculinity. Hence, he waits for a chance to cancel the plan to go to Paris. He sees the perfect opportunity in April’s third pregnancy, which occurs only a few nights after Pollock’s offer. April expresses her desire to have an abortion, as having the baby would prevent them from going to Paris and also because she strongly believes that they are “not even adequate as parents” and were never “ever meant to be parents.”84 In an attempt to convince April of having the child, Frank appeals to the concept of maturity, telling her that “the only mature thing to do is go ahead and have [the child].”85 With this, Frank shows that he has succumbed to the malady of maturity and other-directness. April’s answer proves to be a harsh critique against this concept: “But there we are again […] You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means […] and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank […] All I know […] is what I feel, and I know what I feel I’ve got to do.”86 Just as she did when proposing moving to Paris, April pinpoints the bizarreness of the rules imposed by society. She rightly argues that the whole concept of maturity is used to monitor citizen’s actions. It favors and perpetuates other-directness. Indeed, April’s words seem to show that she is the one who is still an inner-directed type of American, as she will

83. Mills, White Collar, 165. 84. Ibid., 302 (emphasis in the original). 85. Ibid., 305. 86. Ibid., 305–6.

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not act to satisfy others, whereas Frank is more concerned with being accepted than being happy. Essentially, April tries to demonstrate how maturity, as Frank himself witnessed, cannot bring happiness. Still, Frank has become so other-directed and obsessed with proving his maturity, and therefore his manliness that he keeps trying to convince April to have their third child. He tells her that her desire to have an abortion is a product of some psychological problem. The only way she can heal and become a rational woman who wants to have babies, as any sane, mature woman should, is by accepting to see a psychiatrist.87 Thus, they must remain in the suburbs and the plan to move to Paris must be postponed for her safety. With this argument about April’s alleged psychological disturbances, Frank is regurgitating a Freudian discourse used throughout the 1950s, which had as its main goal to keep women working as housewives and to show them “motherhood was the ultimate fulfillment of female sexuality” and “the primary source of a woman’s identity.”88 Moreover, they were expected to be passive, since “powerful mothers […] would damage their children and undermine fathers’ authority”89 Likewise, with these words Frank is also proving his maturity and manliness, for he shows that he wants to have children and be a breadwinner as any man should. What makes his speech even more pathetic is the fact that he used to criticize the same things that he is now defending. Indeed, in the novel he complains that one of the reasons for America’s and men’s decadence is its devotion to Freud and psychoanalysis.90 He claims that the culture of the United States is “geared” to Freud and that psychoanalysis had become “the new religion; […] everybody’s intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit.”91 It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he used to regard men who followed Freud so blatantly as inferior and intellectually limited. Although this criticism is fierce, it shows that Frank was, at some point, a man who did not blindly follow the masses; i.e. he was inner-directed. At this point, however, he is nothing but a hypocrite and a bigoted patriarchal, misogynistic man who is too afraid to achieve his boyhood dream of going to Europe and develop his talent.

87. Ibid., 318–19. 88. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 5. 89. Joanne Meyerowitz, “Rewriting Postwar Women’s History, 1945–1960,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed, Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 391. 90. Ibid., 89. 91. Ibid.

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The ending of the novel is a final cry for change. After a series of confrontations, April decides to self-induce an abortion, which causes her death. When the doctors inform Frank of herdecease, he immediately realizes that he is the one to blame as he has caused his wife’s death to fulfill his absurd desire to prove his manliness. As the true villain of the story, he receives severe punishment; he becomes trapped in a series of depressions and mental problems, resulting in him becoming a “walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man”92 incapable of “laughing, or really crying, or really sweating or getting drunk or getting excited—or even standing up for himself.”93 Ironically, in the end his actions have not granted fellow men’s admiration. On the contrary, men look down on him and pity him, as he has become what he accused April of being; an empty shallow shell of a human being. A fitting ending for the 1950s’ patriarchal model of masculinity that he embodied, which, as the novel proves, show gender inequalities are bound to bring about tragedies not only for women, but also for men. Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road accomplishes its goal of stirring society and change Americans’ conception of their life, especially in the suburbs, thanks to characterizations of April and Frank. Indeed, by portraying April’s fight as no less than heroic and, somewhat, martyr-like, the novel draws attention to the unfair situation of women and denounces it, as well as it shows the tragic events that might derive from it. Likewise, pinpointing the flaws in Frank, who perfectly portrays the prevailing hegemonic masculinity, and the insanity of its actions, helps male readers realize that new models of masculinity are needed, as the normative ones fail to bring happiness. In so doing, the novel advocates for alternative models of masculinity which can lead to more gender egalitarian societies.

Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road and the Praising of Traditional Gender Roles The 1950s are long gone. Presumably, so should be the patriarchal society they were based on. However, as Carabí and Armengol argue, patriarchal models of society are still very much alive and becoming globalized and perpetuated.94 On October 12th 2001, Peggy Noonan wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Welcome Back, Duke,” in which she 92. Ibid., 453. 93. Ibid., 453–54. 94. Àngels Carabí and Josep Maria Armengol, Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 1.

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pointed out that what she had witnessed throughout the first weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack was a revival, as well as a “celebration” and “honoring,” of a John Wayne-type of masculinity.95 Scholars seem to agree that Wayne embodied a patriarchal hyper-masculinity with a strict moral code and sexist attitude disguised in an apparently unselfish, “Good Joe” behavior, and a model of caring fatherhood.96 The portrayal of Frank in Sam Mendes’s adaptation follows this type. Frank is presented as a happy man in his role of pater familias who enjoys the responsibilities of fatherhood. Indeed, throughout a series of portraits that April examines, it is revealed that Frank has been deeply involved in the upbringing of his children, putting them to sleep as babies and teaching them how to ride a bicycle.97 Likewise, Frank’s insane obsession with proving his masculinity in the novel is significantly toned down to favor an apparently more unselfish, “Good Joe” representation. When April proposes to go to Paris, he shows no fear, nor does he regard the plan as a threat for his manliness. Instead, he joyfully embraces it, suggesting that he is well above the paranoia of breadwinning, for what he truly cares about is not what others might think of him, but rather what is best for his family. In this line of argument, he seems to be a replica of the character Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) in Crime of Passion98 who, in one of the first dates with his soon-to-be wife, states that for him there is no greater goal and pleasure in life than to have a “marriage, have children, and a home”. When Doyle’s wife complains about his job and wonders how he can be happy with it, he replies that “I do this because it gives us a living. Because it makes it possible for us to live with a piece of security. Because it makes it possible for us to be together. That’s what’s important. That’s all that matters.”99 That is, both Bill and Frank are portrayed as men who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their families. Therefore, when Frank claims that he is not a “dumb, insensitive husband” as April accuses him, the audience believes his words. In fact, however, what is being praised in both films is not their characterization, but the traditional gender 95. Peggy Noonan, “Welcome Back, Duke,” Wall Street Journal October, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12245117479865008512 (accessed August 12, 2015). 96. Russell Meeuf, John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 97. This and all the following quotations are from the 2008 film version of Revolutionary Road, DVD, directed by Sam Mendes (London: UIP). 98. Crime of Passion, DVD, directed by Gerd Oswalt (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957). 99. Ibid.

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roles and, above all, a patriarchal model of masculinity diminishing their wives’ thoughts and words. The film version of Revolutionary Road uses this apparent interest in the wellbeing of his family to justify Frank’s hesitation about accepting Pollock’s offer. On a day the Wheelers and the Campbells go to the beach, Frank tells Shep that he would refuse Pollock’s offer “if they weren’t offering so much damn money.”100 When April is offended and tells him she thought he would turn it down, Frank explains to her that with a higher salary they could buy a better house, travel around the world and probably lead more interesting lives, and he is willing to do it, even if it means “toiling away” his life. His unselfishness accentuates Frank’s figure as a “Good Joe,” family man, which further helps him in becoming the audience’s object of sympathy. Conversely, April is shown as willing to do anything to make her wish come true, regardless of whether or not it harms her family. As a result, she becomes closer to the antagonist mother figure in Wayne’s early films, for she acts as an obstacle for the wellbeing of her family. This antagonism is exacerbated when Frank discovers the rubber syringe that April plans to use to induce an abortion, in a scene which clearly sets the film apart from the novel. First, contrary to the book narrative, April confesses that her desire to go to Paris is a selfish one. She is not trying to save her marriage or give her children a better future, but rather fulfill a “fantasy,” which she eventually admits is a childish one. She also becomes the one to call their second child an excuse to prove that the first one was not a mistake and it is implied that she tried to interrupt her pregnancy in both cases. This further evidences that she is an immoral and mentally sick woman who needs to be stopped before she harms her children. In this sense, she embodies the 1950s “neurotic” housewife101 who did not hesitate to “damage [her] children and undermine fathers’ authority”102 just to achieve her (often) banal goals. This archetype was often present in 1950s movies and usually dragged male characters to tragic endings. Conversely, Frank tries to act following traditional moral codes. Indeed, even if he does not really want another baby, he states that the “right” thing to do is to have it. That is, he bases his decision on morality, not on maturity or to prove his manliness, as happens in the novel. Moreover, to further emphasize he had no idea about April trying to have an abortion and that he cares about his children, he asks her several times 100. Ibid. 101. Meyerowitz, “Rewriting,” 176. 102. Ibid., 391.

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how he can be sure she did not “try to flush our fucking family down the toilet”103 because of her disdain of motherhood. In our current times, when women’s right to abortion is becoming jeopardized in different parts of the world due to the extreme right, Frank becomes almost a hero who is fighting for the “right to be born.” At this point the film has completely shifted the novel’s attribution of sympathy and antipathy, making Frank a character with whom the audience sympathizes, whereas April has become a selfish, lunatic woman who needs to be stopped by any means necessary. After April finally gives herself the abortion, she is shown bleeding heavily and in a considerable state of pain for a prolonged period of time, making her death significantly gruesome, which is in complete opposition with the novel, where no sign of pain or blood is shown. Moreover, at the hospital, the doctor never states that she fought hard to keep on living and she does not leave any type of message for Frank. That is, her death is not martyr-like or heroic, but rather villain-ish, which ensures that the heroism in the movie is shifted to Frank, the man who embodies traditional values and morality, and the one fights for the wellbeing of his family. As a result, he does not attempt to commit suicide and does not become a “walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man”104 because the film does not want to punish him in any way. Furthermore, there is no suggestion that he may be responsible for April’s death. He is portrayed as an innocent character that had the misfortune of marrying an insane woman. Traditional, conservative masculinity emerges victorious whereas untraditional femininity is heavily criticized and fatally punished.

Conclusion As shown in this paper, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road proves to be incredible advanced for its time. Written just at the turn of the decade, it advances Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique by denouncing the situation of women. Its fierce critique of the 1950s’ conception of maturity and hegemonic masculinity, as well as its concern with finding new, alternative models of masculinity, make the novel go even further than Friedan’s groundbreaking study, providing, even by today’s standards, a very revolutionary message in terms of gender equality. In fact, the book aims to make men see the unfairness of American society in order to change it. This follows Carabí and Armengol’s claim that to create more 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid.

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gender egalitarian societies, men “should recognize their false entitlements to unequal power […] [and] contest the cultural values of dominance and develop an ethical responsibility to act out more equitable gender relations.”105 Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road, however, presents a more conservative message. Even though it would be unfair to label Revolutionary Road as a completely misogynist film, it does seem to advocate traditional gender roles and to praise patriarchal masculinity. Frank’s reconverted character definitely avoids his literary counterpart’s flaws. In addition, the film emphasizes or even creates new positive traits. As a result, the prevailing hegemonic masculinity of the fifties is not criticized but exalted, with all its connotations. Going back to the question asked in the introduction, we can conclude that Sam Mendes’s adaptation could be added to other contemporary (re)creations of 1950s fiction that seem to indicate that there is a backlash against feminism and gender equality, as well as, using Peggy Noonan’s words, a celebration of conservative masculinity and patriarchal society. Hopefully, just as the 1950s opened the window onto a revolution in gender relationships and paved the way for more equality in men and women’s rights in the subsequent decade, so will our times of recession and praise of traditional gender roles.

Bibliography Armengol, Josep Maria. “Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s American Culture and Literature.” In Embodying Masculinities: Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction and Film, edited by Josep Maria Armengol, 31–48. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Bloom, Alla. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Brandt, Stefan L. The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945–1960. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Brannon, Robert. “The Male Sex Role: Our Culture’s Blueprint of Manhood and What It’s Done for Us Lately.” In The Forty-Nine Percent Majority, edited by Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon, 1– 45. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1976. Bremmer, Robert H. and Gary W. Reichard, eds. Reshaping America: Society and Institution, 1945–1960. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. 105. Carabí and Armengol, Alternative Masculinities, 2.

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Brode, Douglas. The Films of the Fifties: Sunset Boulevard to On the Beach. New York: The Citadel Press, 1976. Carabí, Àngels and Josep Maria Armengol. Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Castronovo, David. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Connell, Raewyn W. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1987. —. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1995. Cook, Fred J. The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Random House, 1971. Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Crime of Passion, DVD. Directed by Gerd Oswalt. Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1957. Cuenca, Mercè. “Lectura, homosexualidad y resistencia a la homofobia: el caso de los Estados Unidos (1945–1965).” In Homoerotismos Literarios, edited by Rodrigo Andrés, 109–27. Barcelona: Icaria, 2010. —. “Invisibilizing the Male Body: Exploring the Incorporeality of Masculinity in 1950s American Culture.” In Embodying Masculinities: Historicizing the Male Body in U.S. Fiction and Film, edited by Josep Maria Armengol, 49–62. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Cuordileone, K. A. “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960.” The Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 515–44. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1987. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1976. Filene, Peter G. “The Long Amnesia: Depression, War, and Domesticity.” In Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, edited by Peter G. Filene, 158–90. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Ford, Richard. “American Beauty (Circa 1955).” New York Times Book Review. http://www.tbns.net/elevenkinds/richardford.html (accessed August 12, 2015). Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.

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García-Avello, Macarena. “‘I’ve Always Known...’: La Mística de la Feminidad en Revolutionary Road de Richard Yates.” Odisea 12 (2011): 289–305. Gelber, Steven M. “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity.” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 66–112. Giardina, Anthony. “An Emotional Journey down ‘Revolutionary Road.’” NPR Books. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=119 13039 (accessed August 12, 2015) Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Halliwell, Martin. American Culture in the 1950s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lhamon Jr., W.T. Deliberate Speed: The Origin of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Meeuf, Russell. John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Rewriting Postwar Women’s History, 1945–1960.” In A Companion to American Women’s History, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, 382–96. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. Mills, Wright C. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Noonan, Peggy. “Welcome Back, Duke.” Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12245117479865008512 (accessed August 12, 2015). Oakley, J. Ronald. God’s Country: America in the Fifties. New York: Dembner Books, 1986. Revolutionary Road. DVD. Directed by Sam Mendes. London: UIP, 2008. Riemer, James D. “Rereading American Literature from a Men’s Studies Perspective: Some Implications.” In The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, edited by Harry Brod, 289–300. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987. Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1950. Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2009 [1961]. Young, William H. and Nancy K. Young. The 1950s. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2004. Whyte, H. William. The Organization Man. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 [1956].

CHAPTER NINE THE 21ST-CENTURY AMERICAN ADAM: POSTFEMINIST MASCULINITY IN AMERICAN CINEMA MARTINA MARTAUSOVÁ

Introduction In the process of reconstructing American manhood after the 9/11 attacks, cinema audiences have witnessed the revival of many iconic figures of American pop culture mythology. Along with the American superhero who adapts to the sociocultural circumstances of the new millennium,1 the American cowboy reappears in an attempt to restore the image of, presumably, all-American authentic masculinity.2 And, as I shall argue in this essay, with these models comes again the American Adam,3 who, as the principal representative of American vitality for onward movement, adjusts to positions compromised by the impact of feminism. The American Adam is a recurrent figure in the American narrative, and as R.W.B. Lewis explains, the figure developed with the need for periodic and radical change in American society that was too troubled with the conventions and traditions of the Old World.4 The Adamic perception of life determined by this vitality for onward movement, referred to as the

1. Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou, eds., The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2011), 2. 2. Michael S. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 91–94. 3. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 13–73. 4. Ibid., 13.

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American dream, has been adopted by many writers consciously contributing to the vision of the American character.5 Taking into consideration the influence of postfeminist discourse6 (understood here as the legacy of feminism revolving around its relevance in popular culture), it is hardly surprising that cinema remains preoccupied with the reconstruction of masculinity. As a result, the 21st-century American Adam gains substantially different contours from his 20thcentury predecessors. Even though this model continues to strengthen the place of American men in society, he does so by fully adapting to the position of the nurturer, transformed into the character of a single father. Demonstrated especially in films like The Pursuit of Happyness, Martian Child, or The Descendants, this archetypal character continues to claim the legitimate right to pursue the American dream, but at the same time proposes a form of masculinity that is ultimately tied to family and family relations. This contribution thus takes as its primary aim the discussion about what it means to be a man and father—a question initially defined by second-wave feminism—in the context of recent academic discussions about the role of feminism in the representation of identities in 21stcentury popular culture influenced by feminist scholarship and its discourses that have the tendency to concentrate on feminine subjects. In 5. E.g. Walt Whitman made innocence the essential attribute of the American character and described his vision of Adam as a “liberated, innocent, solitary, forward-thrusting personality” (Ibid., 28). For further information about the American Adam see also Frederic Carpenter, “The American Myth: Paradise (To Be) Regained,” Modern Language Association 74, no. 5 (1959), 599–606; or Martina Martausová, “Forrest Gump, the Unmotivated Hero,” in Gender in the Media: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Marta Fernández-Morales and Slávka Tomašþíková (Košice: P. J. Šafárik University, 2013), 123–49. 6. The use of the term postfeminism in this essay points at recent discussions about the role of feminism and its legacy in the areas of film scholarship and popular culture. It first of all attempts to reflect the egression from second-wave feminism, and the fact of its legacy, not the question of feminism or the new tradition of feminist scholarship, the terminology of which varies from “third wave feminism” (Rebecca Walker, 1992; Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, Rebecca Munford, 2007), “postfeminism” (Hannah Hamad, 2013; Lauren J. Thompson, 2013), or “neofeminism” (Radner Hilary, 2011). Also, I decided to favor the term postfeminism to avoid confusion that individual terms referring to the legacy of feminism in the twenty-first century often induce. Acknowledging discrepancies in the understanding, interpretation and use of these individual terms, this paper does not intend to tackle their differences, nor discuss their interpretations, but on the contrary, to stress the continuous influence of feminism in the twenty-first century in popular culture. My choice of this term also goes in line with other papers in this volume (e.g. Esquirol-Salom and Pujol-Ozonas, or Gerhards).

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this context, this article attempts to contribute to the discussion on the mainstream representation of masculine subjectivities, as a response to the continuing vitality of feminist discussions in the cultural field. In his publication Men and Masculinities, Stephen Whitehead summarized what other authors writing about the current situation of men in Western culture have come to continually suggest:7 he reiterated the claim that while it is more than obvious that feminism is about change, its impact on men still seems to be “downplayed and overlooked” by social commentators concerned with shifts in gender relations.8 And although men and masculinities have received considerable scholarly interest especially in the 1990s, the real explosion of interest in their representation came in the post-9/11 period. This is when cultural research began exploring popular culture’s engagement with postfeminism through a range of genres in film, within which it is primarily drama that has mediated the discourse on changing masculinities9 and allowed for the shift in cinematic masculinities from the Reaganite model of “hard bodies”10 to a more sensitive and emotional American hero.

Postfeminism and Masculinity Current discussions about the role of feminism in the projection of masculinities seem to rest on the argument that it was second-wave feminism that prompted the social and cultural re-evaluations of gender roles in the media. Seeking ideal masculinity from both the female and male perspectives, this feminist impact ushered in further re-centralization of masculine subjectivities. As a result, Hollywood cinema turned its focus onto the nurturer, a character more responsive to pro-feminist demands. This “pro-feminist man,” as John Beynon describes him, is “attempting to

7. Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2006); R. W. Connell, The Men and The Boys (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). 8. Stephen M. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 78. 9. Hannah Hamad, “Hollywood Fatherhood: Paternal Postfeminism in Contemporary Popular Cinema”, in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 107. 10. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinities in the Reagan Era (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

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put his ‘sharing and caring’ beliefs into practice in his daily life.”11 Beynon stresses that being a product of the 80s and 90s ideology-led tradition and “sensing justice in the feminist movement”12 the nurturer grew restless for social change. And post-9/11 American cinema continues to promote this sensitive man, yet in his more independent version— ostensibly free from the feminine and alone in the pursuit of his happiness—which is one that allows the focus on heroic features of the American man and suggests his firmly declared position in society. The imperative element in this projection of manhood in American cinema, as I also contend here, is the narrative of the American dream that functions as an external force leading the character into the ideal subject position. The use of the narrative of the American dream thus not only corresponds with a broader discourse on fatherhood as an increasingly favorable form of masculinity, but also proves to be a still viable convention and one that allows for the privilege of masculine subjectivities. The focus on fatherhood in contemporary Hollywood film has become increasingly evident as fatherly figures seem to have imbued early 21stcentury productions. With the introduction of the character of a single father in Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1991), cinema further explores the position of fathers in movies like Road to Perdition (Mendes, 2002), War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005), The Pursuit of Happyness (Muccino, 2006), Grace is Gone (Strouse, 2007), Martian Child (Meyjes, 2007), The Road (Hillcoat, 2009), Somewhere (Coppola, 2010), or The Descendants (Payne, 2011), inevitably stirring a discussion about fatherhood and its frequent representation in contemporary media. Identified as an increasingly favorable form of masculinity, authors like Hannah Hamad,13 Amy Burns,14 or Rebecca Feasey 15 perceive fatherhood as an outcome of the process of ongoing transformation of identity representations, and a result of the impact of postfeminism. As Hamad explains, these paternal characters represent contemporary manhood

11. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), 100. 12. Ibid. 13. Hamad, “Hollywood Fatherhood.” 14. Amy Burns, “The Chick’s New Hero: (Re)Constructing Masculinity in the Postfeminist ‘Chick Flick,’” in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 15. Rebecca Feasey, Masculinity and Popular Television (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

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as a “prominent feature of postfeminist media culture”16 as these “domestic breadwinning hero[es]”17 align with the postfeminist ideal of men who are effortlessly involved in the public and domestic sphere. Even more desirable is to see these heroes relinquish their career prospects and a longheld position of power and independence, and alternate these with parenting duties, as in The Descendants or Martian Child, where fathers willingly compromise their work relations and agree to split their focus onto both the public and private domain. As she further points out, it is also the rhetoric that “speaks directly to the extent to which postfeminist fatherhood is being positioned as desirable to women through its framing as ‘hot’ and ‘sexy,’”18 and which is indicative of the tendency with which postfeminist culture associates fatherhood with the conceptualization of ideal masculinity. Thus Hollywood fathers, who go on an emotional journey through the narrative to strengthen bonds with their children and thus prove their paternal competence, have become culturally negotiable figures of the present-day American cinema, as well as an attractive and desirable form of masculinity.19 The American dad is also a model that aligns with the archetype of the American Adam, who reinforces the assumption of manly potency and the ability to succeed. In films like The Pursuit of Happyness, Martian Child, or The Descendants, the father figure navigates his private and professional life to reunite with his children on the film’s surface structure level, and solidifies his position of successful breadwinner on the deep structure/ideological level. In order to allow the characters to achieve both, the narrative follows the American dream pattern that includes a strong narrative closure involving a happy ending, which has great potential for ideological importance.20 This narrative formula, almost ubiquitous in Hollywood cinema, rests on a character-centered causality which positions the main character in the center of a story, hence associating the father with success, and obligating him to fulfill the American myth of the pursuit of happiness, “be it political, monetary, or social.”21

16. Hamad, “Hollywood Fatherhood,” 106. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19 . Ibid., 111. 20. James MacDowell, Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 21. Roger L. Pearson, “Gatsby: False Prophet of the American Dream,” English Journal 59, no. 5 (1970): 645.

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As a traditional narrative thread, the pursuit of happiness was widely exploited in classic Hollywood stories, yet still remains an active device in contemporary cinema because it provides space for self-constituting performative acts that allow male heroes to declare their position in society. This pattern secures the move of the male protagonist towards the resolution of a crisis or social stability that ultimately associates him with the active subject position.22 The narrative of pursuit also functions as a “retardation device”23—a device that formulates a traditional narrative thread to incite pleasure derived from the audience’s anticipation of the held-off narrative closure, which comes in the form of restored status quo24—the fathers use the moment of anticipation as an arena to prove their vital enthusiasm for pursuit, hence meet the expectations of an ideal representative on screen and reinforce male potency at the same time.

Fatherhood as a Means of Restoring Traditional Masculinity David Gordon (John Cusack) from Martian Child struggles to maintain his position as successful sci-fi writer as he is trying to win court approval to adopt a troubled boy, Dennis, who is incapable of interacting with other children. Matt King (George Clooney) from The Descendants, alongside seeking the truth about his wife’s affair while she lies in a coma, and reconciliation with his children, manages to reinforce his authority by withstanding family pressure to keep the clan’s heritage and thus maintain their social status in Hawaii. In turn, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) from The Pursuit of Happyness manages to defend his parental rights and pursue monetary happiness25 by working himself up to an economically higher position. As each narrative unfolds with the decision of the men to willingly resort to the position of single fathers, the storyline of each movie engages them in emotionally charged situations not only emphasizing their sensitivity to satisfy the expectations of contemporary audiences, but also to demonstrate their parental competence as they manage to restore the status quo and confirm their manly authority in a domestic sphere traditionally reserved for women. 22. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2000), 261. 23. Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. (London: Verso, 1999), 29. 24. Ibid. 25. Roger L. Pearson, “Gatsby: False Prophet of the American Dream,” English Journal 59, no. 5 (1970): 645.

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The journeys of these men-to-become-single-fathers begin with the initial condition of (re)creating bonds between the father and child/children. Whether the destination of single father is a willing process determined by a decision as in the case of David in Martian Child, or it is a position designed by the narrative when the man is either abandoned by the mother of his child as in the case of Chris in The Pursuit of Happyness, or simply betrayed by his wife and left alone to re-evaluate his inefficiency as a father like Matt in The Descendants, at the beginning all three men are made to assume their lack or misunderstanding of their parenting skills. This point of acknowledgment, defined by moments of struggle, inner conflict, or undesirable feelings of void and emptiness, discloses the process of negotiating the gains and losses of the role of single fathers and the position that all three characters must adjust to in order to uphold their authority. This authority includes full autonomy, free of female intervention, and demonstrates the ability of these men to remain masculine, courageous, and responsible, which corresponds with what Lauren J. Thompson explains as a requirement for men in postfeminist media to remain “masculine” while also acquiring the emergent traits of being caring, soft, and domesticated.26 Providing the type of setting that places these fathers in either an economically challenging position, or one that teases their moral values and ethical responsibilities is also a very efficient tool that stiffens the cinematic emotional fix. This setting is not uncommon for the representation of men in American cinema. In his essay on postfeminist male singletons, Benjamin A. Brabon aptly identifies that it is “due to the incapacitating social and economic topography of late capitalism”27 that men are often represented in contemporary media as being unable to fulfill their patriarchal duties, and thereby this setting challenges their position of power and independence. This topography also interferes in the process of acknowledging and adjusting to the position of single father in contemporary American cinema, yet helps the process of becoming a father on screen emphasizing the struggles of an individual and, more often than not, highlights the character’s fearless determination to affirm this newly acquired position and to reconcile with his more sensitive and 26. Lauren J. Thompson, “Mancaves and Cushions: Marking Masculine and Feminine Domestic Space in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy,” in Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, ed., Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 151. 27. Benjamin A. Brabon, “Chuck Flick: A Genealogy of the Postfeminist Male Singleton,” in Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, ed., Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 116.

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nurturing self, which, in the end, results in the restoration of the lost power by reclaiming their independence. The most straightforward demonstration of the desire to restore male power from the three examples in this paper is the case of Chris Gardner, whose determination to become the kind of parent “whose children know who their father was”28 is as strong as his wish to be able to provide for his family an economically higher standard, and who makes sure to perform markedly well despite merciless downfalls that keep challenging him throughout his journey. A classic paradigm of rags-to-riches story, The Pursuit of Happyness provides a picture of a man who from the beginning claims his son and alongside his parenting skills continually proves his reliability, unlike his wife and mother of the child, whose emotional restraint makes her egotistic and unappreciative. The initial family background thus slowly transforms into a battleground, where Chris’s male identity is being constructed within the domestic sphere, in which the female side is no longer desirable. Chris decides to take on full responsibility for his son and his economic well-being, and the narrative makes the incapable mother redundant and unnecessary. In the discussion about how postfeminism assists the formation of masculinity, Lauren J. Thompson stresses the importance of understanding the influence in relational terms; that postfeminist masculinity is reactionary to both the images of traditional masculinity and to postfeminist images of women.29 As she further explains, traditionally masculine traits are defined as being “alert, aggressive [and] ambitious”30 and because they are induced by/in the domestic sphere it is now women’s visibility in the domestic sphere that is no longer desirable, thus often made non-existent. After Chris faces separation from his wife who continuously blames him for their poor condition, and who leaves her son behind to seek better opportunities elsewhere, he resorts to even loftier ambitions and gathers all the strength he can in order to succeed in caring for his child. The leaving mother hence confirms the man’s parental and moral authority and leaves the stage to the emergent father figure. A different story unfolds in Hawaii when Matt King in The Descendants loses his wife to a boating accident. He introduces himself at 28. The Pursuit of Happyness, directed by Gabriel Muccino (Columbia Pictures Corporation. 2006). 29. Thompson, “Mancaves and Cushions: Marking Masculine and Feminine Domestic Space in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy,” in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 151. 30. Ibid.

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the beginning of a story as an emotional man, and the story that he is going to reveal to the audience as one that caused him severe heartache and made him seriously reconsider his focus on professional life. He adds that he is ready “to become a real husband and real father.”31 As a back-up parent who previously relied on his wife when it came to looking after their two daughters, he admits that he “do[es]n’t know what to do with [them].”32 Taking this life experience as a test, he promises to reform himself only to get his wife and their former life back. But this changes as he discovers the affair that his wife had with another man, and while she is in a coma, he sets out on a journey to reveal the lover’s identity. During this journey Matt makes his eldest daughter his closest companion and the search itself transforms into a process of reconnection. Eventually, the result discredits the mother and makes the daughters appreciate the father’s parenting effort even more. The narrative structure that celebrates fathers seems to require that he remains a single parent, without the interference of the motherly aspect, and it also suggests that the father rightly deserves the position by casting doubt on the competence of mothers. This narrative design transfers parental competence onto the fathers to support norms of masculinity that emphasize agency and entitlement. Matt’s initial representation also supports this design. Being an established lawyer, his character is defined through the professional sphere from the beginning. Only later as the narrative develops does he partially adjust to the domestic sphere, however maintaining the profession and keeping his credit, status and wealth, even reclaiming his authority at the resolution of the story. Also, during Matt’s introduction, the narrative focuses on his lack of understanding and interest in family matters as he is often engaged in professional duties, underlying the development of his character on the emotional and social level, placing his professional status into a default position. Apart from keeping his professional status, Matt acquires parental competence as the mother of his daughters slowly transforms from passive and redundant into non-existent. Yet another variable of the situation occurs in Martian Child, where David, a widower, willingly decides to adopt a boy too similar to himself. David introduces himself as a product of a stressful childhood, but also as a successful writer who suggests that he did not choose to be a parent but was chosen by whatever higher principles navigate his life. He feels a moral responsibility to protect and guide the troubled Dennis in his self31. The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne (Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2011). 32. Ibid.

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expression and interaction with the outside world—an experience too similar to his own childhood. Without a wife, David resists the call at first only to be persuaded to this commitment, and relishes the appreciation of his moral responsibility while providing emotional stability to his future self. As in the previous two examples, to highlight David’s moral authority he confronts discouragement by the parenting incapability of his sister, who continually contributes to the unflattering picture of a stressed out, neurotic, irritated mother of two and who constantly reminds him that “parenting is really hard.”33 But what the story really suggests is that while parental duties may be difficult for mothers, they certainly are not so hard for fathers. When David finally decides to take full responsibility for Dennis, the method he employs to manage the child seems to be based on the “just be yourself” formula. But as Dennis unshakably maintains his true self in every situation, which ironically brings him even more isolation from his peers, it is David who needs to find out who he is as a father. In this process, he embraces a fatherly model that reveres empathy, selfexpression and understanding, and teaches these values to his son. In coping with the new role he has acquired by being the kind of dad who appreciates the sensitive attitude to his “special” child, he seems to outdo the female approach to parenting and even reprehend motherly incompetence in matters of childrearing: Liz: “I mean, I want to be... sensitive, but this kid is a mess” // David: “Hey, that’s sensitive?!”34 As the story develops, David’s parenting approach is more and more challenged by Dennis only to allow a sentimental, life-threatening climax where David finally saves him, preventing him from falling off a building. This act of rescue, a common narrative device whose function Laura Mulvey explains as the “obsessive subordination to the neurotic needs of the male ego,”35 restores the status quo and confirms the connection of David’s father figure with hegemonic depictions of masculinity compromised by new male images that place emphasis on values and sensitivity.

33. Martian Child, directed by Menno Meyjes (New Line Cinema. 2007). 34. Ibid. 35. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 10.

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Conclusion The restoration of the male ego via the female figure supports the confirmation of male authority in the three cases studied here. The male character acts upon the female one to highlight the traditional binary difference—as a result of which the female character is either represented as the cause of the disintegration of the family and made redundant and undesirable, or simply as incompetent and frustrated, staying outside the father’s arena. Being a comparison point that reflects the rigidly binary contrast, the representation of womanhood traditionally emphasizes the association of man with activity, strength, capacity, voice, power and moral authority, supported by a strong sense of closure and success achieved at the resolution of each story. As he performs his paternal competence, the single father also acquires narrative space to perform the pursuit of happiness and reinforces the authority of the American man free of the female, alone and successful in his pursuit. American film thus continually shows relentless attempts to maintain the value and function of myth in American society. It does so by providing a playing field for the central figure—the American Adam— who, as the archetype of the American man and the carrier of American vitality for onward movement, uses it to demonstrate male authority and his primary status. The arena is designed by the narrative of the pursuit of the American dream which still remains popular and is recycled in multiple forms, and either as the main narrative thread as in The Pursuit of Happyness, or concealed on the deep structure level as in The Descendants or Martian Child, the dream narrative secures the American Adam his right to pursue his happiness, and thus reinforces the ideology of patriarchy to contemporary audiences. The fact that the American Adam adjusts to the position of a single father reflects the way in which postfeminist American cinema tracks transformations that hold continuities with hegemonic depictions of masculinity alongside new emergent male images and values.

Bibliography Beynon, John. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002. Brabon, Benjamin A. “Chuck Flick: A Genealogy of the Postfeminist Male Singleton.” In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 116–30. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Burns, Amy. “The Chick’s New Hero: (Re)Constructing Masculinity in the Postfeminist ‘Chick Flick.’” In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 131– 48. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Carpenter, Frederic. “The American Myth: Paradise (To Be) Regained.” Modern Language Association 74, no. 5 (1959): 599–606. Connell, R. W. The Men and the Boys. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Feasey, Rebecca. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Forrest Gump. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994. Gillis, Stacy, Howie, Gillian and Rebecca Munford, eds., Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Grace is Gone. Directed by James C. Strouse, James C. Plum Pictures, 2007. Gray II, Richard J., and Betty Kaklamanidou, eds., The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2011. Gwynne, Joel, and Nadine Muller, eds., Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hamad, Hannah. “Hollywood Fatherhood: Paternal Postfeminism in Contemporary Popular Cinema.” In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 99– 115. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000. Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and ThirdWave Feminism. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinities in the Reagan Era. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Kimmel, Michael S. The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Verso, 1999. Lehman, Peter. Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. New York: Routledge, 2001. Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.

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MacDowell, James. Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Martausová, Martina. “Forrest Gump, the Unmotivated Hero.” In Gender in the Media: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Slávka Tomašþíková and Marta Fernández-Morales, 124–49. Košice: Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, 2013. Martian Child. Directed by Menno Meyjes. New Line Cinema, 2007. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3, (1975): 6௅18. Pearson, Richard. “Gatsby: False Prophet of the American Dream.” English Journal 59, no. 5 (1970). Radner, Hilary. Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture. London: Routledge, 2011. Road to Perdition. Directed by Sam Mendes. Dreamworks, 2002. Somewhere. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Focus Features, 2010. The Descendants. Directed by Alexander Payne. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. The Pursuit of Happyness. Directed by Gabriel Muccino. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2006. The Road. Directed by John Hillcoat. Dimension Films, 2009. Thompson, Lauren J. “Mancaves and Cushions: Marking Masculine and Feminine Domestic Space in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy.” In Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, 149–65. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms. Magazine 11, no. 2 (1992). War of the Worlds. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 2005. Whitehead, Stephen M. Men and Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

CHAPTER TEN CODIFYING THE DOCTOR’S QUEERNESS IN BRITISH SCI-FI TV SHOW DOCTOR WHO1 RUBÉN JARAZO-ÁLVAREZ

As this paper will prove, the new Doctor Who series has attempted to challenge gender and sexual politics in the last decade of the show, with lesbian interspecies kisses,2 omnisexual Jack Harkness,3 gay characters such as FBI agent C. E. Delaware,4 gay married Anglican marines,5 or the regeneration of the Master into Missy.6 The regeneration of this Time Lady has opened the door to a new female Doctor when Capaldi’s incarnation comes to an end.7 The importance of this regeneration on the 1. Research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Project Bodies in Transit: Making Difference in Globalized Cultures (Reference FFI2013-47789-C2-2-P). 2. “Deep Breath,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Ben Wheatley (London: BBC, August 23, 2014). 3. Although Jack showed several homosexual interests in Torchwood (2006–2011), he was defined as omnisexual or pansexual, in that he found not only both human males and females attractive, but members of alien races which defied gender binary male-female opposition as well (“The Doctor Dances,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by James Hawes (London: BBC, May 28, 2005)). 4. “Day of the Moon,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Toby Haynes (London: BBC, April 30, 2011). 5. “A Good Man Goes to War,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Hoar (London: BBC, June 4, 2011). 6. “Some of Us Can Afford an Upgrade” and “The Witch’s Familiar,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Hettie MacDonald (London: BBC, September 26, 2015). 7. Stephen Kelly, “Doctor Who: A Woman Will Eventually Play the Doctor, Says Steven Moffat,” Radiotimes (December 8, 2014), http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2014-12-08/doctor-who-a-woman-will-eventually-play-the-doctor-says -steven-moffat (accessed January 15, 2015). Exception to this rule is Arabella Weir, who played a female Doctor in Exile. Doctor Who Audiobooks, along with Joanna Lumley in Comic Relief’s “The Curse of the Fatal Death.”

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show, especially when dealing with the identity of the Doctor, has been thoroughly debated within academia, but not truly from the perspective of the gender and sexual politics in Doctor Who. Although some scholars have clearly posited the debate around the sexualization of companions, the reproductive system of the Time Lords/Ladies, or the critical tensions aroused from the possibility of interspecies sexual practices and romance, little attention has been paid to the sexual politics around the protagonist of the show, the Doctor. Previous controversies such as the possibility of having a homosexual Doctor appeared when Russell T. Davies, first showrunner of the new Who, debuted in 2005.8 Although the show could be read in the light of queer theory, since the Doctor was only a hero who saved the world and showed little interest in “getting the girl,” Davies only signaled the sexual fluidity in a futuristic Whouniverse with the inclusion of Jack Harkness and other minor characters on the show, but not clearly on the Doctor. Steven Moffat, the present-day showrunner, has possibly expanded this position, as the transition from David Tennant’s Doctor to Matt Smith’s could be read under the auspices of Judith Butler’s performative acts and queer theory as well. In the end, is the show presently trying to suggest that gender and sexuality are constructed through time and space? Is the process of regeneration essential in this debate? Is this fluidity visually and narratively mirrored in Matt Smith’s performance? By analyzing all these concerns in the new Who episodes, David Tennant’s and Matt Smith’s Doctors could reposition this debate. But the ambivalence in the treatment of female characters in Doctor Who has been questioned for years, especially by television critics and academia. Experts in the field of cultural studies such as John Fiske9 or John Tulloch have largely dedicated their attention to this television show, sometimes positioned as purely British sci-fi, at times, as children’s television. The representation of women in the show is present in Tulloch and Alvarado (1983),10 Jenkins (1995),11 Britton and Baker (2003),12 or

8. “Doctor Who Ready to Come Out of the TARDIS,” The Daily Telegraph, September 27, 2005. 9. John Fiske, “Doctor Who: Ideology and the Reading of a Popular Narrative Text,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 14–15 (1983): 69–100. 10. John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who. The Unfolding Text (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 11. Henry Jenkins, and John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Chapman (2006, 2013),13 whereas a more complex approach towards gender and sexual politics is key to understand Thomas and O’Shea (2010),14 Garner, Beattie, and McCormack (2010),15 Wallace (2010),16 Hansen (2010),17 Bradshaw et al. (2011),18 Booth (2013),19 Ellis and Thomas (2013)20 and, Myles and Barr (2015).21 Doctor Who premiered in 1963 and is still on air every Saturday. It is clearly a gender-complex show and has revealed an accurate portrayal of sexual politics as well as relocating Britishness22 for decades in both classic Who (1963–1989)23 and new Who (2005–present).24 Initially the 12. Pears Britton and Simon Baker, Reading Between Designs. Visual Imagery and Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 13. James Chapman, Inside the TARDIS. A Cultural History of Doctor Who (London: IB Taurus, 2006); Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who (London: IB Tauris, 2013). 14. Lynne Thomas and Tara O’Shea, Chicks Dig Time Lords. A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It (Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2010). 15. R. Garner and U. McCormack, Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). 16. Richard Wallace, “But Doctor?—A Feminist Perspective of Doctor Who,” in Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who, ed. Chris Hansen. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 102–16. 17. Chris Hansen, Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010). 18. S. Bradshaw, A. Keen, and G. Sleight, The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (London: Science Fiction Foundation, 2011). 19. Paul Booth, Fan Phenomena. Doctor Who (Intellect Books: Bristol, 2013). 20. Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas, Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It (Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2013). 21. L.M. Myles, and Liz Barr, Companion Piece: Women Celebrate the Humans, Aliens and Tin Dogs of Doctor Who (Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2015). 22. Showing the “persistence of mid-twentieth century Britishness within the series.” (Nicolas Cull, “Bigger on the Inside: Doctor Who as British Cultural History,” in The Historian, Television and Television History, ed. Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2001), 99). 23. Running without interruption for twenty-six seasons, from 1963 to 1989. 24. Starting with the 2005 revival, the production team abandoned the traditional serial format and series were renumbered. However, the show is still connected to classic Who both with regards to timeline and narration.

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role of female characters in the show corresponded to very specific goals; women were “there to provide ‘something for the dads’” and “to act as a ‘lady-in-jeopardy’ who is menaced by the monster.”25 In fact, auditions used to involve showing how well female companions could scream. To be fair, the series has made repeated attempts to challenge this stereotype: at an early stage, one of the very first companions was a woman schoolteacher who represented a challenge to the Doctor’s (male) authority,26 later TARDIS crewmembers included two scientists,27 a journalist,28 an Amazonian warrior,29 two Time Ladies,30 an air stewardess31 and a working class teenager32 until the show was cancelled in 1989. In the new 25. Chapman, Worlds of Doctor Who, 7. 26. Barbara Chesterton debuted in “An Unearthly Child” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Waris Hussein (London: BBC, November 23, 1963) and left the show in “The Chase” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Richard Martin (London: BBC, May 22, 1965)). 27. Liz Shaw, accomplished scientists with a Degree in Medicine and Physics working for UNIT debuted in “Spearhead from Space” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Derek Martinus (London: BBC, January 3, 1970) and left the show in “Inferno” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Douglas Camfield (London: BBC, June 20, 1970). Melanie Bush, computer programmer from the 20th century, debuted in “The Trial of a Time Lord: Terror of the Vervoids” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Chris Clough (London: BBC, November 1, 1986) and left the show in “The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Chris Clough (London: BBC, December 6, 1986)). 28. Sarah Jane Smith was the non-continuously longest-serving female companion in classic Who. She won the heart of many viewers with her comeback to the show in new Who’s “School Reunion” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by James Hawes (London: BBC, April 29, 2006)) with such success BBC decided to create a spin off The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–2011). She debuted in “Time Warrior” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Alan Bromly (London: BBC, December 15, 1973)) and left the show in “Five Doctors” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Moffatt (London: BBC, 25 Nov. 1983)). 29. Leela of the Sevateem a savage warrior debuted in “The Face of Evil” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Pennant Roberts (London: BBC, January 1977)) and left the show in “The Invasion of Time” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Gerald Blake (London: BBC, March 11, 1978)). The DVD commentary to “The Robots of Death” (January 29, 1977) clearly stated that Leela’s skimpy leather outfits were very popular with the male audience who kept watching the show. 30. Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward as the two TV incarnations of Romana. 31. Tegan Jovanka, a stubborn and loud companion, is described as “just a mouth on legs” (“Earthshock,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Grimwade (London: BBC, March 8, 1982–March 18, 1982)). 32. Ace was designed “to fight, not to scream” (Andrew Younger, “Doctor Who: How Ace Set the Template for Modern Companions,” Den of Geek,

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Who, this tendency in favor of working class female companions has been prolonged with Rose Tyler, Donna Noble, Amy Pond or Clara Oswald.33 Despite the presence of Time Ladies on the show such as Missy, Romana, the Rani,34 or Susan Foreman,35 the Doctor’s character has never been regenerated into a woman, even though producers have never ignored that possibility—Catherine Z. Jones auditioned for the role.36 One of the television moments that heated the debate occurred in 1999, when the parody “The Curse of the Fatal Death” was produced for BBC Comic Relief.37 In this comic gag, a Mr. Bean-Doctor regenerates five times in twenty minutes, once as Hugh Grant, and finally as a woman. By making the Doctor regenerate as a woman, a potential sexual relationship is swiftly destroyed, and instead the story ends with the Doctor and the Master walking off hand-in-hand, hero and villain finally drawn together in a

http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-who/33496/doctor-who-how-ace-set-the -template-for-modern-companions (accessed January 5, 2015)). She debuted in “Dragonfire” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Chris Clough (London: BBC, November 23, 1987)) and left the show in “Survival” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Alan Wareing (London: BBC, December 6, 1989)). 33. Although Rose Tyler could be culturally analyzed under the auspices of 1990s Cool Britannia, Donna Noble or “the best temp in Chiswick” is, however, the most notable example of working class culture on the show (“Partners in Crime,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by James Strong (London: BBC, April 5, 2008)). 34. The Rani, previously known as Ushas, was a renegade Time Lady, and an old acquaintance of the Doctor and the Master/Missy when all three were young. She debuted in “The Mark of the Rani” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Sarah Hellings (London: BBC, February 2, 1985)) and left the show in “Dimensions in Time” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Stuart McDonald (London: BBC, November 27, 1993)). 35. Susan Foreman, previously known in Gallifrey as Arkytior, is the Doctor’s granddaughter so she cannot be considered a female companion per se. She debuted in the first episode, titled after her “An Unearthly Child” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Waris Hussein (London: BBC, November 23, 1963) and left the show in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Richard Martin (London: BBC, December 26, 1964) with a relevant cameo in “The Five Doctors” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Moffatt (London: BBC, November 23, 1983)). Extensive literature (prose and audiobooks) developed Susan’s story after her years on planet Earth. At the moment, she is one of the most awaited returns to the show (Verity Lambert, “Verity Lambert’s Scrapbooks,” Doctor Who Magazine 487 (July 2015), E-book). 36. Anita Singh, “Catherine Zeta Jones to Be the Next Doctor Who?,” The Telegraph, December 18, 2008. 37. BBC Comic Relief, Television (London: BBC1, March 18, 1999).

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“safe heterosexual partnership.”38 So the question now is: how important is regeneration in the history of the show and for the identity of our protagonist? While the concept of regeneration has become an intricate cultural form in present-day British culture—with million viewers worldwide gathering around the television each time the show performs this Deus ex machina technique—its heavy tradition was progressively developed in the early stages of the show, and not commonly mentioned unless a leading actor wanted to leave. This procedure soon acquired a strong dramatic function and took more prominence with the regeneration of the third Doctor, making this concept central to the series. The naming of the whole process is mentioned for the first time when the change of physical appearance is disclosed as part of the punishment inflicted by Time Lords on the Doctor.39 It is however, more specifically, during Peter Davison’s regeneration in “Logopolis” (1981),40 “Castrovalva” (1982)41 and “Time Flight” (1982),42 when the writers decided to deal with post-regeneration conflicts, and thus it became relevant to the narrative. However, since the show’s revival in 2005, regeneration can also be essential to explain the process of reconfiguration of certain gender and sexual issues anchored in several incarnations of the Doctor. In the end, what changes during regeneration is how the Doctor approaches the construction of his self, and of course, this includes aspects such as gender categories and sexuality. Given the circumstances in which the show was created in the sixties,43 the role of the Doctor and his performance is reminiscent of a grandfather 38. John Paul Green, “The Regeneration Game: The Changing Faces of Heroism,” in Impossible Words, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, ed. by R. Garner, M. Beattie, and U. McCormack (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 15. 39. When Pertwee’s Doctor turns Baker’s, the change is named “regeneration” for the first time on the show, and it is explained as a biological process inflicted to Time Lord’s when they are dying in the episode “Planet of the Spiders” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Barry Letts (London: BBC, June 8, 1974)). 40. “Logopolis,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Grimwade (London: BBC, February 28, 1981). 41. “Castrovalva,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Fiona Cumming (London: BBC, January 4, 1982). 42. “Time Flight,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Ron Jones (London: BBC, March 23, 1982). 43. With the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in the middle of an international crisis during the Cold War, the BBC commissioned the creation of a show for children which is somehow indebted, not only to H.G. Wells and Doyle’s Sherlock, but also to successful British sci-fi The Quatermass Experiment (1955).

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who travels time and space with his granddaughter Susan. The show, originally intended for children, is centered on a character that imparts lessons in history and science to a young audience,44 so initially sexuality was out of the equation. Accordingly, the first Doctor, William Hartnell, explicitly forbade “sex and swearing.”45 This tendency was unperturbed with the arrival of good-looking Peter Davison,46 who explained that the golden rule was that there would not be any “hanky-panky” and confessed that he did not believe that children would like to see kissing on the show.47 To make perfectly clear that he is a paternal figure, the women around him often dress and behave like children, rather than adults.48 One of the most notable features with regards to sexual politics has always been the age and physical attractiveness of male and female companions in contrast to the Doctor, a dynamic which is disrupted in the new Who,49 with the exception of Peter Capaldi.50 As costume designer Barbara Kidd argued, the Doctor was a character whose clothing could be “highly eccentric,” whereas companions “wore outfits that were generally meant to emphasize their physical appeal: these tended to be hip and of-the-

44. From an early stage, producers fashioned episodes taking into account the setting of each episode, and the implication of characters within the main plot. Historical episodes, known as “pure historical,” are those which are set on Earth, prior to the date of broadcast and do not contain aliens or alien technology. “The Aztecs” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by John Crockett (London: BBC, May 23, 1964)) is the first episode in a long series of pure historicals. Extensive literature has been published on pure historicals, postcolonialism and Britishness. 45. Jim Leach, Doctor Who (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 34. 46. Paul Jones, “Peter Davison: Doctor Who Made Me a Gay Icon,” Radiotimes, November 4 2013, http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-11-04/peter-davison -doctor-who-made-me-a-gay-icon (accessed December 5, 2014). 47. Peter Haining, Doctor Who: The Key to Time. A Year by Year Record (London: Carol Pub Grup, 1984), 230. 48. Kim Newman, BFI TV Classics: Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series (London: BFI, 2005), 47. 49. Eccleston being 41 in his debut, Tennant 34, and Smith 27 permitted producers to virtually create a different relationship between Doctors and companions. Apart from the looks, and after his twelfth regeneration, the Doctor claims to be over 2000 years (“Deep Breath,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Ben Wheatley (London: BBC, August 23, 2014), to be more precise, 2100 years old (“Tales of Trenzalore: The Eleventh Doctor’s Last Stand,” BBC Books (February 27, 2014), E-book). 50. Present-day Doctor, Capaldi (55), was the same age as Hartnell’s first Doctor to begin playing the role on a regular basis.

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moment.”51 Exceptions to this rule are Peter Davison in the classic Who,52 and David Tennant in the new Who. Another pressing concern that has not yet been revealed is how Time Lords’ reproductive system operates.53 Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, is introduced in episode one, therefore he presumably had a romantic past. Once she is gone, there are no further comments on this issue until “Fear Her”: “I was dad once.”54 When Susan left the show, a new actress could not take the role because the producers had not invented the concept of regeneration, and the Time Lord-Gallifrey background of these characters was still a mystery.55 We can only guess that Susan and the Doctor are aliens from a distant planet who are trying to return home. Consequently, the producers decided to marry Susan with a human56 because, at that time, the idea of “humans and Time Lords becoming romantically involved was dropped.”57 Similarly, the American producers decided to establish the Doctor’s half-alien half-human background in the first film (1996) in order to allow the Doctor’s romance with his surgeon Grace Holloway.58 When he passionately kisses Grace in the televised movie, the writer’s decision to make the Doctor half-human removed the incestuous potential of the scene; the Doctor was then cast as the Byronic romantic, a man of action and not a safe patriarchal figure anymore, allowing the romanticized kiss to take place. In the new Who, paternal instincts are again intertwined in the plot of “The Doctor’s Daughter,”59 when soldiers force the Doctor to stick his hand into a progenation machine, which uses 51. Britton and Baker, Reading between Designs, 146. 52. Amit Gupta, “Doctor Who and Race: Reflections on the Change of Britain’s Status in the International System,” The Round Table 102, no. 1 (2013): 41–50. 53. According to prose, all pregnancies on Gallifrey ended in miscarriage due to Pythia’s curse, adopting artificial genetic reproduction (Marc Platt, Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible (London, Virgin Books, 1992)). 54. “Fear Her,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Euros Lyn (London: BBC, June 24, 2006). 55. Tulloch and Alvarado, Unfolding Text, 29. 56. “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Richard Martin (London: BBC, November 21, 1964–December 26, 1964). 57. Michelle Cordone and John Cordone, “Who is The Doctor?: The MetaNarrative of Doctor Who,” in Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who, ed. Chris Hansen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 15. 58. Doctor Who. The Movie, Television, directed by Geoffrey Sax, (Canada and UK: Universal Television and BBC, 1996). 59. “The Doctor’s Daughter,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Alice Troughton (London: BBC, May 10, 2008).

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his DNA to generate another living soldier, Jenny or a “generated anomaly,” as the Doctor puts it.60 While the Doctor’s sexual practices are not discussed on the show until David Tennant’s regeneration in the new millennium, the sexualization of companions reached its peak in the eighties. In particular, costumes were radically used to sexually objectify male and female companions in this decade: “the girl-companion of the moment was seen in one episode wearing a leather miniskirt with a chain fob, while the boy-companion spent an entire year in a tight-fitting schoolboy outfit.”61 Also significant were “the weak narrative excuses for occasionally having these young people strip to their underwear in front of the cameras.”62 In the latest Who, if Eccleston’s ninth doctor originally rejects the domestic and emotional side of humans,63 David Tennant’s tenth becomes the romantic hero, and arguably the most sexually active Doctor. However, he establishes long term romantic relationships but never with a common human. In fact, Rose Tyler is reborn into a semi-divine status as the Bad Wolf, and River Song is conceived so close to the TARDIS energy that becomes a half-human half-Time-Lady.64 We should not forget the Doctor is a Time Lord, a race with a strong sense of custodianship over time and the universe, which makes him a member of the aristocracy, and therefore a lord in the feudal sense as well,65 maintaining class and racial barriers.

60. The discontent of the Doctor about Jenny is possibly based on the fact that she is a soldier, not his daughter, as Jenny becomes a full Time Lady with regeneration powers. The viability of artificial genetic reproduction in Gallifrey is thus supported in this episode, although it is not conclusive due to many narrative discontinuities in the TV show. 61. Britton and Baker, Reading between Designs, 157. 62. Ibid. 157. 63. “The Last Battle,” Doctor Who Confidential, Television (London: BBC Three, June 18, 2005). 64. Looking into the heart of the TARDIS, Rose was filled with Time energy temporarily becoming the Bad Wolf entity (“The Parting of the Ways,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Joe Ahearne (London: BBC, June 18, 2005) and River is conceived in the TARDIS (“A Good Man Goes to War,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Hoar (London: BBC, June 4, 2011). River Song, the third regeneration of Melody Pond, is portrayed as a female Bondian spy with a strong personality and appeal (“The Pandorica Opens,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Toby Haynes (London: BBC, June 19, 2010). 65. Time Lords receive their name for their non-linear perception of time, which allows them to see everything that was, is, or could be at the same time, as shown in the 1996 movie (Craig Donaghy, Doctor Who: How to Be a Time Lord: Official Guide (London: BBC Children’s Books, 2014), 7).

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From a distance, he even refers to humans as “creatures of hope,”66 “indomitable human race,”67 or even “stupid apes,”68 never treating them as equals. Cordone and Cordone have also come to terms with the Doctor’s peerage and the social implications of his nature: Jonathan Powis defined the aristocracy as “hereditary ruling groups” (Powis 1984, 1). Powis also stated that the term carries with it the association of authority and leadership (Powis 1984, 3). Lords maintain order and determine the law (Strayer 1956, 17). The role of the Time Lords, and the Doctor in particular, satisfies this definition. In the narrative, the Doctor makes decisions involving time, as a Time Lord. In the meta-narrative, the Doctor is simply a lord. His primary traits stem from this fact and are immutable, while other traits stem from the social context or the desire of the producers at the time of production and can evolve.69

These producers finally show a more emotional side of the Doctor, explicitly stressing the feelings and relationship dynamics between characters, especially between Doctor and companions. Each show begins with an opening episode that emphasizes the Doctor’s personality and his relationship with his companion—introducing, or effectively reintroducing, the companion character. The show’s politics is finally reflected as a continuum in the context of “the social, biological, and cultural conditions from which it emerges.”70 As Nel Noddings suggests, our actions are shaped by our real-world feeling, not by abstract principles,71 and the Doctor follows this motto, not only caring for the human race but also for his enemies.72 Following this theory, Ken Chen interprets Tennant’s 66. “The Power of Three,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Douglas Mackinnon (London: BBC, September 22, 2012). 67. “The Ark in Space,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Rodney Bennett (London: BBC, January 25, 1975). 68. “Rose,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Keith Boak (London: BBC, March 26, 2005); “Father’s Day,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Joe Ahearne (London: BBC, May 14, 2005). 69. Cordone, and Cordone, “Who is the Doctor?,” 8. 70. Kevin Decker, “The Ethics of the Last Time Lords,” in Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, ed. Lewis Courtland and Paula Smithka (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010), 143. 71. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1. 72. Web and Mark Wardecker, “Should the Daleks be Exterminated?,” in Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, ed. Lewis Courtland and Paula Smithka (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010), 177–88.

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Doctor, and Smith’s by extension, as resembling “humanity’s nurturing mother, always giving pep talks about mankind’s special potential.”73 Rather than a Time Lord patriarch, tenth and eleventh stand for feminized, materialized masculinity, which protect human race, but also refuse to exterminate the Daleks.74 In the end, Tennant’s Doctor as a romanticized figure stimulates new sexual reconfigurations, extending the potential of the androgynous as an icon of sexual politics. This is extremely evident in the evolution of Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor and Steven Moffat’s production. Moffat’s new design of the show is tremendously influenced by Gothic horror and aesthetics in seasons five to seven.75 Continuing themes such as abandonment, commitment, and sexuality are dynamically established between the Doctor and fellow characters, constructed in a binary male and female opposition with Amy and Rory as companions. In “Flesh and Stone,” in fact, Moffat unburdens the series of its post-2005 romanticization and sexualization of the Doctor’s relationship with his companions when Amy passionately kisses him and plans to elope the night before her wedding.76 But eleventh rejects any sexual or romantic interest in Amy. By disassociating the Doctor from the humanizing adventures of the tenth’s era, Moffat eliminates Doctor’s sexuality from the equation again. At least, this tendency will continue until he marries River Song.77 However, this romance is condemned to failure from the beginning as both characters do not share the same time line and only meet on special occasions. Gradually, eleventh’s asexual erratic behavior is perceived as queer compared to the hetero-centrism of previous series. “The Lodger” clearly states this tendency.78 His sexuality is more overtly queer than ever, 73. Ken Chen, “The Lovely Smallness of Doctor Who,” Film International 32 (2008): 59. 74. “Genesis of the Daleks,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by David Maloney (London: BBC, March 8, 1975); “The Witch’s Familiar,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Hettie MacDonald (London: BBC, September 26, 2015), to name a few. 75. Piers Britton, “It’s All New Doctor Who: Authorising New Design and Redesign in Steven Moffat’s Era,” in Doctor Who. The Eleventh Hour, ed. Andrew O’Day (London: IB Tauris, 2014), 157–58. 76. “Flesh and Stone,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Adam Smith (London: BBC, May 1, 2010). 77. “The Wedding of River Song,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Jeremy Webb (London: BBC, October 1, 2011). 78. “The Lodger,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Catherine Morshead (London: BBC, June 12, 2010).

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dominated by the heterosexual discourse around him, mainly represented in the relationships established by his companions, Amy, Rory,79 TARDIS-Idris,80 to name a few. The show emphasizes this tendency by portraying many kissing scenarios in the new Who: homosexual kissing,81 omnisexual kissing,82 resuscitation kissing,83 or even regeneration kissing.84 Based on a comic strip of the same name, “The Lodger” problematizes the constraints of the Doctor’s sexual identity when he must pass as a normal human and share a flat with Craig Owens. In this episode, the TARDIS materializes in a park in Colchester, and a mysterious force coming from Owens’ building blocks the spacecraft’s navigation system, so the Doctor must stay on Earth for a while, and adapt his alien demeanor in a quest for social acceptance. While it harks back to the “Doctor/companion life” of the Russell T. Davies era, Gareth Roberts focuses on portraying the Doctor as gender inexperienced by associating the show’s sexual politics with queer theory. Roberts also codified these elements in past episodes such as 79. Dee Amy-Chinn, “Amy’s Boys, River’s Man: Generation, Gender and Sexuality in the Moffat’s Whoniverse,” in Doctor Who. The Eleventh Hour, ed. Andrew O’Day (London: IB Tauris, 2014), 70–88. 80. The Doctor flirts with Idris, his spacecraft embodied in the form of a female alien in “The Doctor’s Wife” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Richard Clark (London: BBC, May 14, 2011). For a thorough comprehensive reading, cf.: Emily Capettini, “‘A Boy and His Box, Off to See the Universe’: Madness, Power, and Sex in ‘The Doctor’s Wife,’” Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry, and Prose, ed. Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), Kindle. Charlie Coile, “More than a Companion: ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and Representations of Women in Doctor Who,” Studies in Popular Culture 36, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 83–104. 81. The Doctor kisses Rory in “The Pandorica Opens” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Toby Haynes (London: BBC, June 19, 2010) and “Dinosaurs on a spaceship” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Saul Metzstein (London: BBC, September 8, 2012). 82. Different species kissing are shown in the TV series, when Captain Harkness kisses the Doctor “The Doctor Dances” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by James Hawes (London: BBC, May 28, 2005) and the recent lizard-lesbian kiss in “Deep Breath” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Ben Wheatley (London: BBC, August 23, 2014)). 83. Donna’s kiss is only intended to induce a shock in the Doctor as part of his antidote to cyanide poisoning (“The Unicorn and the Wasp” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Graeme Harper (London: BBC, May 17, 2008)). 84. Melody awakes the Doctor and kisses him, using her ten remaining regenerations to bring him back to life, passing away and becoming River Song (“Let’s Kill Hitler” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Richard Senior (London: BBC, August 27, 2011))).

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“The Shakespeare Code”—playing a specific innuendo with Shakespeare’s sexuality: “Fifty-seven academics just punched the air”85 or “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” gazing the sexual relationship between a young Lord and his footman.86 For Collins, Roberts subtly continues this tendency in “The Lodger” by exploring “queerness in the perceived homosexuality and homosocial bonding between the Doctor and Craig and in his depiction of society’s current crisis of masculinity.”87 This depiction is also extended on the show, as Moffat validates Rory’s nurturing qualities but at the same time, both Amy and the Doctor mock his emasculated personality. Only when Rory dies and comes back to life again, he is able to reconcile positions, ultimately becoming “the Last Centurion” and rescuing his wife in a Spielberg-like all action superhero scene.88 “I love you”89 opens the Doctor and Craig’s first encounter. Immediately, the episode offers an ambiguous, humorous meaning to the meeting when the Doctor confidently asserts: “Well, that’s good, because I’m your new lodger. Do you know? This is going to be easier than I expected!”90 But what is easy? Possibly, this is a reference to the process of eleventh’s adaptation into human heterosexual discourse. Following on, the Doctor’s sexual orientation and social skills are confused as he greets Craig with two kisses: “That’s how we greet each other nowadays, isn’t it?”91 Not heterosexually conventional in English discourse, which symbolizes the Earth in the episode. The Doctor’s social etiquette and masculine behavior is rapidly compromised again: “This is the most beautiful parlor I have ever seen; you’re obviously a man of impeccable taste.”92 When Craig wonders where the Doctor’s luggage is, he assures him that it will materialize if all goes according to plan, confusing his landlord even more. After enjoying the omelets the Doctor cooks, Craig decides the Doctor can stay. He is definitely weird, but he can cook.

85. “The Shakespeare Code,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Charles Palmer (London: BBC, April 7, 2007). 86. “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Graeme Harper (London: BBC, May 17, 2008). 87. Frank Collins, Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor (Cambridge: Classic TV Press, 2011), 189. 88. “A Good Man Goes to War,” Doctor Who, Television, directed by Peter Hoar (London: BBC, June 4, 2011). 89. “The Lodger, Doctor Who, Television, directed by Catherine Morshead (London: BBC, June 12, 2010). 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid.

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Atypically, the Doctor becomes the object of desire in this episode, when he takes a shower the next day,93 partially showing his slender body for the first time on the show, and generating much controversy.94 The “bromance” reaches the homoerotic peak when hearing a loud bang from the floor above, the Doctor jumps off the shower and hurries to help Craig grabbing a toothbrush instead of the sonic screwdriver.95 The Doctor’s sexualization is amplified when Craig’s girlfriend, Sophie, meets him for the first time: “You didn’t tell me he was gorgeous, [Craig].”96 Craig then invites the Doctor to play football, possibly in order to win Sophie’s affection, defeating him in the match, and by showing the Time Lord’s inability to behave in a typically male fashion. Eleventh is even confused about what football actually is, asking “Is it the one with the sticks?”97 Amy, who extrinsically acquired these conventions in her everyday life, is essential in this episode, as she anticipates the heteronormative discourse criticized by Roberts. She congratulates the Doctor on playing football, an acceptable heteronormative practice. She even explains acceptable male behavior to the Doctor: “They watch telly, they play football and they go down the pub.” Although the episode could be considered an Amy-lite episode,98 her brief intervention is vital to reinforce social convention. She also censures the Doctor’s queerness when he mentions that bow ties are cool once again.99 Amy suggests digging the bow tie, the symbol that defines the Doctor’s queerness for her. This is of course in line with Judith 93. The Third Doctor also (at least once) sang while he showered himself. (“Spearhead from Space”). When in the shower, the Doctor sings Verdi’s “La donna è mobile,” which he previously sang in his third incarnation (“Inferno”). 94. BBC spokesperson said: “Fans might speculate about what they saw. But I can assure them that Matt wasn’t totally naked when he filmed these scenes. He was sporting an item to protect his modesty.” (Catriona Wightman, “Matt Smith wasn’t naked in Doctor Who,” Digitalspy, June 14, 2010, http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/ s7/doctor-who/news/a226815/matt-smith-wasnt-naked-in-doctor-who.html# ~ppHWcQeVBxiuik (accessed June 20, 2014). 95. Cf. Fiske for a full reference on penis-extensions and action heroes (John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 2010), 213). 96. “The Lodger,” Doctor Who, June 12, 2010. 97. Ibid. 98. Companions are (almost) inexistent in the narrative of these episodes due to time or monetary constrains. 99. It is also central in “The Eleventh Hour” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Adam Smith (London: BBC, April 3, 2010)) “Amy’s Choice” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Catherine Morshead (London: BBC, May 15, 2010)), and “Vincent and the Doctor” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Jonny Campbell (London: BBC, June 55, 2010)).

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Butler’s performative acts,100 gender is not the starting place, but is repeatedly constructed through time and space. As Butler pointed out, the possibilities of gender are “necessarily constrained by available historical conventions,”101 which the Doctor is not aware of.102 Any diverging performance from the socially intended gender is subject to exclusion. Only when Craig discovers that the Doctor is an alien can he be restated in the patriarchal social structure. In the words of Cordone and Cordone: For all his intelligence, the Doctor cannot pick appropriate clothing that will help him to blend in with his surroundings. His attire identifies him as the “other”, someone who is different. However, instead of standing out by dressing as an aristocrat, the Doctor wears outfits that make him look ridiculous. At the sight of Colin Baker’s bizarre outfit, one would not take him seriously. At the narrative level, this quirk foils his authority. His dress is a barrier that he must overcome. At the meta-narrative level, he is above the rules of attire.103

Normality is for this Doctor a disguise to pass within the heteronormative system, after all these years on Earth. His appearance, partly indebted to Patrick Troughton’s, seems to be a mixture of college professor and indie rock star: tweed jacket with elbow patches, bow tie, braces, rolled up trousers and boots. Costume is, thus, also used within Who to construct a visual narrative discourse of gender and sexuality. The use of clothing has prolonged from supporting character construction in the classic Who, to the objectification of the Doctor’s body and his masculinity in the new Who. As Christine Holmlund states, contemporary masculinity is characterized by a series of interlocking, multiple masquerades that are enabled through a combination of costume props and the representation of the male body.104 This is in line with the fact that Russell and Moffat did not want to overtly create a gay Doctor, but signaling the fluid sexuality in the future of many species navigating through the universe, in contrast 100. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519. 101. Ibid, 521. 102. The vast knowledge the Doctor shows about science and biology on the TV series, even about Earth and human race, makes us think that gender and sexual politics is not an issue to care about. 103. Cordone and Cordone, “Who is the Doctor?,” 19. 104. Christine Holmlund, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The Mature Stallone and the Stallone Clone,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Hollywood Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 222.

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with the rigid labels established in our present-day society for masculinefeminine, homosexuality-heterosexuality. In those days, Matt Smith also played the part for many gay magazine covers, and played Christopher and His Kind (2010), portraying gay writer Christopher Isherwood. In the end, what is the position of Smith as the eleventh? He lost his mother, his family, his race;105 he became a troubled action hero tortured by cosmic angst with a specific inability to form lasting relationships for biological reasons. He does not die, but regenerates, and his companions perish in a short period of time,106 unless they are Time Lords/Ladies. In the new Who, sexual politics are consequently unstable and continually restated in the ideological construction of the Doctor’s identity. Even gender categories are also blurred with each regeneration. In other words, masculinity and gender are products of time and space and thus, forever subject to change on the show. It is no surprise, on the one hand, that the main discourse of the show is patriarchal, the long tradition and longevity of the classic Who is still a heavy burden in present-day Who. On the other hand, the new Who has arguably now become part of a queerly coded television drama that entertains to a more demographically diverse audience. While Doctor Who has grown and sustained its appeal with minority groups, it has also been applauded for reinstating family primetime viewing.

Bibliography “A Good Man Goes to War.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Peter Hoar. London: BBC, June 4, 2011. “Amy’s Choice.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Catherine Morshead. London: BBC, May 15, 2010. Amy-Chinn, Dee. “Amy’s Boys, River’s Man: Generation, Gender and Sexuality in the Moffat’s Whoniverse.” In Doctor Who. The Eleventh Hour, edited by Andrew O’Day, 70–88. London: IB Tauris, 2014.

105. The Time War, or the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, supposedly ended with Gallifrey and the Doctor’s race. (Roger Mann, Engines of War (London: BBC Books, 2014)). This theory is not confirmed due to the events occurred at the 50th anniversary episode “The Day of the Doctor” (Doctor Who, Television, directed by Nick Hurran (London: BBC, November 23, 2013)). 106. Captain Jack Harkness, who cannot die, also reflects the same preoccupations regarding romance and family. See the relationship with his daughter and his boyfriend Ianto Jones in Torchwood: Children of Earth (Television, directed by Russell T. Davies (London: BBC, July 6-10, 2009)).

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“An Unearthly Child.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Waris Hussein. London: BBC, November 23, 1963. BBC Comic Relief. Television. London: BBC1, March 19, 1999. Booth, Paul. Fan Phenomena. Doctor Who. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2013. Bradshaw, S., Keen, A., and G. Sleight. The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the new Doctor Who. London: Science Fiction Foundation, 2011. Briggs, Nicola. Exile. Doctor Who Audiobooks. London: Big Finish Productions and BBC, 2003. Britton, Piers, and Simon Baker. Reading between Designs. Visual Imagery and Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Britton, Piers. “It’s all New Doctor Who: Authorising New Design and Redesign in Steven Moffat’s Era.” In Doctor Who. The Eleventh Hour, edited by Andrew O’Day, 141–59. London: IB Tauris, 2014. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31. Capettini, Emily. “‘A Boy and His Box, Off to See the Universe’: Madness, Power, and Sex in ‘The Doctor’s Wife.’” In Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry, and Prose, edited by Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Kindle. “Castrovalva.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Fiona Cumming. London: BBC, January 4, 1982. Chapman, James. Inside the TARDIS. A Cultural History of Doctor Who. London: IB Tauris, 2006. —. Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who. London: IB Tauris, 2013. Chen, Ken. “The Lovely Smallness of Doctor Who.” Film International 32 (2008): 52–59. “Children of Earth.” Torchwood. Television. Directed by Russell T. Davies. London: BBC, July 6–10, 2009. Coile, Charlie. “More than a Companion: ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and Representations of Women in Doctor Who.” Studies in Popular Culture 36, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 83–104. Collins, Frank. Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor. Cambridge: Classic TV Press, 2011. Cordone, Michelle, and John Cordone. “Who is The Doctor?: The MetaNarrative of Doctor Who.” In Ruminations, Peregrinations and

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Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who, edited by Chris Hansen, 8–21. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Cull, Nicolas. “Bigger on the Inside: Doctor Who as British Cultural History.” In The Historian, Television and Television History, edited by Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor, 95–111. Luton: University of Luton Press, 2001. “Day of the Moon.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Toby Haynes. London: BBC, April 30, 2011. Decker, Kevin. “The Ethics of the Last Time Lords.” In Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, edited by Lewis Courtland and Paula Smithka, 133–43. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010. “Deep breath.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Ben Wheatley. London: BBC, August 23, 2014. “Dimensions in Time.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Stuart McDonald. London: BBC, November 27, 1993. “Dinosaurs on a spaceship.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Saul Metzstein. London: BBC, September 8, 2012. “Doctor Who Ready to Come Out of the TARDIS.” The Daily Telegraph, September 27, 2005. Doctor Who. The Movie. Television. Directed by Geoffrey Sax. Canada and UK: Universal Television and BBC, 1996. Donaghy, Craig. Doctor Who: How to Be a Time Lord: Official Guide. London: BBC Children’s Books, 2014. “Dragonfire.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Chris Clough. London: BBC, November 23, 1987. “Earthshock.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Peter Grimwade. London: BBC, March 8, 1982–March 18, 1982. Ellis, Sigrid and Michael Damian Thomas. Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It. Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2013. “Father’s Day.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Joe Ahearne. London: BBC, May 14, 2005. “Fear Her.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Euros Lyn. London: BBC, June 24, 2006. Fiske, John. “Doctor Who: Ideology and the Reading of a Popular Narrative Text.” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 14–15 (1983): 69–100. —. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 2010. “Flesh and Stone.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Adam Smith. London: BBC, May 1, 2010.

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Garner, R. and U. McCormack. Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. “Genesis of the Daleks.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by David Maloney. London: BBC, March 8, 1975. Green, John Paul. “The Regeneration Game: The Changing Faces of Heroism.” In Impossible Words, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, edited by R. Garner, and U. McCormack, 2–21. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Gupta, Amit. “Doctor Who and Race: Reflections on the Change of Britain’s Status in the International System.” The Round Table 102, no. 1 (2013): 41–50. Haining, Peter. Doctor Who: The Key to Time. A Year by Year Record. London: Carol Pub Grup, 1984. Hansen, Chris. Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Holmlund, Christine. “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The Mature Stallone and the Stallone Clone.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Hollywood Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 213–29. London: Routledge, 1993. “Inferno.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Douglas Camfield. London: BBC, June 20, 1970. Jenkins, Henry and John Tulloch. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who. London: Routledge, 1995. Jones, Paul. “Peter Davison: Doctor Who Made Me a Gay Icon.” Radiotimes (November 4. 2013). http://www.radiotimes.com/news/ 2013-11-04/peter-davison-doctor-who-made-me-a-gay-icon (accessed December 5, 2014). Kelly, Stephen. “Doctor Who: A Woman Will Eventually Play the Doctor, Says Steven Moffat.” Radiotimes (December 8, 2014). http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-12-08/doctor-who-a-womanwill-eventually-play-the-doctor-says-steven-moffat (accessed 15 Jan 2015). Lambert, Verity. “Verity Lambert’s Scrapbooks.” Doctor Who Magazine 487 (July 2015). E-book. Lambess, Neil. “Errant nonsense.” Time Space Visualizer 73 (2005): 67– 69. Leach, Jim. Doctor Who. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.

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“Let’s kill Hitler.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Richard Senior. London: BBC, August 27, 2011. “Logopolis.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Peter Grimwade. London: BBC, February 28, 1981. Mann, Roger. Engines of War. London: BBC Books, 2014. Myles, L.M. and Liz Barr. Companion Piece: Women Celebrate the Humans, Aliens and Tin Dogs of Doctor Who. Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2015. Newman, Kim. BFI TV Classics: Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series. London: BFI, 2005. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. “Planet of the Spiders.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Barry Letts. London: BBC, June 8, 1974. Platt, Marc. Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible. London: Virgin Books, 1992. “Rose.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Keith Boak. London: BBC, March 26, 2005. “School Reunion.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by James Hawes. London: BBC, April 29, 2006. Singh, Anita. “Catherine Zeta Jones to be the next Doctor Who?.” The Telegraph (December 18, 2008). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/tvandradio/3833703/Catherine-Zeta-Jones-to-be-the-nextDoctor-Who.html (accessed January 16, 2017). “Spearhead from space.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Derek Martinus. London: BBC, January 3, 1970. “Survival.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Alan Wareing. London: BBC, December 6, 1989. “Tales of Trenzalore: The Eleventh Doctor’s Last Stand.” BBC Books (February 27, 2014). E-book. “The Ark in Space.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Rodney Bennett. London: BBC, January 25, 1975. “The Aztecs.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by John Crockett. London: BBC, May 23, 1964. “The Chase.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Richard Martin. London: BBC, May 22, 1965. “The Curse of the Fatal Death.” BBC Comic Relief. Television. Directed by John Henderson. London: BBC, March 19, 1999. “The Dalek Invasion of Earth.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Richard Martin. London: BBC, December 26, 1964. “The Day of the Doctor.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Nick Hurran. London: BBC, November 23, 2013.

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“The Doctor Dances.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by James Hawes. London: BBC, May 28, 2005. “The Doctor’s Daughter.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Alice Troughton. London: BBC, May 10, 2008. “The Doctor’s Wife.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Richard Clark. London: BBC, May 14, 2011. “The Eleventh Hour.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Adam Smith. London: BBC, April 3, 2010. “The Face of Evil.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Pennant Roberts. London: BBC, January 1, 1977. “The Five Doctors.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Peter Moffatt. London: BBC, November 25, 1983. “The Invasion of Time.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Gerald Blake. London: BBC, March 11, 1978. “The Last Battle.” Doctor Who Confidential. Directed by Joe Ahearne. London: BBC Three. June 18, 2005. “The Lodger.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Catherine Morshead. London: BBC, June 12, 2010. “The Mark of the Rani.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Sarah Hellings. London: BBC, February 2, 1985. “The Pandorica Opens.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Toby Haynes. London: BBC, June 19, 2010. “The Parting of the Ways” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Joe Ahearne. London: BBC, June 18, 2005. “The Power of Three.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Douglas Mackinnon. London: BBC, September 22, 2012. “The Shakespeare Code.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Charles Palmer. London: BBC, April 7, 2007. “The Trial of a Time Lord: Terror of the Vervoids.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Chris Clough. London: BBC, November 1, 1986. “The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Chris Clough. London: BBC, December 6, 1986. “The Unicorn and the Wasp.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Graeme Harper. London: BBC, May 17, 2008. “The Wedding of River Song.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Jeremy Webb. London: BBC, October 1, 2011. “The Witch’s Familiar.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Hettie MacDonald. London: BBC, September 26, 2015.

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Thomas, Lynne and Tara O’Shea. Chicks Dig Time Lords. A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It. Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press, 2010. “Time Flight.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Ron Jones. London: BBC, March 23, 1982. “Time Warrior.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Alan Bromley. London: BBC, December 15, 1973. Torchwood: Children of Earth. Television. Directed by Russell T. Davies. London: BBC, July 6–10, 2009. Tulloch, John and Manuel Alvarado. Doctor Who. The Unfolding Text. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. “Vincent and the Doctor.” Doctor Who. Television. Directed by Jonny Campbell. London: BBC, June 5, 2010. Wallace, Richard. “But Doctor?—A Feminist Perspective of Doctor Who.” In Ruminations, Peregrinations and Regenerations: A Critical Perspective to Doctor Who, edited by Chris Hansen, 102–116. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Web, Ed and Mark Wardecker. “Should the Daleks Be Exterminated?” In Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, edited by Lewis Courtland and Paula Smithka, 177–88. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010. Wightman, Catriona. “Matt Smith Wasn’t Naked in Doctor Who.” Digitalspy. June 14, 2010. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s7/ doctorwho/news/a226815/matt-smith-wasnt-naked-in-doctorwho.html#~ppHWcQeVBxiuik (accessed June 20, 2014). Wise, David. Gallifrey: Forever. “Doctor Who” Audiobooks. London: BBC and Big Finish Productions, 2011. Younger, Andrew. “Doctor Who: How Ace Set the Template for Modern Companions.” Den of Geek. http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-who /33496/doctor-who-how-ace-set-the-template-for-modern-companions (accessed January 5, 2015).

CHAPTER ELEVEN “OF OTHER BODIES”: AN ANALYSIS OF HETEROTOPIC LOVE AND KINSHIP IN CROSSBONES (2014) EVA MICHELY

I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals. Michel Foucault1

Introduction Questions of the nature of kinship continue to be paramount to discourses of nation states and the national identities they enclose within their borders. The recent constitutional changes in the Republic of Ireland, and the socio-political transformation it expressed, may serve here as a point in case. In May 2015, the Irish became the first country to have endorsed same-sex marriage by means of a plebiscite.2 The subsequent amendment of Article 41 of the Irish Constitution,3 signed into law only three months 1. Michel Foucault, “Body/Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), 55. 2. See, for example, Henry McDonald, “Ireland Becomes First Country to Legalise Gay Marriage by Popular Vote,” Guardian, May 23, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/gay-marriage-ireland-yes-vote (accessed August 25, 2015); and Fintan O’Toole, “Ireland Has Left Tolerance Far Behind,” Irish Times, May 25, 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ fintan-o-toole-ireland-has-left-tolerance-far-behind-1.2223838 (accessed August 25, 2015). 3. The amendment reads “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” Constitution of Ireland, amend. 34

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later, was as groundbreaking as it was simple: It did not change the constitutional status of marriage per se. Rather, by way of marriage, it enabled same-sex couples to acquire entrance to the sanctified realm of “the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society.”4 All married couples, regardless of the spouses’ sex, are thus recognized as families with equal rights and equal protection, and “as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.”5 The Irish “yes-vote,” which preceded the U.S. Supreme Court endorsement of marriage equality by one month only,6 testified to a fundamental rethinking of the institutional nature of marriage and family, and, by extension, of the nature of the social body that is constituted by their interrelation. The great international impact of the “yes-vote” in Ireland has again demonstrated the need for a reformation of the social norms governing the bounds of sexual agency, reproduction, and kinship.7 The renegotiations of these norms within national discourses seem to provide prominent sites of crystallization for the social insecurities of the current age. This article proposes a site-specific reading of the alternative understandings of sexual agency and kinship that are put forward in the first season of the NBC series Crossbones (2014). Set in the early 18th century, the series makes but little pretense at historical accuracy and pertains more directly to a globalized present and the fluid nature of kinship ties and national communities.8 The series pivots around the English pirate Edward Teach who, disillusioned with both the old European order and a lifetime of violence and crime, assembles on the island of Santa Campaña a multiethnic “nation of thieves, outlaws and miscreants”9 that are united in their alienation from the British Empire and their longing for individual freedom. Depending on seclusion as its only defense, Santa Campaña is a (marriage equality), schedule part 2, Act 2015, http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/ eli/2015/ca/34/schedule/enacted/en/html#sched (accessed August 25, 2015). 4. Constitution of Ireland, art. 41, sec.1, http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/en/ constitution/ index.html#article41 (accessed August 25, 2015). 5. Ibid. 6. See, for example, Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide,” New York Times, June 26, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sexmarriage.html?_r=0 (accessed February 20, 2016). 7. Judith Butler powerfully argues this need in her article “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 8. Cf. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 104. 9. “Crossbones: About the Show,” NBC, http://www.nbc.com/crossbones?nbc=1 (accessed August 25, 2015).

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fragile realm of alternative social ordering that gives rise to understandings of both the social and the sexed body that are based on shared experiences of danger, violence, and vulnerability.10 “[T]his is a place like no other” the Crossbones website summarizes, describing Santa Campaña as “[p]art shantytown, part utopia, part marauder's paradise […].”11 In my analysis, both the island’s otherness and its utopian existence come to bear. Following Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces,” I argue that Santa Campaña constitutes an archetypal heterotopia which has been produced by the emergence of the British Empire. A socio-spatial oddity revealing the fault lines of the imperial order, it is one of those places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society— which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.12

It is, however, a heterotopia of—and in—transition, where traditional understandings of kinship are not yet fully jettisoned and the new not yet fully formed. “The postulate of a founding heterosexuality” which, as Butler argues, “must also be read as part of the operation of power” continues to be reenacted on a national plane, where its “invocation […] works in the building of a certain fantasy of state and nation.”13 Edward Teach, the self-proclaimed Commodore of Santa Campaña,14 poses as the founding father of this nation-in-the-making and reinstates the symbolic order to justify the exertion of power over the emergent social body. As the series proceeds, it becomes clear that the Commodore’s body is the prime social signifier in relation to which his citizens are invested with meaning. It is also in relation to his idiosyncratic performance of masculinity that their bodies emerge as legible according to the gender

10. Judith Butler argues lucidly that an alternative understanding of community can be based on “our exposure to violence and our complicity in it” and on the condition of bodily vulnerability in such a manner as “affirms relationality not only as a descriptive of historical fact of our formation, but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives […]” (“Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), 19, 27). 11. “Crossbones: About the Show.” 12 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24. 13. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 124. 14. Henceforward, Teach will be referred to as “the Commodore.”

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binary. What Butler calls the “process of assuming a sex”15 may hence go unchallenged, but it loses its relevance for the subjects’ social status and their possibilities of agency. As the privileged position of reproductive heterosexuality within martial arrangements16 slowly dissolves, kinship is detached from biological ties and increasingly projected onto the emergent social body. Kinship in Crossbones is thus depicted as a social practice that disproves “the claim that kinship is always already heterosexual”17 and that challenges the symbolic order from below.

“It is a place of many paradoxes”:18 Santa Campaña as Heterotopia Santa Campaña is a prime example of what Foucault terms “heterotopias of deviation”:19 It inverts the social standards governing abjection and makes room for a social ordering that accommodates its otherwise deviant citizenry. A sense of community and, indeed, kinship can well be wrought from this marginal existence, which posits Santa Campaña within the bounds of what Butler poignantly calls “spectral infinity” and thus beyond the recognizably human.20 As the Commodore phrases it powerfully in an address to the nation: To any monarch, king, sultan, pope, despot, or emperor, you are no more than a means to an end. A means to acquire riches, a means to acquire power. But we are an end to our own selves. […] We that stand are abject dogs and bastards, we are killers and malefactors, we are thieves and scum, and we are brothers and sisters.21

Santa Campaña’s “spectral infinity” relies not least on the fact that it is geographically indeterminable: As yet unmapped, the island lies outside the bounds of hegemonic knowledge and is thinkable only in the realm of myth. Its heterotopic existence, however, depends precisely on this navigational blind spot, which provides the necessary “system of opening 15. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 16. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 102. 17. Ibid., 123. 18. “The Return,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Terry McDonough (Concorde, 2014), Episode 5. 19. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. 20. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 34. 21. “Blackbeard,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Ciaran Donnelly (Concorde, 2014), Episode 9; emphasis added.

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and closing that both isolates [it] and makes [it] penetrable.”22 William Jagger, the Governor of Jamaica, is obsessed with the wish to kill the Commodore, and the threat he poses to the heterotopic isolation provides much of the driving force of the intricate plot. Using the longitude chronometer as bait, he assigns the assassination to Thomas Lowe, a medical doctor and English spy. When Lowe is captured by the Commodore and brought to Santa Campaña, he becomes the medium through which the differences between the heterotopia and “all the space that remains”23 are negotiated. While his “entry [into the heterotopia] is compulsory,” he eventually “arrive[s] at a sort of absolute break with [his] traditional time”24 when he renounces his allegiance to the King of England toward the end of the series. Santa Campaña is more, however, than a heterotopia pure and simple. For Foucault, the ship is the perfect heterotopia. Its unique pulling force for the imagination lies in its movement, in its ability to travel back and forth between different heterotopic sites, such as “[b]rothels and colonies [which] are two extreme types of heterotopia.”25 While Santa Campaña is stationary, it is, however, in and by itself an inherently hybrid site: Satisfying Foucault’s third heterotopic principle, it brings together in the one geographical location the multiple trajectories of the British Empire “that are in themselves incompatible.”26 What is more, Santa Campaña is capable of redoubling this principle by becoming a site of amalgamation for the Empire’s multiple heterotopias (such as brothels and colonies) which were formerly connected through shipping routes only. As the imperial subjects, slaves, traitors, prisoners, pirates, and prostitutes build a new multiethnic republic, Santa Campaña emerges as a vast “reserve of the imagination”27 where unprecedented social change becomes conceivable. It is this amalgamation of heterotopic sites that makes it difficult to determine what precisely Santa Campaña’s “function in relation to all the space that remains”28 may be. While Foucault differentiates between heterotopias of “illusion” and “compensation,”29 Santa Campaña seems to combine elements of both. When the Commodore renounces the English

22. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. 23. Ibid., 27. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Ibid., 27. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid.

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monarchical system which to him is evil institutionalized, he declares to be nothing but a fellow with no wish to be governed, inspected, indoctrinated, preached at, taxed, stamped, measured, judged, condemned, hanged or shot [… and who has] cast out the devil, that depraved distinction between rich and poor, great and small, master and valet, governor and governed.30

He thus condemns the heavy “materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” that is employed to form and make obedient “the social body.”31 In the interest of a given social order, the Commodore implies, this individualized form of hegemonic power establishes and naturalizes a fundamental inequality that then secures the perpetuation of the order it serves. On this reading, Santa Campaña provides a heterotopia of illusion whose alternative ordering denounces “every real space, all the sites in which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” and inherently deceptive.32 If the heterotopia of compensation functions to “create a space that is […] as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled,”33 Santa Campaña appears to be, at the same time, an inverted heterotopia of compensation that counters the order of both the British Empire and its compensatory colonies.

“The Kingdom of a Madman”: Heterotopic Camp and Embodiment Crossbones follows a strongly camp aesthetics,34 which is a stylistic device employed to set off the heterotopic quality of the colonies. The British naval base at Port Royal, Jamaica, for instance, which is a stronghold of imperial order, is strangely out-of-sync with the loud, crowded, unmistakably local and, ultimately, camp street market surrounding it. It is Santa Campaña, however, untrammeled by any imperial imposition, whose heterotopic status is stressed by, and even dependent on, camp. When Lowe and his gofer Fletch first set foot on Santa Campaña, Fletch’s assessment of his surroundings amounts to little 30. “The Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by David Slade (Concorde, 2014), Episode 1. 31. Foucault, “Body/Power,” 55. 32. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. 33. Ibid. 34. I am indebted to Heike Mißler for this observation, and for suggesting that I consider the camp aesthetics of Crossbones.

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more than bewilderment: “This is the kingdom of a madman,” he states, surveying the gaily-colored and stylishly-shoddy market stalls selling exotic fruit and vegetables, while all about them, there is music, laughter and talk emanating from idle men and women in torn garments, carrying flimsy parasols, some of which appear to be sex workers.35 Fletch’s assessment instantly calls to mind not only “the heterotopia of the festival,”36 but more importantly the subversive potential of what Bakhtin calls “‘festive’ madness.”37 As a heterotopia of transition, Santa Campaña is home to former prisoners, traitors, colonial subjects, slaves and madmen who are freed from these normative epithets by virtue of the island’s alternative ordering. Within the imperial framework, Santa Campaña seems akin to the Bakhtinian carnival which “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, prohibitions. Carnival was […] the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.”38 In this transitional environment, social ordering in terms of sexual difference appears to give way to a form of gender equality that is based on the individual’s utility for the heterotopia. Again, it is Fletch through whose eyes this observation is filtered. Disembarking onto the quay in Santa Campaña, Lowe and Fletch encounter Lady Katherine Balfour, the island’s quartermaster, who is dividing the spoils from HMS The Petrel. In this capacity, Katherine is in command of a small workforce of men whom she unceremoniously orders about. Quizzing Lowe as to his sudden appearance on the island, she informs him, flirtatiously, “I hope you’re not prone to unseemly conduct, Mr. Lowe.” His retort, “I believe there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” is met with her approval: “then you’ve washed up on the right island.”39 Fletch is clearly astounded at the exchange: “I’ve never heard such talk, not from a lady.”40 While surprised at the lady’s lack of deference, Fletch’s astonishment also sheds light on the moral system he grew up in. Agreeing with Lowe, Katherine rejects normative categories as the structuring principles of social life in

35. “Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 1. 36. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. 37. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1968), 39. 38. Ibid., 10. 39. Lowe borrows his retort from Shakespeare’s Hamlet 2.2.244–45, where Hamlet professes “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” “Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 1. 40. “Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 1.

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favor of individual freedom, and she introduces Lowe and Fletch to Santa Campaña as a realm that eschews binary thinking of any sort. It befits this place pledged to the ideal of self-determination that it should cultivate a taste in all things camp. As Susan Sontag argues in her seminal “Notes on Camp,” taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality.41

The state of disorder that Fletch identifies on Santa Campaña, and associates with madness and loose morality, stems from the fact that “[t]aste has no system and no proofs”:42 It is inconsistent, patchwork, and potentially anarchic. To say that the Commodore styles himself in a distinctly camp fashion, however, is not to minimize the earnestness of his purpose concerning Santa Campaña. Rather, it is a gesture of defiance against the moral certainties of Europe. When first meeting Lowe, the Commodore accompanies his introductory note “Please allow me to introduce myself”43 with a mock bow and a quick turn to the right, slashing open the artery of an English captive kneeling next to him. The lighthearted flourish with which he carries out the act is strangely at odds with its grave purpose. As a gesture, it powerfully illustrates Sontag’s description of camp as “a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.”44 The morality of taking a human life, the actual content of the action, is subordinated to the aesthetic effect it might achieve. It is, finally, in the Commodore’s insular dream of establishing a secure, stable, and hybrid nation of the free that the heterotopic and the camp intersect. “[H]eterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time,” Foucault writes, can be linked to the [modern] idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages.45

41. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Essays of the 1960s & 70s, ed. David Rieff (New York: The Library of America, 2013), 259. 42. Ibid., 260. 43. “Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 1. 44. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 270. 45. Foucault, “Of Other Places,” 26.

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The first depiction of the Commodore’s quarters establishes him as a collector of clocks, and as one who is apparently obsessed with the passing of time.46 This, and the accumulation in his home of artefacts and fabrics47 and books and knowledge of manifold provenance, exemplify his attempt at creating “a place of all times” that will be equipped to withstand the test of time. It is in this excessive accumulation, and in the hubris of the endeavor,48 that I detect the presence of camp. There is great “artifice and exaggeration” in it, which testifies to the Commodore’s “love of the unnatural.”49 Maybe camp on Santa Campaña can even amount to “a badge of identity”:50 Piracy is, after all, based on the exploitation of shipping routes, where goods from all the world can be intercepted and brought home, where they amass, as Foucault puts it, “in one place […] all forms, all tastes.” It is no small irony, then, that an invention akin to the clock, the chronometer to determine longitude at sea, should pose the greatest threat not only to piracy but to Santa Campaña’s heterotopic existence. It is, in a sense, the progress of science through time and space that will expose Santa Campaña to the equalizing force of imperial expansion. The juxtaposition of the two devices, one measuring time, the other space, establishes Santa Campaña right from its inception as a place with a present but no future. Ultimately, Santa Campaña is the realm of camp by virtue of its association with the Commodore, who epitomizes camp as a force which “neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”51 Being his creation, Santa Campaña is a heterotopic space that defies traditional standards not only in terms of structure but also style. Crossbones abounds with examples of the Commodore’s “relish for the exaggeration of […] personality mannerisms”52 which manifests in ironic speech, use of metaphors, elaborate syntax as well as in gestures that either have little purpose or overemphasize it. This playfulness and affectation of the

46. The first appearance of the Commodore is of him in deep thought, sitting amid a great number of clocks whose relentless ticking is the sound dominating the scene. As the camera zooms in on his face, he turns his alarmed stare at a clock to his right (“Devil’s Dominion,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 1). 47. As Sontag elaborates, “[c]lothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, […] make up a large part of Camp” (Notes on Camp,” 261). 48. “In Camp, there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself.” Ibid., 266; italics in original. 49. Ibid., 259. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 273. 52. Ibid., 262.

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Commodore—who seeks both to be entertained and to entertain by spectacle, unpredictability, and willfulness—allows Santa Campaña to be marked by elements of camp and the carnival. It is also this quality of character that creates the most significant contrast between the Commodore and Lowe, who both employ violence and subterfuge to achieve their ends, but whose styles are irreconcilable. Sontag importantly states that “[t]o perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-aRole. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”53 An English double-agent, Lowe’s role-playing cannot be understood through the lens of theatricality; it is a necessity, a life-saving mode that needs to be performed as inconspicuously as possible to shield the vulnerable body. When Katherine disgustedly states that lying “comes as natural to [him] as breath,”54 she is not so very far off the mark: Lowe conceals the self to cover the body. With him, to adapt Sontag’s phrase, it is being not as but because of playing a role. The Commodore, in contrast, skillfully opposes Sontag’s claim that “Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.”55 Vacillating between his incarnation as the mythically evil pirate Blackbeard and his recently adopted, more benign role of Commodore, he creates a life narrative that is recalcitrant to conventional genre boundaries. This theatricalization of the self does not shield the body so much as it destabilizes the body as a social signifier, a strategy which is in itself inherently camp.56 This carefully fostered duality is the perfect tool of domination; it neatly encompasses the paradigm of “rule by fear, reward by favor.”57 Being in the position to bestow and withdraw communal belonging on Santa Campaña, the Commodore becomes the primary site of projection for his citizens’ most existential fears: If they have no place with him, they have no place at all. Alone the individual’s body and the community they belong to, Bauman argues, are perceived as providers of stability in an unstable and ever-changing

53. Ibid., 263. It is here that camp and carnival most perfectly intersect. As Bakthin explains, “the basic carnival nucleus of this culture [of the marketplace] is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play” (Rabelais and His World, 7). 54. “Crossbones,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Deran Sarafian (Concorde, 2014), Episode 8. 55. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 263. 56. Ibid., 264. 57. I adopt this phrase from Eoin McNamee’s novel Orchid Blue (London: Faber, 2010), 16.

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world.58 Thence derives also “the tendency to shape the image of the community […] after the pattern of the ideally protected body.”59 As the embodiment of Santa Campaña, the Commodore achieves a focalization of each of his citizens’ individual hopes and fears on his own person. If, as Foucault posits, the body as the individual’s pivot “has no place, but it is from it that all the possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate,”60 it is the Commodore’s body from which Santa Campaña materializes as a heterotopic place, and around which “all the possible places” for the citizens of the island evolve.

“Least of all with your body”: Heterotopic Love Love on Santa Campaña illustrates the radical relationality of human existence that Judith Butler captures with characteristic clarity when she writes: “Let’s face it. We are undone by each other. And if we’re not we’re missing something.”61 Pirate and warrior Oswald Eisengrim mourns the death of his partner Alain Mersault whose loss begs for a retaliatory murder, Katherine loved her Jacobite husband enough to trade “everything: family, friends, country, and entire life” in exchange for his freedom,62 and he in turn now longs for her happiness so completely that he is willing to sacrifice his own in the process. The real or anticipated loss of a loved one compels each partner to make decisions that do not benefit them individually but that prioritize and even intensify their dependency on the beloved. Yet, it is the Commodore himself who experiences the most 58. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, repr. ed. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 182–83. 59. Ibid., 184. 60. Michel Foucault, “Utopian Body,” trans. Lucia Allais, in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 233. 61. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 23. See Lena Steveker, who builds her splendid discussion of “Precarious Selves in Contemporary British War Novels” on Butler’s book Precarious Life, which contains the essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” quoted here. Steveker discusses the ways in which the texts she discusses “narrat[e] the violent loss of the other as an existential threat to the self.” While she lucidly analyses the impact of the violence of war, loss and grief on “the self’s ties to its external and internal others,” I focus mainly on representations of the body and “external” relationality. “Precarious Selves in Contemporary British War Novels,” in Narrating “Precariousness”: Modes, Media, Ethics, ed. Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 21, 27. 62. “The Covenant,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Ciaran Donnelly (Concorde, 2014), Episode 2.

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powerful and continuous undoing at the hands of his first wife, Antoinette, who has come equally undone as a result of their ill-fated relationship. Antoinette, who throughout the series wears a torn, dirty-white gown, ekes out her existence as William Jagger’s prisoner in Jamaica. In both condition and appearance, she brings to bear two powerful intertextual references. While her dress and unhealthy obsession with the past conjure up links to Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, her name and situation allude to Edward Rochester’s wife Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Jane Eyre. Both references evoke a strong but broken female character, one who has been betrayed by the person they loved and who is “beside [her]self with rage or grief.”63 When the British captured her husband years ago, Antoinette killed their son and baby daughter, throwing them off a cliff near the family’s home in Charleston. Jagger suggests that Antoinette suffered so severely under the absences of her husband that she committed the infanticide as a punishment for his pirate life and consequent imprisonment. Giving their children to the very sea that keeps her husband away from her, she commits a cruel act of defiance in which she refuses to be a mother unless he commits to being a father. On a symbolical level, Antoinette renounces “that primary tie” between herself and her husband, the tie embodied by their children, by virtue of “which [they] are, as bodies, outside [them]selves and for one another.”64 The loss of his wife and children, and the grief and guilt it causes, initiate the Commodore’s physical undoing.65 The incredible force of his ailment is stressed by being juxtaposed to representations of the Commodore as a decidedly unphysical person. For all his extravagance in word and deed, he is an ascetic who is never seen to eat, drink, or even have sex beyond self-control. He uses his body as a pliable tool whose application he has mastered to perfection: The endurance of pain as well as the performance of martial skill seem to be a matter of utter reason, practice, and will-power.66 His continuous

63. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 24; italics in original. 64. Ibid., 27. 65. Again see Lena Steveker’s insightful analysis of the Regeneration trilogy, where she shows that the experience of loss and grief “unravel the ties that hold together the relationality of [Billy] Prior’s self.” She argues that “[i]t is therefore the vulnerability of others, the precariousness of their lives, which makes the self lose its autonomy and self-control in Barker’s World War One trilogy” (“Precarious Selves,” 22, 23). 66. Illustrations of the Commodore’s physical strength abound in the series. Most notable among these figures the episode “A Hole in the Head,” where Teach nonchalantly defeats Lowe (who is otherwise quite invincible), and proceeds to the application of the trephine to his head with bravery and determination.

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undoing, however, will not be mastered by either. The unbearable headaches he suffers as well as the recurring, harrowing visions of his wife and lost children illustrate Butler’s point that the body is never exclusively a personal possession, but that it “is formed within the crucible of social life […].”67 The past destruction of the primary, bodily tie to his children—which illustrates the inseparability of the self from a sustaining other68— determines the current relationship between the Commodore and his new partner, Selima. Both seem wary of the exposure that the self is subjected to by virtue of the body,69 and both are acutely aware of the other’s physical integrity, which they guard for one other if they see it jeopardized. Until the Commodore’s marriage proposal towards the end of the series, he and Selima never kiss or touch each other intimately. Intimacy until then is played out in the linguistic realm and appears to be based on intellectual stimulation and on a refusal to become mutual objects of mere bodily desire. The materiality of the physical act was captured with customary beauty by Foucault when he contemplated: Maybe it should also be said that to make love is to feel one’s body close in on oneself. It is finally to exist outside of any utopia, with all of one’s density […] Love also, like the mirror and like death—it appeases the utopia of your body […]. This is why love is so closely related to the illusion of the mirror and the menace of death. And if, despite these two perilous figures that surround it, we love so much to make love, it is because, in love, the body is here.70

Love, in other words, forces body and self to coincide for once; it reconciles both in the one place that can only be reached by virtue of a beloved that mirrors and exposes us to the physicality of human existence. It is love that makes the weight of the body tolerable to the experiencing self. It is love, then, also, that makes the Commodore expose Selima to “the menace of death.” Knowing that her agoraphobia will prevent her from seeking safety, he asks his golden child Charles Rider to kill Selima in the event of a British attack on Santa Campaña. Fearful of what might be 67. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 26. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. The fear of exposure seems to be at the heart of Selima’s agoraphobia. Describing herself as “a slave of [her] own fear of leaving this house,” she inadvertently challenges the Commodore’s vision of a nation of the free (“The Return,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 5). 70. Foucault, “Utopian Body,” 233; italics in original.

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inflicted on her, the Commodore decides that if she has to experience her “body close in on [her]self” in death, it should be with “no suffering.”71 Learning of this violation of their covenant, Selima is momentarily placed “beside [her]self with rage and grief”72 and has sex with Rider in an act of defiance in which she affirms her “bodily integrity and self-determination.”73 Selima thus radically counters the exposure to death by a related act of physical intimacy. In the subsequent attempt at concealing her betrayal, Selima tries to seduce the Commodore who quietly refuses the possibility of physical love: “You can’t lie to me, not to me. Least of all with your body.”74 It is not the primary, bodily tie between them that the Commodore refuses. Rather, he refuses the physical act as an instance of what Butler calls “anonymous citationality.”75 Pondering the possibilities of the phrase “I love you,” Butler claims “the citationality of the speech act offends our sense of singularity or even authenticity, if that is a value we have.” This offence can be indemnified only if the phrase seeks to transport “some somatic feeling […] from here to there to find its destination with you.” The “transitivity” of the phrase, however, “is never actually automatic.”76 It seems that if the linguistic expression of love can be citational and intransitive, so can the physical expression thereof. In his refusal, the Commodore denies to have their relationship reduced to a physical act that is not also an embodiment of genuine feeling. The only truly transitive speech act that occurs between the Commodore and Selima is one that has deep reverberations emotionally, bodily, and nationally. Believing that his headaches will lead to an untimely death, he addresses her unceremoniously: I need you to heed me now, I need you to hear three things: The first is that I admire you more than I love you and I love you a good deal. The second is that I am dying. […] The third thing you need to hear is that the day will come when this island needs a new leader.77

71. “The Man Who Killed Blackbeard,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Stephen Shill (Concorde, 2014), Episode 3. 72. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 24; italics in original. 73. Ibid., 25. 74. “Antoinette,” Crossbones. Season 1, DVD, directed by Dan Attias (Concorde, 2014), Episode 4. 75. Judith Butler, “Response: Performative Reflection on Love and Commitment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1/2 (2011): 237. 76. Ibid. 77. “The Return,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 5.

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The vulnerability that is inherent in the declaration of love, the fact the body does not stay intact “as a spatiotemporal given”78 in the process, is painfully heightened by the exposure of the dying body to rejection. The declaration of love, Butler argues, “is a wager we make, but it is also, bodily, a wager we become.”79 In both love and death, the stakes are high, and the Commodore adds to those the future of his nation. When Selima refuses to succeed him, he is adamant: “Selima without you it’s finished, all of it. And I leave nothing behind me but ghoulish folklore.”80 In asking her to “commit [her]self in the face of the unknowable” to both him and his heterotopic vision, to free him from his mythical existence, he asks her “to stand for [her] future”81 and, crucially, for his as well. The Commodore offers his body as what Butler calls “a wager”—the meaning of his body as a social signifier is in Selima’s hands, contingent, and in limbo. The Commodore’s marriage proposal,82 then, has to be read in light of the question of succession. Marriage will neither change their terms of cohabitation nor is it required by the social practice on the island, from which a church is conspicuously absent. Marriage does, however, predicate Selima’s entrance into the symbolical order of the nation. His simple plea “marry me” is prefaced by the announcement that she “should consider [her]self Commodore until [his] return.”83 Selima’s acceptance implies a commitment to their shared future as well as to the future of Santa Campaña. While the exchange follows a patriarchal pattern of empowerment, with a male authority legitimizing female agency, the Commodore perforates the patriarchal in favor of matriarchal rule according to which Selima will become her people’s mother. This change does not presuppose a break with the symbolic order, but it opens up this order to “the demands for a social reorganization of paternity.”84 Marriage proposals, it would seem, can never be completely selfless, and neither is the Commodore’s. The marriage arrangement will ensure that Santa Campaña stands finished 78. Butler, “Response,” 237. 79. Ibid. 80. “The Return,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 5. 81. Butler, “Response,” 238. 82. Quoting from John Donne’s “To his Mistress Going to Bed” the Commodore displays both his rootedness in and break with the culture of the old world, which is brought into relation with his first wife, Antoinette. He addresses Selima, who is clad in white, as one of “heaven’s angels” (l. 19), and juxtaposes her to the “Ill spirits [who also] walk in white” (l. 22). “Crossbones,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 8. 83. Ibid. 84. Judith Butler, “Gender Regulations,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45.

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as a monument to the Commodore’s existence beyond the bounds of what he calls “ghoulish folklore.” It may hence be precisely the adjustment of the symbolic order that ultimately serves to preserve it. Empowering Selima to complete his vision, the Commodore ensures his remembrance as the founding father of the nation and, by extension, the “quasi timelesscharacter”85 of his own symbolic position therein. Selima’s acceptance of the Commodore’s proposal depends upon his willingness to sacrifice Rider; it is what she “need[s]” and “desire[s]” if the Commodore “want[s her] hand.”86 With this violent request, she asks the Commodore to solve the oedipal triangle between him, her and Rider and, by extension, signals her commitment to the symbolic order. Upon becoming the Commodore’s wife, Selima will occupy the symbolic position of the mother of the nation and cease to be a legitimate object of desire for this nation’s children: “These relations of prohibition,” Butler explains the Lacanian argument, “are encoded in the ‘position’ that each of these family members occupies.”87 I have argued above that the Commodore’s proposal is as much a romantic request as it is a political plea for future succession. It is for this very reason that Selima insists on the continuity of the symbolic order which will, in turn, guarantee the stability of the reign she inherits from her husband. It becomes obvious, again, that Santa Campaña is a heterotopia of transition, where the old ways are not yet fully jettisoned and the new is not yet fully formed. As Butler further explains, “the symbolic is precisely what sets limits to any and all utopian efforts to reconfigure and relive kinship relations at some distance from the oedipal scene.”88

“She’s our first”: Heterotopic Kinship For all its attempts at alternative social ordering, thus, Santa Campaña does not abandon the symbolic order. The heteronormative principle of the nuclear family in which every member is allocated a symbolic position remains intact on the national level where heterosexual desire is 85. Ibid. 86. “Crossbones,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 8. 87. Butler, “Gender Regulations,” 44. Selima is cast as more intelligent than the Commodore, who venerates her for her superior mental capacity. Their relationship, however, is not built on equality. Residues of the patriarchal system are manifest not least in the fact that the Commodore is free from the restrictions of monogamy, while Selima has to erase her oedipal trespass before entering the symbolic order. 88. This again in reference to Lacan. Butler, “Gender Regulations,” 45.

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privileged: It provides the basis for an authoritative, undemocratic form of power where each citizen is answerable to the Commodore as the founding father of the nation. This relation alone constitutes and grants “intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship,”89 which in turn perpetuates the position of the Commodore. This, however, also implies a gradual dissolution of the symbolic order as the structuring principle of individual lives at a grass-roots level.90 In keeping with both the heterotopic and the camp principles of difference and choice, there are no top-down attempts made to “restrict the domain of what will become recognizable as legitimate sexual arrangements”:91 Eisengrim loves a male fellow warrior, female warrior Nenna has both hetero- and homoerotic sexual encounters, Katherine has an extramarital relationship with Lowe, and the Commodore himself sleeps with prostitutes on a regular basis. None of these sexual alliances appear to be judged within a national “discourse of legitimacy.”92 Linked to this is a disintegration of the norms governing marital union, which gives rise to a reconceptualization of the understanding of the nature of individual kinship. Katherine and her husband James, as well as Selima and the Commodore are heterosexual couples whose reproductive efforts are either hampered or non-existent. These non-reproductive relationships are as such “deviant to the required mean”93 of 18th-century Europe and also of modern-day residues of the patriarchal model. Constituted by individuals who have endured pain, torture and captivity, Santa Campaña is a nation yoked together by their “exposure to violence.”94 In this violent environment, kinship is increasingly based on a shared sense of vulnerability, on an understanding of the body as the touchstone of human existence. Both Nelly’s and Katherine’s pregnancies occur outside of marriage arrangements. Nelly, a spouseless sex worker, can neither ascertain the father of her child nor is this a relevant question for her or anyone else on the island. Katherine is convinced that not her husband but Lowe is the father of her child. Both of these women, by way of their circumstances of conception, contradict the ideal of the nuclear family founded in the institution of marriage. With the birth of Nelly’s child, a disconnection of marriage and sexual reproduction takes place which appears programmatic for the national community in the making. Nelly’s daughter lacks the “dual 89. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 117. 90. Cf. Ibid., 113–14. 91. Ibid., 115. 92. Ibid., 105. 93. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. 94. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 19.

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point of reference for [her] own initiation into the symbolic order,”95 which is provided by traditional heterosexual parenting only. The married couple as the nucleus of the nation is increasingly irrelevant on Santa Campaña, yet residues of the patriarchal order continue to operate subconsciously and throw into relief the heterotopic ordering. Nelly professes not to know about her pregnancy until she goes into labor. The repression of the pregnancy highlights her socialization into the old world where the carrying of a conjugally unsanctioned child is a social stigma. The fact that her abdomen has remained flat throughout the pregnancy stands, literally, as the embodiment of this social norm and illustrates the normative sway held over the individual body. In Foucault’s terms, this tangible, corporeal “effect of an investment of power in the body” is then questioned and subverted with the birth of Nelly’s daughter as “a counterattack in that same body.”96 The girl’s entry into the world may still be governed by the binary “regulatory norms of ‘sex,’”97 but the kinship arrangements she is born into are nonetheless constitutive of the new nation-to-be: The immediate circle of caregivers that the child is born into and raised among consists of Nelly’s female coworkers. In their concern and assistance during and after birth, they illustrate the claim that “kinship is itself a kind of doing”98 rather than a passive, biological condition. They perform what Butler calls “kinship practices […] that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support […].”99 On this reading, kinship becomes an active social practice that helps to mitigate bodily vulnerability. The Commodore greets the child’s arrival with enthusiasm and has her brought into his own quarters where he gently sings her to sleep on her first night on earth. The powerful juxtaposition of the Commodore imagining his son crying for help and Nelly’s going into very complicated labor100 highlights the new understanding of kinship based on vulnerability.101 To him, the child’s birth seems to be nature’s vindication of the alternative order he has established on Santa Campaña. “She is our first,”102 the Commodore proudly explains to Lowe whose outsider status 95. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 118. 96. Foucault, “Body/Power,” 56. 97. Butler, Bodies, 2. 98. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 126. 99. Ibid., 103. 100. “Man Who Killed,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 3. 101. Cf. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 27. 102. “Man Who Killed,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 3.

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posits him eternally in the interrogative mode. The Commodore’s use of the possessive pronoun “our” is slightly ambiguous, since there is the possibility that he might himself have fathered the child. It is more likely, however, that he understands himself as the symbolical father of this child born into the national community. This claim to metaphorical fatherhood again implies the even distribution of a very intimate form of power over each citizen. Kinship, in this constellation, is dependent upon the leader’s acknowledgement of the relation, and not upon biological, ethnical or cultural bonds. The concept of the nuclear family is thus submitted to a simple but radical reform: Not the nuclear family is to be the base unit of the nation, but the single child born into it. This emergent social structure makes each citizen equally legitimate and recognizable regardless of sexual and/or family arrangements.103 Upon entering Santa Campaña, the individual enters at the same time into a quasi-filial relationship with the Commodore, who offers social equality and protection in exchange for commitment to the heterotopic order. While the nature of this bond may appear willful, it nonetheless befits this heterotopic realm of camp: It rejects modes of communal belonging that predicate and demand homogeneity as opposed to the accumulation of difference. As Bauman posits in Liquid Modernity: Neither the patriotic nor the nationalist creed admits the possibility that people may belong together while staying attached to their differences, […] or that their togetherness […] actually benefits from the variety of life-styles, ideals and knowledge while adding more strength and substance to what makes them what they are—and that means, to what makes them different.104

As mentioned above, the Commodore disdains the reduction of individuality as well as the equalization of difference in the service of a national endeavor. Any normative intervention into the individual’s bodily and sexual life goes against the heterotopic order, in which the “togetherness” Bauman speaks of ultimately equals heterogeneity. A multi-ethnic republic, Santa Campaña is built on the principle of difference, and on a suspicion against any social arrangement that presents itself as a natural given. As such, it indeed propagates a “republican model of unity, an emergent unity which is a joint achievement of the agents

103. For a discussion of the stakes involved in state-sponsored legitimation and recognition, see Butler, “Is Kinship,” 114–17. 104. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 177; italics in original.

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engaged in self-identification pursuits […].”105 Rigid understandings of kinship based on either biological or ethnic ties have no place in this alternative order which champions equality and choice. Pondering the future of Nelly’s child in this new republic, the Commodore renounces institutionalized inequality as the source of human degeneration: Evil is no more than a cogent riposte to the world you and I were born into. It will be different for this child, she will be free from it all: the iniquities we had to accept as part of the natural order, King and country, God in heaven.106

In contrast to old Europe, Santa Campaña is a transitional society where alternative understandings of the individual and the social body and the relationship between the two have yet to be formed. While this nation may yet grow to become what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined political community,”107 it is a lived community in the present, based on first-hand encounters and, as in Nelly’s case, on mutual care and protection. This national community is held together by an expedient form of kinship that, in Butler’s words, “displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations […]” and that is understood in terms of “a set of community ties that are irreducible to family.”108

Concluding Thoughts, Heterotopic Endings I have argued above that the Commodore’s body functions as the pivot around which Santa Campaña evolves as a deeply heterotopic and camp space. No matter how questionable the symbolic foundation of his leadership may be, he is depicted as the source of the alternative social ordering due to which Santa Campaña classifies as a transitional society. While the birth of Nelly’s daughter illustrates that the ascription and the inhabitation of one’s sex continues to govern the way in which individual subject positions become socially legible,109 the normative status of 105. Ibid., 178; italics in original. 106. “Man Who Killed,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 3. 107. Anderson explains that the nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6; italics in original). 108. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 127. 109. Butler, Bodies, 3, 7.

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heterosexual kin relations slowly dissolves. Kinship is tentatively projected onto the emergent social body where it becomes a social practice that challenges the symbolic order from below. With a certain degree of speculation (lacking the proof of a second season), I suggest that the deaths of Antoinette, Selima, and the Commodore himself in the final episode also mark the end of Santa Campaña as a heterotopic realm. It is a defeat that is, ultimately, commensurate with the island’s campness. As Sontag has argued, “[a] work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds.”110 Following William Jagger’s attack on Santa Campaña, the island is laid waste and the Commodore’s quarters as the quintessential home of camp are destroyed. The Commodore himself is killed by Lowe, who is convinced that the Commodore’s megalomania—itself a variation of his camp inclinations—will in time destroy the island. Lowe emerges as the new leader of the island in which capacity he breaks the heterotopic order. Striking a pact with the newly instated Governor of Jamaica, he offers him the Commodore’s head in exchange for an untrammeled existence on Santa Campaña. Now placed on the Empire’s map, Santa Campaña will become subsumed in the hegemonic body of knowledge that inevitably grows with ever more detailed cartography and enhanced navigation. It is of no small significance either that Lowe, as a medical doctor, is trained in a system of knowledge that rules the legibility of bodies and hence “the emergence of the ‘human.’” As Butler writes: Consider the medical interpellation which […] shifts an infant from an “it” to a “she” or a “he,” and in that naming, the girl is “girled,” brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.111

The end of the series, thus, suggests the end of the heterotopic order and the possibilities of camp and, by extension, a return to the patriarchal model and a more traditional understanding of kinship. It is a concession to the heterotopic order that Katherine conclusively decides to stay with her husband James, who is more than willing to raise the child she has conceived with Lowe. While on James’s part, fatherhood becomes indeed an active “kind of doing” with no grounding in biological kinship, the child will nonetheless grow up with “the dual point of reference”112 that naturalizes heterosexual marriage as the base unit of the social body.

110. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 267. 111. Butler, Bodies, 7. 112. Butler, “Is Kinship,” 126, 118.

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Finally, I would hazard that the project of building this social body is shown to be carried out on the back of the female body. Lowe refuses when Katherine asks him to end her pregnancy out of love and concern for James—she believes “his heart will be broken”113 if she has somebody else’s child. In these circumstances, Katherine’s bodily integrity is negated twice: once when Lowe refuses her request out of concern for her life, and a second time when she is forced to take an abortive drug which then nearly does kill her. Collaborating to save her, Lowe and James decide that the question of paternity will be of little consequence if only mother and child survive. Katherine is, consequently, even denied to be right about her own husband, and she owes her own life and possibly her child’s both to him and the future leader of the nation. This is a patriarchal narrative of kinship that relegates the Commodore’s feeble attempt at establishing a matriarchal system to the extreme ends of the possible. When, towards the end of the final episode, Lowe climbs a set of stairs in the desolate market square and proclaims the rebuilding of Santa Campaña, it is highly symbolical that his speech is heeded by two reunited heterosexual couples, Katherine and James, and Nelly and Fletch. This purportedly renewed national endeavor implies at the same time a return to the traditional pattern of the symbolic order.

Bibliography “A Hole in the Head.” Episode 6 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Deran Sarafian. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso, 2006. “Antoinette.” Episode 4 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Dan Attias. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Reprinted edition. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. “Blackbeard.” Episode 9 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Ciaran Donnelly. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. “Gender Regulations.” In Undoing Gender, 40–56. New York: Routledge, 2004. 113. “Crossbones,” Crossbones. Season 1, Episode 8.

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—. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” In Undoing Gender, 102– 30. New York: Routledge, 2004. —. “Response: Performative Reflection on Love and Commitment.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1/2 (2011): 236–39. —. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” In Precarious Life, 19–49. London: Verso, 2004. Constitution of Ireland, art. 41, sec. 1. http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/en/ constitution/index.html#article41m (accessed August 25, 2015). Constitution of Ireland, amend. 34 (marriage equality), schedule part 2, Act 2015. http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2015/ca/34/schedule/ enacted/en/html#schedm (accessed August 25, 2015). “Crossbones.” Episode 8 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Deran Sarafian. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. “Crossbones: About the Show,” NBC, http://www.nbc.com/crossbones ?nbc=1. (accessed August 25, 2015). Donne, John. “To his Mistress Going to Bed.” In John Donne: Selected Poetry, edited by John Carey, 22–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. “Body/Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 55–62. New York: Vintage, 1980. —. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. —. “Utopian Body.” Translated by Lucia Allais. In Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, 229–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Liptak, Adam. “Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide.” New York Times, June 26, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex -marriage.html?_r=0 (accessed February 20, 2016). McDonald, Henry. “Ireland Becomes First Country to Legalise Gay Marriage by Popular Vote.” Guardian, May 23, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/gay-marriage -ireland-yes-vote (accessed August 25, 2015). McNamee, Eoin. Orchid Blue. London: Faber, 2010. O’Toole, Fintan. “Ireland Has Left Tolerance Far Behind.” Irish Times, May 25, 2015. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/fintan-o -toole-ireland-has-left-tolerance-far-behind-1.2223838 (accessed August 25, 2015). Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Essays of the 1960s & 70s, edited by David Rieff, 259–74. New York: The Library of America, 2013.

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Steveker, Lena. “Precarious Selves in Contemporary British War Novels.” In Narrating “Precariousness”: Modes, Media, Ethics, edited by Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard, 19–29. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. “The Covenant.” Episode 2 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Ciaran Donnelly. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. “The Devil’s Dominion.” Episode 1 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by David Slade. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. “The Man Who Killed Blackbeard.” Episode 3 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Stephen Shill. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014. “The Return.” Episode 5 of Crossbones. Season 1. DVD. Directed by Terry McDonough. Grünwald: Concorde, 2014.

CONTRIBUTORS

Ruben Cenamor is a research fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Barcelona. He is a member of the EAAS (European Association of American Studies) Women’s Network Steering Committee and its treasurer; a member of the Constructing New Masculinities research group, and a peer reviewer for two interdisciplinary journals. His main research focuses on the representation of counter-hegemonic and alternative masculinities in 1950s American literature, with special interest in the literary representation of ecomasculinities. Meritxell Esquirol Salom, Ph.D., is a researcher and cultural analyst specialized in feminisms, representation and cultural consume. She participates in the Project The Role of TV Fiction in Processes of Identity Construction in the 21st Century, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. She is specialized on the cultural construction of contemporary female identity in relation to the economic and cultural project of neoliberalism and consumer culture. She is a lecturer of Sociology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Astrid M. Fellner, Prof. Dr., is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (Germany). Her monographs include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002) and Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-EighteenthCentury American Culture (forthcoming WVT Trier). She has also published a series of articles and co-edited books in the fields of Border Studies, Early American Literatures, U.S. Latino/a literature, Canadian literature, Gender/Queer Studies, and Cultural Studies. Marta Fernández-Morales, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of literature, gender studies, and cultural studies at the University of Oviedo (Spain). She is a full-time researcher in the project The Role of TV Fiction in Processes of Identity Construction in the 21st Century, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. She has published widely in scholarly journals, is the author of four books, and has co-edited eight volumes. More information at www.academia.edu.

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Lea Gerhards is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of British, North American, and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. She is currently working on her dissertation about contemporary vampire romances, their construction of gender and sexuality and their postfeminist agenda. She has presented her research at multiple international conferences and published articles in several collected volumes. Rubén Jarazo Álvarez, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). His research capacity is focused on British cultural studies and the influence of Anglophone cultures in Spain. His main area of research covers British cultural studies in the XX century, William Shakespeare in XX century Spain, as well as British telefantasy and sci-fi. Some recent published volumes include “To Banish Ghost and Goblin.” New Essays on Irish Culture (2010), In the Wake of the Tiger. Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2010), Press, Propaganda and Politics: Cultural Periodicals in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania (2013), along with Andrada Fatu-Tutoveanu, and more recently Taking Liberties: Scottish Literature and Expressions of Freedom (2016), along with Brown and Clark. Apart from extensively publishing in scholarly journals and co-editing volumes, Rubén Jarazo is presently editor of the Spanish Journal for the Study of Popular Culture Oceánide. More information at www.academia.edu. Leopold Lippert is a post-doctoral fellow at the research project “Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution” at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Vienna (2015), and his dissertation Performing America Abroad was awarded the 2016 Fulbright Prize in American Studies. In his current post-doc project, he is concerned with the relationship of humor and the public sphere in late-eighteenth-century America. Martina Martausová is a lecturer at the department of British and American Studies, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia. She completed her Ph.D. studies in 2013 and has since taught and published in the field of American and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary representations of masculinity in American cinema, and is currently working on the project Postmillenial Sensibility in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media.

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Eva Michely earned her degree in English and Spanish from Saarland University, where she is currently working on her Ph.D. project in (Northern) Irish fiction and film. Her research interests include border studies and the cultural representation of space and power. Heike Mißler, Dr., is a Senior Lecturer at the English Department of Saarland University (Germany). Her dissertation The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation was published by Routledge in 2017. Her research interests are cultural studies, feminist theory, gender and queer studies. María Dolores Narbona Carrión, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Málaga (Spain) and focuses her research on Literature and Cultural Studies. She is a member of the project The Role of TV Fiction in Processes of Identity Construction in the 21st Century, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Apart from several chapters of books and articles in specialized publications, she has published two books focused on American women writers, and she has co-edited three books dealing with American theatre. Cristina Pujol Ozonas, Ph.D., is Lecturer of Media and Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is the author of Fans, Cinéfilos y Cinéfagos. Una aproximación a las culturas y los gustos cinematográficos (2011). She has also published articles about gender, popular culture and cultural studies. Irina Simon (née Bodrow), Dr., is an independent scholar in the field of North American indie culture. She wrote her master thesis on indie rock and her dissertation on how to narrate American independent cinematic heroines. She currently tries to bridge the gap between social sciences and humanities with the conception and conduct of interdisciplinary seminars on the impact of storytelling, authenticity and cultural diplomacy in business environments at the HRW Muelheim, among others. Katharina Wiedlack is post-doc research fellow at the Department for English and American Studies, University of Vienna. She has taught and published in the fields of American, Gender, Queer and Disability Studies and is currently working on the project Looking Eastward: U.S.-Identity, Western Values, and Russian Vulnerable Bodies, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). For more information see: http://archiv-anglistik.univie.ac.at/home/staff-members/wiedlack/