Download PDF (756KB)

Heroic women in science fiction and fantasy television shows have done much to represent strong, successful women in leadership positions. However, these female roles that are viewed as strong and empowered embody many masculine identified traits, maintaining a patriarchal division of gender roles. This paper analyzes strong female characters within nine television shows by deconstructing their stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” gender specific attributes and cross referencing how they play within and against traditional archetypes.

Employing texts from cultural criticism and feminist theory, I explore how representations of groups in popular culture and mass media messaging uphold structures of power by giving higher value to masculine attributes as observed in patriarchal discourse. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of why it is critical to foster television media that supports feminist ideals and breaks out of traditional oppressive gender binaries in order to promote, encourage and envision a just future society.

Did you get a chance to see “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight remixed“? It was recently nominated for a Webby! And it might be the only feminist anything that is nominated at all this year, which is why I think it’s so important that it wins the people’s choice award for best remix/mashup video! Currently it’s only in third place and it needs a big boost of votes to bring it to first.

There are only a few days left (voting ends on April 29th) and it only takes a few minutes to vote on the Webby YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/webby?x=remixmashup

** You can watch, comment, share and subscribe on YouTube

Veronica Mars has got to be one of my favourite shows of all time.  No seriously, it’s funny, witty, smart, progressive.  Women are technologically savvy, the privilege of white rich kids are exposed (well sort of…), and it generally has progressive commentary.  Watch this video for the things I loved about the show and also the more problematic elements… and keep watching because I included some hilarious and entertaining clips from the show.

ps.  Steer clear of season three, my love for the show ended during the last episode of season 2.

Check out other great blogs and commentary about Veronica Mars:

• Great commentary and analysis by The Hathor Legacy “Veronica Mars: Grade is Not the Verb I’d Choose” and also commentary about sexual violence in the show written in three parts entitled “Rape in Veronica Mars” read here: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3.  Many of the situations they write about are in the third season of VM, which I will comment more about in another video.

• Reactions about the third season of Veronica Mars from “Across the Pond” -  “Et Tu Veronica Mars“

• This article at Other Magazine talks about Veronica Mars and Dr. Who trying to emulate the strong empowered female character that we so many fans loved about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Also check out this wonderful vid by Keewick which exposes some of the sexual violence issues in Veronica Mars.

**Update: You can now see my clip review about how the writers used wit and humour to talk about gender and class in Veronica Mars over at Critical Commons.

Video Blog Transcript

I love veronica mars I think it’s an absolutely brilliant show.  It only had a short run of three seasons and only two of which were actually watchable.  The third season has sort of been written off as a fluke, there were a lot of problems with it but I’ll save that for another video, that said you should go out immediately and bit torrent, pirate rent buy, whatever you have to do to watch Veronica Mars because it will totally be worth it.

It’s a show about a teenage detective she actually learned the tricks of the trade from her father who is a private detective and she often solves problems at school, she even solves crimes that the local sheriff’s department are unable to solve.  The show is actually really funny, it’s got great wit, great humour and I would actually compare it to Joss Whedon’s writing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and maybe even say its a little bit better?  Joss Whedon did a cameo during Season 2 because he thought the show was so good.  and so did Courtney from the Dandy Warhols and Kevin Smith.

One of the things that drew me in immediately to the show was how technologically savvy Veronica Mars is.  It’s a pretty rare representation to have young women shown as super knowledgeable about all different technologies, so you see her often using computers and having a really good understanding of how they work.  She’s also and excellent photographer, printers, scanners all that sort of stuff.  She also has a lot of different spy gadgets, so she can take apart an iPod and put in a hidden camera that can take a photo every five seconds for example or track people through GPS or put recording devices in cars.  There is also another teenage woman at Veronica’s school named Mac, who is also super tech savvy, Veronica met up with her because she needed some help with the computer systems at school and Mac knew everything about them so throughout the television series she is constantly going to Mac asking her for help on how to break into wifi networks, and how to create websites and hack into different things and they work together as pair on various projects.

Very little violence is used on the show to solve problems  but it’s not a world without violence so it kind of comes in two forms on the show.  The first is really awkward and clumsy, so you’ll have two teenage boys beating each other up and throwing punches and kind of missing but it’s not like they’re trained in martial arts they’re just really awkward.  The second way shows how horrific and egregious  violence actually is.  It makes your stomach kind of turn as you are watching the show.  I think that these characteristics and representations of violence on Veronica Mars really helps to show us how violence is used on other shows to solve problems, how easy it is to write violence as a solution as opposed to coming up with really creative ways to deal with different problems.

Veronica Mars Clip Season 1 Episode 14: Mars vs. Mars
Veronica: Well she’s giving a statement at the sheriff’s department tomorrow, I’ll drop by and see if she’s up for a chat
Logan: Well I’ll go with you
Veronica: Actually despite popular opinion you really can’t beat the truth out of someone

Instead of using violence Veronica gets really creative and cleaver with the way that she solves her cases.  At the resolution of each show the viewer is left with this sense of poetic justice. An example of this poetic justice is when Veronica kind of gets back at her boyfriend Troy who she finds out later on that he was kind of scamming her the whole time.

Veronica Mars Clip Season 1 Episode 5: You Think You Know Someone
Shauna: Troy what’s with this girl calling me? You gave her my number?
Troy: oh whoa what girl?
Shauna: Some girl named Veronica
Troy: You didn’t tell her you’d be seeing me did you?
Shauna: She caught me off guard, what was I suppos– (phone clicks)
Veronica Voice Over: Sorry we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, just wanted to wish you luck at your new school and leave you something to remember me by.  It took me awhile to figure out where you stashed the steroids but there was only one place where you were alone right?  In case you were wondering the former contents of the package are somewhere between my toilet and the pacific ocean.  Say hi to Shauna for me, she sounds like a keeper
Troy: Damnit!

The show is of course not without its faults, it has some problematic portrayals of racism and classism, but it does actually acknowledge those things and talks about them throughout the show, this is in comparison to most mainstream television shows that don’t even really acknowledge that racism or classism exist.  I think that even though it talks about it in a sort of problematic way, just having that on our television screens is just a step towards making out television programs more anti racist more anti classist.  When I first started watching the show we were introduced to the local Latino biker gang and I was really fearful that the writers were going to feed into the very racist stereotypes, which they kind of did.  But the writers also took the main leader of the gang and sort of humanized him, really showed a bit of his back story and made the audience sympathetic and made a really complex character.  There are also other moments in the show where the writers gave us really subtle and interesting and also humourous ways of exposing racism that you don’t often think about, and you almost never see that on TV.

Veronica Mars Clip Season 2 Episode 13: Ain’t No Magic Mountain High Enough
Vice Principal: We’re gonna have to start searching the lockers… immediately.
Madison: Wanna save yourself some time start with hers, we all saw her, lurking around.
Jackie: Lurking? Ah you mean standing while Black?

Sexual Violence is a reoccurring theme throughout all three seasons of the show. I think that for the most part, the writers did a really really terrible job of dealing with rape and abuse and because of that I’m going to dedicate a whole other video blog to it because I think that it really needs to be exposed just how important it is to deal with sexual violence in a healthy manner on television.  Overall I really really like the show, I would highly recommend season one and two, I think that there is a lot of really great things about it as far as the complexity of characters, it’s entertaining and witty, it’s really fun to watch.  Veronica’s relationship with her father is totally worth watching because they are really funny but its also this mutual love and respect they have for one another and there is a lot of really progressive values that the show offers and I think that is fairly rare to see on TV.  That said, I’m going to leave you with this clip that I think is wonderfully subtle.

Veronica Mars Clip Season 1 Episode 5: You Think You Know Someone
Keith Mars: Wow that’s some cake
Veronica Mars: Isn’t it though
Keith Mars: I love it.  Ever notice how everything you make tends to lean a little to the left
Veronica Mars: I do that on purpose
Keith Mars laughs

** You can watch, comment, share and subscribe on YouTube

Fox Networks decided to renew Dollhouse for another 13 episodes but canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I’m less then thrilled about this decision.

Links Referenced in Video:

• Whedonesque.com: Joss talks about the Dollhouse renewal
• Washington Post Article: Fox Execs Keep Playing With ‘Dollhouse’

Update: There are some really great conversations about Dollhouse on The Angry Black Woman “The problem with Dollhouse is not that I don’t understand subtlety” and on Feminist SF “Working in the Dollhouse”

Also please check out this amazing fan vid about Dollhouse It Depends on What You Pay.   Brilliantly edited by Gianduja Kiss to expose some of the more controversial aspects of the show.  Word of warning, it’s kind of intense.

This video can be viewed with English subtitles at DotSub and is available to be translated into other languages.

Video Blog Transcript

I just found out that Dollhouse is being renewed by Fox for another season.  It’s a Joss Whedon TV show so I wanted to give it a chance when it first started.  Dollhouse is a show about a bunch of people who get there brains wiped and then new personalities and experiences and memories get put into their heads and they can exist as that person for X amount of time and they get hired out by clients to perform various tasks.  Most of the “engagements” are men trying to fulfill a fantasy.  Dollhouse is really a glorified brothel, Dollhouse is really misogynistic, I don’t know what other word to describe it as.  There is a big issue that has really been raised about whether this is rape or not.  It’s been talked about a little bit online but the show hasn’t dealt with this issue at all.  So they sign these contracts saying that they’ll be in Dollhouse for X amount of years and their conscious mind isn’t around so they can’t consent to every single engagement that they go on.  Now if you can’t consent then that would be rape right?

In Dollhouse we as the viewer are supposed to condemn the dollhouse, we’re not supposed to like it, we’re supposed to think it’s morally and ethically wrong to do these things to these people yet we identify with all of the characters in the dollhouse.  So Boyd the handler, you think he’s pretty cool because he seems to have issues with what’s going on, yet he still continues to work there.  The woman who runs the place, towards the end of the season we start to get more of an emotional grasp on her and her character gets more complicated so we become even more entrenched in who she is not, you know, not hating her.  Tofur the crazy scientist, you totally think he’s funny and witty and smart and goofy, you don’t really take him too seriously.  If we’re not supposed to like dollhouse, which I think we’re not supposed to then why are we sympathetic with all of the characters inside of the dollhouse?

Joss Whedon on Whedonesque.com was quoted as saying that part of the pitch to renew for a second season was that they were going to go in the direction of the season finale.  I think we have enough crazy, serial killing, murdering men on television that we don’t need to add to the repertoire with dollhouse.  The season finale was just blah cover my ears cover my eyes, I didn’t want to watch a single other episode of Dollhouse after that.  It was just so grotesquely violent, it was unnecessary, it’s this crazy maniacal guy who was damaged by the dollhouse (which were sympathetic to right) doing all these crazy things so now he becomes the enemy and the dollhouse is kind of in that grey middle zone area.

This news is troubling in that I really didn’t want Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles to get cancelled.  I thought it was a really good show.  I felt like the story line and the characters were really complex.  They made complicated relationships between each other and the characters evolved in interesting ways that I thought could grow over another couple of seasons.  Also the show is based on the Terminator movies which most of us have probably seen which are kind of big macho fests about you know, gore and violence and blowing things up and robots, the whole sci fi chase scene thing.  But Sarah Connor, although it had those elements, was actually really smart.  It fused together the action part of the sci fi genre but it also brought in character development that I thought was really well done.  The show is also mostly about a woman, she’s an independent, tough, single mom that’s trying to protect her son.  The other main character on the show is a representation of a teenage woman who although she’s a robot you still see as young female.  She’s empowered, she’s smart, she’s strong, these are all good things to have on television I think.  I think looking really critically at a show why Dollhouse is being renewed and the Sarah Connor Chronicles are not… the Sarah Connor Chronicles really took its time and sometimes it was a little slow moving because they really did a lot of character development, and really built up a story line so you really became attached to what was going on and really invested.  Where in Dollhouse you met a new character every week.  It wasn’t really super complicated, you didn’t have a lot of character development.  There were a few things here and there where the main character, Echo started to remember her old past but even then it wasn’t that interesting and it was kind of the same old same old.

There was a really interesting article in the Washington Post that talked about how Dollhouse was produced by Fox and aired on the Network of Fox so they have more invested in that financially and can make more profits.  Where Sarah Connor was produced by Warner Brothers aired on Fox, there’s not as much financial investment.  I know that Joss Whedon is capable of writing really good quality television that’s critical and analytical and has social commentary while still being entertaining and fun.  So I don’t know why he can’t do that again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This remix is just what I’ve been wanting – death to Edward Cullin!  I might be a little biased because I was a consultant on this project but I think it turned out wonderfully.  It is a meticulously crafted discussion about the disturbing and unacceptable behaviour of Edward Cullin.  Where in Twilight his controlling and stalkerish ways are celebrated as romantic, in this reimagined narrative, using the empowered yet complicated character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jonathan McIntosh demonstrates an alternative way of looking at Edward’s character.

I find the Twilight series to be the antithesis of anything feminist from the over dominating, stalking (and murdering) boyfriend to the disempowered female protagonist.

In this re-imagined narrative, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed – in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century. — This transformative work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. The remix is licensed under a creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Read an article from Jonathan McIntosh about why he made “Buffy vs Edward” at WIMN Voices where he discusses his pro-feminist interpretation of Twilight and also gives a big shout out to the vidding community which was a primary influence in making this video.  His other remixes can be seen on his blog at www.rebelliouspixels.com