The problematic binary that
privileges reason over emotion (associating men with reason and women with
emotion) has existed for centuries.
Different historical moments often resurrect and repurpose gendered
portrayal of emotion for particular reasons.
That this current post-9/11 moment is doing this is not surprising. While tracing narrative trends among the
popular post-9/11 wave of dystopian fiction, television, and film, I noticed
some surprising lessons concerning gender-appropriate emotion. Although it’s too early to make any grand
claims, I think these didactic moments within these narratives can be traced
back to the representations of gender seen in the days and weeks immediately
following September 11th.
In
The Terror Dream and Fantasy in Post-9/11
America, Susan Faludi convincingly showcases how feminism was attacked in
the aftermath of 9/11 as one of the supposed reasons for the vulnerability of
the United States. She is clear to note that 9/11 did not cause the sentiments
that gave rise to the renewed feminist backlash, but that it revealed cultural
conflicts that were already brewing underneath the surface. In the days following 9/11, Faludi herself
was bombarded by calls from various journalists who wanted her opinion on how
“9/11 pushed feminism off the map” or sounded its “death knell.” Reporters asked for her opinion on so-called
phenomena such as “the return of the manly man” and the trend of women becoming
“more feminine” after 9/11 (and, therefore, in their opinions, less feminist). There was an oddly celebratory nature to some
journalistic articles that predicted the death of feminism after the
attacks. For example, in a piece titled
“Hooray for Men,” Mona Charen wrote: “Perhaps
the new climate of danger – danger from evil men – will quiet the anti-male
agitation we’ve endured for so long.” And, in an attack on specific feminists, such
as Susan Sontag, articles went to press such as Ann Coulter’s “Women We’d Like
to See… in Burkas” which certainly did not mask their animosity toward the
women’s movement.
And,
in the weeks and months after 9/11, it was not just self-identified feminists
who felt the effects of this cultural shift.
Faludi notes, “soon after the World Trade Center vaporized into two
biblical plumes of smoke, another vanishing act occurred on television sets and
newspaper pages across the country. Women
began disappearing… Three weeks after 9/11, the media watchdog group Fairness
& Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) counted the op-ed bylines in the nation’s
major newspaper and reported” a drastic decrease in women’s public visibility.”
For example, the number of opinion pieces written by female writers at The New York Times had dropped from 22
percent to 9 percent. Across mediated divides on television, The
Feminist White House Project noted that during this time frame women’s
representation on Sunday news talk shows plummeted, decreasing by nearly 40
percent. When women were featured in the
media, it was not the strong women of before being showcased.
Women
who garnered the most attention needed to fit the script of the moment; they
needed to be vulnerable and in need of (male) protection. The 9/11 widows fit well into this narrative
and, therefore, became the focus of the media frenzy. These women were desirable because “they
weren’t ambitious careerists trading commodities on the eighty-fourth floor [of
the World Trade Center]. They were at
home that day tending to the hearth, models of all-American housewifery.” Along with these images of women in need of
saving were, of course, those who could do the saving: men.
Some of the most iconic images associated with 9/11 are of first
responders who became symbolic representations of the nation’s courage and resilience.
Years later it seems like some cultural
representations still want to see the two genders along these lines. Two examples of strong women being punished
for not behaving according to gender norms can be found in popular post-9/11
dystopian narratives: Susan Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and AMC’s The Walking Dead. Katniss Everdeen, the main character of
Collins’s successful young adult-trilogy-turned-blockbuster-hit, is portrayed
as having many traits associated with masculinity: she is strong, resourceful, calm, and
rational. While her actions and skill
sets are often linked to those of the masculine sphere (she is the provider for
her family, a skilled hunter), it is her affective qualities that cause many to
classify her as male-like. When forced
to enter into a national televised competition where she has to
fight-to-the-death in an arena where only one can leave as a victor, Katniss
remains (for the most part) emotionally reserved. Besides for rare outbursts, she refuses to
show the emotions one would expect. For
the most part any emotion one sees from her throughout the training process,
pre-game ceremonial activities, and the game itself is performed. She is told,
quite explicitly, that she is “unlikeable” and she is only made “likeable” when
she is recast into the role of the love-struck teen, the star-crossed lover,
who has to enter the arena alongside of her male love interest. She plays the role of the emotional girl in
order to survive – because to deviate from this gender norm could mean death.
AMC’s Walking Dead is a television program set during a zombie
apocalypse. Comprised of an ensemble
cast, one of the characters originating from the first season (and surviving
into the fourth), is Carol Peletier.
Unlike Katniss, this character was originally portrayed as quite emotional: her early storylines focused on her status as
an abused wife and later a grieving mother.
As the seasons progress this emotionality slowly recedes as she becomes
more emotionally hardened. She is depicted
as a strong “masculine”-like character gaining a leadership role among the
survivor’s camp. Season three finds her
training the children of this in community survival tactics and eventually
making the call to kill two fellow survivors who were infected by a plague that
threatened to wipe out the entire group.
Despite the fact that the former leader, Rick, had made morally
questionable, unilateral decisions on behalf of the group, he casts Carol out
from the community as a punishment for her action. In this example, Carol, who grows away from
her status as “emotional woman” and into a symbolic stand in for the “rational
man,” is punished for not behaving according to social norms.
21st century popular
culture houses an array of strong female characters, but (as discussed in
previous posts) they are often cast into emotional scenarios that undermine
that strength or (as is evident in the examples above) their refusal to conform
to expected emotional scripts causes them some sort of conflict within the
narrative. In an age where we’re trying
to raise children to ignore the age-old conceptions of the rational male/emotional
female, how do narratives such as these undercut those efforts? I’m not sure, but I better go cry about it
now.
